To Each According to Their Ledes
The Crisis of Online Humor-Writing and a Call to Action
Want to make money being funny? Don’t try to write humor. Be an actor. Be a screenwriter. Be a comedian. Be a joke writer. Be a young, good-looking professional douche-bag on YouTube. But don’t try to write humor. Because right now might not be the worst time ever to be a humor writer, but it’s damn close.
When I say humor writing, I don’t mean comedy screenwriting (for T.V. or film), nor stand-up, nor supply-side economics op-ed writing. I mean the fine-ass, thoughtful wordsmithery of the pure humorous essay, whether political, satirical, informative, or absurd; it doesn’t matter as long as it is meant in large part to be funny for funny’s own sake.
Writing this kind of humor has never been an easy way to pay bills and funnel money to your creditors. But it used to at least be possible or, at least, conceivable to be able to make some appreciable money writing humor. Unfortunately, humor writing today, like a lot of creative arts, suffers from the twin curses of zero barriers to entry and impenetrable barriers to getting paid more per hour than you could make collecting barbershop hair.
In 2018 anybody can get “exposure” as a humor writer if they have enough Facebook friends, but the funniest people writing the best humor essays online today are lucky to get a few thousand views and a Canadian quarter for their trouble. But has it ever been better? Well, yes, it has almost always been better. The question is what are we going to do about it, humor writers? Well, stay with me and I’ll tell you. But first, some history.
Dawn to Decadence
American Humor Writing, 1865–2005
For the sake of argument, let’s just say the age of the professional American humorist began with Mark Twain, though you could credibly say Ben Franklin cut the ribbon. It continued along, high-brow and low-brow, through Mencken, Perelman, Benchley, Thurber, Buchwald, Allen, Keillor, Sedaris, and hundreds of name-dropping schleps of lesser fame. The practice of the art of the humorous essay has waxed and waned as the American circumstance as been more or less amenable; there was not much demand for yuks during the Depression, World War II, or in the writers’ room at thirtysomething, for example.
But even when we were eating up the chuckles culturally, the pure humorous essay — whose highest realistic expectation in terms of audience reaction is the elicitation of a slight smile, a nod, or at best a, ‘That’s funny,’ acknowledgement in the reader’s internal monologue — has never been most’s cup of tea. For example, I know many comedy nerds/aficionados who know every comic there is or ever has been, even the has-beens; who have seen every sitcom ever made, including the unaired pilot of Heat Vision & Jack; and who have viewed multiple times the cinematic œuvre of both Woody Allen and Todd Philips. Yet there are many among them who, if you asked them to read just one 1,500-word humor essay, would promise to read it for months and then murder you. Especially if you wrote it. So it’s a niche market.
But there was indeed a golden age of humor writing, at least for those of us younger than seventy. It was a time when the humorous essay became both counter-cultural and mainstream, when us keyboard-chained chuckle monkeys could actually hope to be cool and have a full-time job writing guffaw-inducing tracts in magazines and use that job as a springboard to dive into a swimming pool full of cocaine and fifty-dollar bills from all the screenwriting, producing, acting, and famous-being we would do: It was the peak of the National Lampoon years, from 1970 to about 1978.
Think of who National Lampoon spawned for a minute: Doug Kenney, Henry Beard, nearly all the original cast of Saturday Night Live, Christopher Guest, Harold Ramis, Anne Beatts, Michael O’Donoughue, John Hughes, P.J. O’Rourke, Jeff Greenfield, and dozens of others who went on to litter the ranks of sitcom screenwriters, late-night talk-show writers, and comedy-movie screenplay writers and actors, directors, and producers for the next forty years. And they all started as humor writers at the same magazine. (If you want to get the gist of what it was all about, go watch… well, if you’re reading this, you probably have already watched and read everything I could tell you you should. If not, Google it.)
As hard as it is to imagine now, there was a time when there was a best-selling magazine that featured nothing but written humor. It made money, it had paid, full-time writers and editors, it was based in New York, and it was cool. Then, by the time I was about eight years old, it wasn’t funny — it was a joke.
As the radical, truth-to-power-speaking Baby Boomers at the National Lampoon aged into bourgeoisie, Chevy Chase-ian, establishment yuppies, so did its audience, whereupon they quit reading the National Lampoon and started reading… the newspaper. (For more on this, watch some reruns of thirtysomething.)
Not to say written humor died when the Lampoon morphed from brilliant, challenging, satirical broadsheet into a sophomoric titty-mag with dead-baby jokes, it’s just that, like a lot of things in the ’80s and ’90s, it sold out and got really lame. As I grew up in those post-Lampoon decades, you would still occasionally come across a photocopy of some old Nat Lamp classic that got passed around like samizdat by older brothers’ friends and cool uncles. But by Reagan’s second term the Lampoon had fallen to the lowest on the totem pole of humor magazines, behind even the middle-school mainstays,Mad (about as cool as Transformers) and Cracked (about as cool as Go-Bots).
With the Lampoon out of the picture, the only place to find written humor in the ’80s and ’90s was, perhaps not surprisingly, the newspaper. (I am not counting the ubiquitous, ghost-written comedians’ books that came out in that period, as they were usually not more than a few dozen fleshed-out stand-up bits and some “when I was a kid” anecdotes. I would recommend Drew Carey’s Dirty Jokes & Beer, however, as a superior example of the genre.)
In the gray pages of America’s then still-flourishing newspapers, you could find a lot of material that is very funny when read today, especially in the copious Republican economic op-eds by various since-disproven supply-side shills. Among these were, ironically enough, National Lampoon editor and youthful undercover-hippie/police informant, P.J. O’Rourke. (I will admit that P.J.’s early, apolitical, post-Lampoon work is quite funny and was among the rare species of written humor in broad circulation in the ’80s.)
But the place to find written humor from Reagan’s election until Bush v. Gore that was intentionally (or at least intended to be) funny was the work of a handful of syndicated humor columnists, whose work would often appear at the back of the ‘Lifestyle’ section, after the travelogues and recipes. Foremost among these was dad-humorist extraordinaire, Dave Barry. (See also Erma Bombeck, Calvin Trillin, et al.) [Note — This is not to diminish the amazing humor of newspaper cartoonists, such as Gary Larson, Gary Trudeau, Berkeley Breathed, Lynn Johnston, and Bill Watterson. It’s just a different art form. — ed.]
Ahem…
Dave Barry is a first-wave Baby Boomer, born in 1947, one year after Doug Kenney. But there their similarities end. I could try to explain to you how milquetoast Dave Barry is, but instead I will just quote his Wikipedia “Early Life” bio:
Barry was born in Armonk, New York, where his father, David, was a Presbyterian minister. He was educated at Wampus Elementary School, Harold C. Crittenden Junior High School (both in Armonk), and Pleasantville High School, where he was elected “Class Clown” in 1965. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Haverford College in 1969.
As an alumnus of a Quaker-affiliated college, he avoided military service during the Vietnam War by registering as a religious conscientious objector.
To repeat, this guy was the class clown at Pleasantville High. He did dodge the draft, though, so that’s something.
Dave Barry diligently worked his way up the ladder in that profitable, prodigious, pre-internet print-media world that is dead and buried today. Again from his Wikipedia bio:
Barry began his journalism career in 1971, working as a general-assignment reporter for the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pennsylvania, near his alma mater, Haverford College. He covered local government and civic events and was promoted to City Editor after about two years. He also started writing a weekly humor column for the paper and began to develop his unique style. He remained at the newspaper through 1974. He then worked briefly as a copy editor at the Associated Press’s Philadelphia bureau[.]
. . . .
In 1981 he wrote a humorous guest column, about watching the birth of his son, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which attracted the attention of Gene Weingarten, then an editor of the Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine Tropic. Weingarten hired Barry as a humor columnist in 1983.
Barry wrote his weekly humor column for twenty-two years. It was syndicated nationally, reaching over five hundred newspapers at its peak. His best columns were collected into books, over two dozen, which were often New York Times bestsellers. The audience and notoriety from his syndicated column and anthologies enabled him to publish novels, short stories, and even a screenplay that was made into a major film (albeit one about smuggling a nuclear bomb onto an airplane that was set to open in September 2001…yeeeegh).
Try to imagine replicating that humor-writer career arc today, especially the part where the big city newspaper has the budget to hire a full-time humor columnist… for its Sunday magazine! It is just not a possibility any more. You’d have better luck becoming a professional phrenologist.
But in that mediated, mass-circulation, printed-page Pangea, Dave Barry became a dad-humor demigod. As a young blood chasing down my dreams I was always intrigued by Dave Barry because my dad would sometimes chortle while reading his columns. I will sum up his humor with a joke I can remember reading in a Dave Barry column when I was about twelve, paraphrased as best I can:
Home equity is money that you don’t have to work for, but that takes decades to earn. Although it is technically yours, you can’t ever spend it. You can only borrow it at interest, unless even that is illegal in your state.
My dad laughed heartily at that one. Hell, I laugh at it now. Barry was and is a smart guy, and lot of his stuff was very funny, but it was plainly a far cry from Lampoon classics such as ‘The Vietnamese Baby Book’ and ‘Foreigners From Around the World.’
If anyone can make you fall asleep while almost laughing, it’s Dave Barry.
Yet Dave Barry made a fucking fortune. Celebrity Net Worth (which admittedly pulls numbers out of asses like it’s performing a colonoscopy on Count von Count and Tommy Tutone) pegs (ahem) Dave Barry’s net worth at $10 million. He retired at 58 in 2005, although retirement is a strong word when your job is to write a weekly column of about 800 words.
Decadence to Decent, Then to Total Shit-Sandwich (Like — Seriously — Absolutely Annihilated Hellscape) Then Back to Pretty Decent, But Still Not Great:
American Humor Writing, 2001 — Present
Let’s back up to about four years from Dave Barry’s Michelob Light-spiced retirement party. Written humor had a brief renaissance in the Web 1.0 to early-Web 2.0 days, starting around 2001. The National Lampoon was reborn as an online humor magazine. (I wrote two pieces for them for $200 in around 2004.) Humor writer C.V. must-have, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, became a thing. Cracked.com was a legit written humor site, not a listicle factory. Collegehumor.com articles were getting forwarded around like wildfire. Tucker Max (ugh) made a meta career in written “humor” in the early-internet era, branching out from misogynistic, mostly fictional, frat-tastic blogging into paperback books now found at garage-sale quarter bins. But he made a mint in the meantime. The Phat Phree tried to be a writer-focused written-humor site, although the ad revenue could barely keep the servers rented, let alone pay the writers, and it succumbed to the creeping ivy of malware ads and botnet takeovers in 2008 or so. (I wrote a lot for them too. For free. #nothumblebrag) The short-lived Modern Humorist was often great. And of course, you had the Gray Lady of Doing One Thing Very Well in Written Humor, The Onion, whose early online days were especially fantastic. There were also dozens of other smaller humor sites around the web all providing an outlet for aspiring humor writers who had up to then been confined to handing out one-page zines at open mic nights. There were even new opportunities in the print world, where Jest magazine was in New York trying to be the glossy, hipster Lampoon (and not responding to my submissions — Williamsburg snobs).
Everyone was writing and having fun and — a few Tucker Max-like outliers and corporate-acquired-website owners (I’m looking at you, College Humor) notwithstanding— not getting paid a dime. This lasted until about mid-2007.
And then written humor died.
I am not exaggerating. It died.
It died because of widely available streaming video. It was exhumed, poked with sticks, and buried again for fun in 2012 once 4G was everywhere and streaming video went mobile.
YouTube became everything and everywhere to everyone. Funny or Die became the video comedy showcase. And, quite suddenly, people did not want to read anything online, let alone smirking essays from people who thought their humor was too “smart” for standup and too dense for their improv troupe. Young, funny kids quit writing and started shooting in HD. The Lonely Island was the new Lampoon.
Online, ad revenue increased, but rewarded clicks. Anything longer than it took to get a click was a waste of time and money. So to the extent the few surviving online humor sites didn’t turn exclusively to video, they quit publishing anything longer than three hundred words or that was not a listicle/slideshow full of “remember when” pop culture nostalgia references.
It was a bad time for humor purveyed by written words.
Then, for a long time nothing happened. A lot of humor writers went into hibernation, relicts in a video world, myself included. I worked. I got married. I had a kid. (For more on this, watch some reruns of thirtysomething.) But I didn’t write because: A) I was busy, and B) Who would ever see it? I wasn’t aware of any place online providing a platform for written comedy aimed at an audience older than twenty-four besides the venerable McSweeney’s, where they probably got five hundred submissions a day and had a word limit that cramped my style (I told myself, not-at-all bitterly). And not that it mattered, but McSweeney’s didn’t pay either.
In the more tangible universe, it’s never been easy to get published in the New Yorker or Harper’s or some similarly respected rag, but in the increasingly desperate hard-copy world of the 2000s (and still today) the few printed pages devoted to humor were and are more and more taken up by celebrity dilettantes, sometimes funny sometimes awful. (Jack Handey being one of a few successful humor-writing purist exceptions who prove the rule.) As far as your local paper or city magazine, you could basically forget it. You were far more likely to find a recently laid-off local reporter or columnist behind a register at Barnes & Noble than to find room in local publications for humor, especially for pay.
I’d still get funny ideas for little pieces, but I could never muster the energy to dive back in to humor writing. I told myself it was because I’d become more mature and humor readers were too young; I didn’t want to be sarcastic or mean or make cancer jokes, and plus, I didn’t know the latest slang. I told myself I just wasn’t funny any more; I’d gotten old and comfortable and into golf. But that was all bullshit, and I gave up golf. The real reasons were: A) I didn’t see any chance for exposure because there were no outlets I knew of for smart (or at least not dumb), long-form written humor, and I didn’t want to write essays for the sole amusement of my dog and one friend from high school; and B) I was willing to do it as a hobby, but it would damn sure be nice to at least get some pocket money out of it; I was a father and a husband and if I was going to take hours from my precious free/family time, I’d like to at least be able get a Playstation 4 or something out of the deal. Plus, when friends and relatives asked if I get paid for writing, it’d be nice to say yes.
So Now…
Then along comes Medium! Slowly at first in 2012, but then really taking off around 2016 or so (when I heard of it). Hooray! This was what we didn’t know written humor was lacking in the early days of the internet — a centralized site where you can find everything that’s anything in the funny written word, but within which writers, readers, topics, and interests can create and group themselves and form publications. It’s a good idea. Rather than have comedic-essay fans wandering around the streets of online writing at night, getting lost and stabbed, Medium brings them all into the foyer of the same bright white, minimal mansion and then lets them stroll the grounds, safe among their own analog (but still digital), video-spurning, wordplay-loving kind! Genius.
We’re still not getting paid though.
The Medium Partner Program is great. It has always been hard to explain to people, but I’ve settled on saying:
Medium? It’s like Netflix for writing. You pay a little each month so there’s no commercials and some of that money goes to the writers you read in the hopes that the content will be better than on ad-based sites. Multiply by a few ten-thousands or millions of people, and everybody’s a winner.
Not bad, right?
We’re still not getting paid though.
Sure, maybe Tom Mitchell and other Medium magnificoes pull down a few hundred a month (Is it more? Less? Will you tell me?) but it’s just not enough — at present — for anyone (at least among humor writers) to do make enough to even consider it a side hustle.
Importantly, this situation is not anything that can be laid at the feet of Medium or its business model, which I think is smart, great, helpful to writers, and which I truly hope succeeds. Rather, it’s because there’s just not enough audience for written humor. Even if the “writers’ fund” were supplemented with ad revenue (and I get why it isn’t) the advent of streaming video and the Platinum Age of Television and video games has taken the already small market for written wit and whittled it to a thin core of comedy nerds, dictionary readers, and people who like to make up Wellerisms in their free time.
Perhaps we as humor writers have to accept that it will likely never again be possible to make the kind of money that Henry Beard, Woody Allen, Dave Barry, or P.J. O’Rourke made writing pure humor.
But it’s got to get better than $0.95 in a good week, right?
A Call to Action!
What we humble humorists need is an endowment — a fund, invested and managed by trustees, that will pay humor writers who reach a certain level of audience engagement a stipend. Not enough to get rich. Maybe even not enough to quit your day job. But enough to make it worth while to keep delivering to that dwindling audience of comedy connoisseurs the puns, alliterations, unexpected rule-of-three punchlines, run-on sentences (I’m not making this a run on sentence [or a lengthy parenthetical] on purpose to illustrate this point [and the next]. It just has to be this long.), lengthy parentheticals (see the previous parenthetical), historical asides (see most of this article so far), smart-sounding latin abbreviations (see “et al.,” supra), and random attention-grabbing fucks, bullshits, and ballses that they want and deserve.
Thus, I say to all humor writers:
We must collectively seize Dave Barry’s assets by force.
I’ll say it again. We must join together, go to Florida, and seize Dave Barry’s assets, by force (only) if necessary, to fund a permanent endowment for humorists. A double-reverse Robin Hood maneuver. Believe me, I’ve thought it through and this is the only way to fund our endowment, the Endowment.
Sure, we could attempt to get the Endowment through political action. But the W.P.A. is long gone, and — considering our country’s imminent descent into right-wing autocracy, buoyed by insurmountable electoral-rigging, census manipulation, and judicial bad faith —nothing like it is coming back soon. Plus, there’s already a National Endowment for the Arts and another for the Humanities, and those barely hang on every year. So, political action is too hopeless to undertake in good faith.
And yeah, maybe we could start a popular movement to get Steve Martin, Conan O’Brien, Bob Odenkirk, John Stewart, Robert Smigel, and other wealthy humorists — maybe even including Dave Barry — to charitably contribute to such a fund in order to give aspiring humorists (especially ones from socially and economically marginalized backgrounds, who can’t afford to work for free for the foreseeable future) a chance to succeed in a field that at present is not economically viable except for those already at the top. But if they’re anything like their Boomer and early-Gen X compatriots, their response will likely be, I got mine, so fuck off! Now hold my beer while I vote to gut Social Security for you so I can have another tax cut.
So as you can see, the only way to fund the Endowment is with the proceeds from the capture and sale of Dave Barry’s life’s fortune by us, an unruly, lawless, and potentially — but hopefully not — bloodthirsty mob.
Hear me out.
With apologies to Mr. Barry, his success was, like that of so many humorists before the death of print media and rise of streaming video, the result of happenstance, luck, and fortunate technological circumstances. As such, we have to march down there and taken his possessions for our own. With pitchforks and forklifts if necessary.
Dave Barry wasn’t the product of the cutthroat competition for views that most of us endure today, trying to find time to write in between open mic sets while holding down a job at Lowe’s and as a personal concierge and hand-job artist on Taskrabbit.com. Dave Barry got a job at a local paper where he could make a living, in West Chester, Pennsylvania! You can’t even do that in Denver any more. Therefore, on May 1, 2018, I think we are all just going to have to go down to Miami and perform a citizens’ seizure of all his stuff and take it to this auction house I found near there. Torches optional. (No tiki torches! No polos! No Dockers! This is not that kind of right-wing, fascist bullshit. It’s closer to some real left-wing, revolutionary, Action Directe stuff. Although for legal reasons, I will say it is First Amendment-protected satire and performance art…[wink.]) Maybe bring some backpacks and duffel bags; Dave Barry could have lots of small but valuable tchotchkes and gold awards.
Dave Barry didn’t have to run through a never-ending crucible of rejection and never-seen masterworks in an era of the seven-second attention span. He got a gig as a stringer in Philadelphia, gets one column in the Inquirer at the right time, which gets read by an editor in Miami with a paper that has so much goddammed money they can hire a humorst… for their Sunday magazine! I mean, were we living in Valhalla back then?! Talk about luck! So, we need to all just get some boxes and head to Coral Gables and take all of his shit and sell it to pay for our endowment. Who’s got vans? Or is it ven?
I know, I know, he earned that money. Waaah! Well did he? When he started writing most people had three channels of T.V. and maybe an Atari 2600. He retired in 2005, literally the year YouTube came out. In between, sure, there was cable but it was mostly Equalizer reruns, music videos, and Evans & Novak. Talk about zero competition. Imagine waking up in the morning, getting the newspaper, and thinking, This is literally my only option for mental stimulation right now. It was like fishing with dynamite for him. It’s generational theft! Which is why we’re forming a posse, breaking down his security gate, and taking his Ferraris. Speaking of, a car dolly would be great if anyone has one.
On top of that, Dave Barry’s an entitled jerk anyway, when you read between the lines. More subtly than his more bombastically political colleague, P.J. O’Rourke, he peddled the insidious and sophomoric “Everything will be OK because markets! Government is dumb!”-brand of dumbed-down-libertarianism that can only be espoused by white guys who grew up as middle-class beneficiaries of peak of American New Deal-liberalism. Having enjoyed all the high-wages and cheap education you could get in the America of their youth, they took it all for granted and obliviously wanted to take it all away from everyone younger than them so they could have a lower taxes — because the DMV is slow, or unions… or something. Barry was the the Sunday, Section C back-page embodiment of being born on third and believing you hit a triple. He’s a rentier, a saccharine sycophant for the super-rich, and a smarmy smart-ass who deserves whatever he gets! Viva la liberacion!
Listen, I’m not saying we put him through a show trial in a kangaroo court and sentence him to death by exile for crimes against the proletariat or anything. I’m just saying we will enter his home, using bricks and crowbars if necessary, take everything he has and sell it to fund our Endowment. I am sure he will give us access to his bank accounts before we have to threaten to throw him into the nearby alligator-infested pond. But if we have to, we must. Also, if anyone knows someone at PODS, please contact me on Twitter.
Satellite photography indicates that Dave Barry has a thirty-foot yacht called… Syndicated. Syndicated?! Fucking really?! Who does he think he is, Jim Davis (Celebritynetworth.com: $800 million!)? Come on, he’s just rubbing it in all our faces! That is practically begging our Artists’ Direct Action Committee (ADAC, [or CADA, as it will be abbreviated by our French cell]) to arrive at his marina with numbers on our side, board his yacht using grappling hooks, a zodiac boat, and some rope netting I have, and sail that sumbitch to Suriname where it will be sold to the highest bidder. Cash only. Euros preferred. Let a thousand flowers blossom! Also, does anyone among us have any sailing or navigational experience, or a good lawyer?
If Dave Barry is really worth ten million bucks, then if we get his property under implicit (or explicit) threat of physical violence, we could probably sell it for eight million or so, presuming he’s pretty liquid (which he probably is) and his house will sell quickly (which I’m sure it will). That’s enough to get a pretty good endowment going, I’d think. If we take out four percent a year (we won’t want to touch the principal; this is for humor writers in future times as well) that’s $320,000 a year. That’s enough to give $20,000 a year to… sixteen writers.
Shit.
OK, we may have to expand our expropriations. I know P.J. O’Rourke has a place in New Hampshire. Steve Martin is in L.A. Woody Allen is in New York. If we split up, we can net $100 million easy, then we invest in private equity and we’re talking serious money. If anyone has rolling lift jacks, please bring them along. And palettes.
I hear some humanitarian objections brewing. Don’t worry, each of our most glorious donors will be put on a generous stipend themselves. And maybe we’ll give them a room in one of the artists’ collective apartment buildings we’ll buy around the country. Also, they can keep their clothes. And one car each. Spouses will also be provided for, though not adult children.
In any case, I’ve set it all out above, and as you can see we don’t really have a choice. It’s either this or we all rewind time, study harder, and go to Harvard or Northwestern. Or be really good at improv. Or just accept that, as in any art, only a very few will every be able to prosper and live on that art alone; and in that case, most artists will have to find fulfillment in their art as a hobby, or be content to appreciate it as a patron or lover of the art, rather than a creator.
Screw that, right?!
Once a date is set by the ADAC Directorate Committee, we will notify everyone and we’ll meet you at Parking Garage D at MIA. From there, we will head to Dave Barry’s house. We can take eight people in my cousin’s Kia Sedona. Everyone else, please use Lyft — they pay their drivers better. All mob participants are advised to bring their own snacks and meals, as food will not be provided. We will have a block of rooms reserved at the Hampton Inn in Coconut Grove, but everyone is responsible for paying for their own, at least until we finish seizing and selling all Dave Barry’s property by force to pay for our humor writers’ Endowment, at which time we can maybe talk reimbursement. Don’t forget to bring gloves.
