Well, something is funny when you have overlapping but incompatible frames of reference. As you know, if you read my book, that I actually talk about why are some things funny. In the part about killing humor situation...No, no, that wasn't my line. It's just like I was thinking about how jokes work. You say, like, "My dog has no nose. Well, how does he smell? Terrible." It's not very funny, but the reason it works as humor is because smell can be taken in two different ways that are overlapping or incompatible. Smell is like your nose smells things, and smell is an odor. Anyways, what was your question again, what makes something funny? I try to be funny, I typically strain, I mean like you know, sweat beads up on my forehead, I try so hard to be funny, and it doesn't come easy for me. I'll spend half an hour on a joke. And other times, 'course they just pop right out, it's hard to know. Being funny is one of the, talk about something like the news guys don't, the people in the news section don't always appreciate, is that it's work tellin' a joke. They better pay me for that kind of thing, it's not like, it's you know, I'll really pound the keyboard, trying to make a line work. And sometimes you end up with a joke that runs on and on and on and on. Like you know, I am so grateful that you are taking my wife. No, it doesn't work. Take my wife, please. You know what I'm saying, you have to make it punchy. Do you know what I'm saying?

Well, Dave is funny, Dave Barry is funny because he's a genius. He's the kind of guy who, I used to work right next to him in Miami, for five years I had the next desk over and the jokes he would throw away, I mean the garbage, spillage jokes, you know from when he was walking down the hall, were things I could use in my column. Just his spillage. So that's just raw genius there. Unfortunately, most of us can't rely on that. It's, it's um, so we have to do the blue collar method of rearranging the letters on the page until eventually they look funny. Do you know what I'm saying? But Dave is someone, I remember once we were trying to come up with a joke about "It's so hot in South Florida that..." and we sat down and there were a whole bunch of us spending like an hour trying to come up with a conclusion to that line, "It's so hot here, that," and finally someone just asked Dave Barry, and he goes, "Oh, it's so hot that even the statues have armpit stains." Boom. You know, it's garbage, for him it's just like, he just gives it away, you know. But the thing about being funny, is if you try to be funny, and you're not funny, people get mad. People get really angry. I get all kinds of hate mail from people who say, "You're not funny. You think you're funny, you think you're so cute. But you're not." I got one today from someone who says, "You remind me of that guy 'Dormer' or whatever that guy's name was, the one who chopped up the little boys and ate 'em." I think they meant Dahmer. So anyway, I guess 'cause they didn't like one of my jokes, or something. People get mad about it, for some reason, people take their own sense of humor very seriously. So if you say something that they know is supposed to be funny, but they're not laughing, they feel like you've been an affront to them. So that's why you have to spend so much time with humor, and why you have to cut out the jokes that don't quite work. You know, and they're almost there, the temptation is to leave 'em in. Okay, because it's almost funny. But, no, you have to cut the ones that are almost funny. And only use the ones that are definitely funny.

One of the big dangers of course, if you're not careful working with Dave Barry all those years, is you end up telling jokes that sound like Dave Barry jokes. And you end up being like the poor man's Dave Barry. 'Cause there are certain patterns that he uses that are just so, Dave Barryish. And more than once I've had editors delete jokes, just because they sounded too much like something Dave would say. Not even if they were, weren't funny. So they thought a little too much like his style. So I try to, I don't know if I have a style, I think that probably, um, that, someone once told me that I changed registers. Now I have no idea, it's like some linguist's term that I guess I go from saying something very high falutin', you know, a science type thing, to then like, some little vulgar aside. And that comes very naturally out of what I do, because I'll be sitting there, talking to a professor of psychology, like I was when you came in, about baby talk. And about you know, the various terms that they use for what baby talk is, and how they study it, and so I'll be writing something in my column, you know in a very scientific way about baby talk, and then suddenly, there's clearly a demand for a parenthetical remark about spitting up, or something. You know, something gross. You know what I mean, you have to, you can't maintain the seriousness too long. At least I can't, because I can't put on a straight face for that long. I have to have some comic relief. So, I guess that's what I do in terms of trying to be funny is I often throw in these little asides, but it comes very naturally out of, I think, of what I do.

Someone once said to me, they talk about your style. I don't know that I have a style, I try to write, it all pretty much just comes out the way it comes out.

Really. I'm trying to be Erma Bombeck, actually. It's not working. I was hoping you would have made that comparison already.

Well, he does like why questions. "Have you ever wondered why...a keyboard looks like this?" You know, I mean. Well, that's good. I don't think of myself as a humorist.

Well, mainly because I'm still, barely, hanging on by my fingernails, a credible reporter. Which is to say, I can still get away with a straight, serious story, and um, I think of a humorist as being someone who is pretty much full-time with the jokes, but I don't know. Also, no, the reason I don't think of myself as a humorist is that I'm not that funny, I'm just not, I don't have the humor muscles that it takes to be a humorist. And even Andy Rooney, I don't think, I mean Andy Rooney has been a reporter, you know, a regular reporter, I think most of his career. I think, I could be wrong.

Do you know what's amazing, in fact, is, um, humor writing is so difficult, and I don't mean to keep flogging this one point, but humor writing is so difficult, there's really very few people who do it. I mean if you look in the entire country, of all the thousands of reporters, I mean, tens of thousands of reporters, how many actual humor columnists are there? I mean, very few. And most of them aren't even funny. I'm not gonna name names, but most of them are just vile. Or they're just, you know, it's like, you know, am I really gonna read a Lewis Grizzard column now? Sorry, I mean, some people of course like his stuff. I don't run anyone else down, 'cause the guy is, the point is, it's, fortunately they don't ask me to write you know, three funny columns a week.

Yeah, and I'll bet you anything, that Scott Ostler learned his craft writing news copy or sports copy, on deadline, in a straight fashion. That's one of the tough things about sports writing when you're a columnist, is they're producing these pieces of instant literature on deadline, I mean these games end at midnight. And they've got a deadline of like 12:30. And it's amazing to watch. One of the stories I did at the Post that I really enjoyed was when I did a piece on sports writers, and I went and hung out with Tony Kornheiser, and Mike Lupica, and people like that, and watched them do their thing, and I thought they were all just so totally cool, and glamorous, because you know, they're, they're very relaxed before the game, and you know, they're shootin' the breeze, and they're tellin jokes, and, but when the game is over, they're like (makes stress noise) and like they're producing these columns in an incredibly compressed amount of time, and that's a skill that you don't, you're not born with, it takes time to master that, the ability to dilate time, almost like you know, an Einstein theory of relativity type thing, so that in one half-hour, you're able to produce 2,000 words that really sing.

And you know what you notice about this, this is the point, the best sports writing, is what the columnists do, I think, and they don't use very many quotes, because they don't have, they don't have the luxury of going around and getting lots of quotes after the game. Instead, they have to write about what they see. They have to let their own voice carry the piece. We don't do it in the news sections as much. In the news sections, they don't have as many columnists who just sit there and have to describe it themselves. And so a column for the metro section or the national section tends to be, have a lot more quotes in it. We tend to pile them up. And they don't, they're not as good. I mean, as reading goes, they don't have as much energy, as much life to them, I don't think. So I think if you wanna look at good writing, I think the sports section is often the place to go. Look at a good sports columnist.

Well, but I, I think someone like the writers that we keep going back and reading, over time, the ones that we really loved, always had a sense of humor. They always were funny. Even the best writers, your John Updikes, you know, they're funny. Anne Tyler. You know, she can be very funny. And part of it, the mix I think, I mean, there are writers, you don't think of someone like Kafka as being funny, but I think even Kafka, I think he was sort of very slyly funny in a way. You know, like the Hunger Artist. This guy goes in a cage, and what he does for a living is he starves himself, and people come and you know, they applaud, you know, as he gets thinner and thinner. And then eventually, he gets so thin, that he just sort of disappears among the grass inside this cage, and no one pays any attention anymore. But as he's dying, he's thinking, this is his greatest performance. It's sort of, you know, it's funny in a very bleak and horrifying way, but it is funny.

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