Week 4 Reading Response: Humor
Sports Writing in America: Myths, Memories, Heroes, and Villains
Part One
This week’s readings highlighted two very different forms and purposes of humor in writing: satire/exaggeration and light positive humor.
Adding humor to a piece can make a serious topic easier for the audience to swallow.
The two readings this week that perfectly exemplified this technique were “If You’re Expecting One Liners” by Jim Murray and Amanda Hess’s “You Can Only Hope to Contain Them”.
“If You’re Expecting One Liners” had a wistful and almost nostalgic tone that paired beautifully with the light humor to form a fluid rhythm, which accompanied the streams of descriptive images Murray heavily emphasizes in the article.
This ironic emphasize on descriptive imagery in comparison to the somber subject of losing his eyesight fills the article with a sense of levity — putting the reader at ease. By doing this, Murray is able to produce a positive perspective on losing his last good eye and possibly his career.
Hess’s piece takes on a less fluid approach by including a casual — almost conversational — tone. This allows the reader to feel more comfortable learning about awkward topics such as the female anatomy. In addition, the humor keeps the reader engaged in the piece, which is packed with statistics and information.
On the other hand, satire is a more abrasive, or extreme, way to commentate on the absurdity of a given situation.
“Oh, No! Not Another Boring Interview With Steve Carlton” by Diane Shah takes satire and exaggeration to the limit.
In this article, she creates an entirely fictional interaction between her and Carlton in order to illustrate the absurd relationship between the media and athletes.
That being said, if you are not familiar with baseball, Carlton, or Shah, the piece may confuse you — which brings me to my next point.
Part Two
How important is audience and context to writing a humorous piece?
When it comes to light humor and irony, I do not think it is necessary for the audience to have background knowledge of the topic the writer is discussing.
As Hess demonstrated, the article was published on ESPN; a predominantly male oriented audience. So it’s easy to assume that the majority of the audience never really thought about the importance of sports bras as they have probably never needed to wear one. Hess’s inclusion of humor in the piece was to make it engaging, more comfortable to read, and to bring awareness to an issue that has been ignored in the sports world.
However, I feel like — especially in Shah’s piece — that if an article includes extreme satire it helps a lot for the audience to have a vague understanding of the context surrounding the article (in Shah’s case the writer, the sport and the athlete). Since, I am not an avid fan of Shah, baseball or Carlton I was completely lost until it was explained in class on Thursday — so, for me, the purpose of the article flew way over my head.
That being said, it was still a captivating article and the absurdity of it certainly paralleled the ridiculous relationship between athletes and reporters.
