Just not funny...

Believe it or not, I never could understand the joke about "cow tipping". Mostly, I knew it to be absolutely impossible and failed the test of humor for sheer illogic.

But obviously this fable is alive and well.

Let's get this out of the way: Cow tipping, at least as popularly imagined, does not exist. Drunk young men do not, on any regular basis, sneak into cow pastures and put a hard shoulder into a cow taking a standing snooze, thus tipping the poor animal over.While in the history of the world there have surely been a few unlucky cows shoved to their side by boozed-up morons, we feel confident in saying this happens at a rate roughly equivalent to the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series.The evidence against cow tipping is immense, and backed up by both farmers and the laws of physics (more on that later), but the simplest bit of proof we can point to: YouTube.

It even includes some serious math to back this up.

I'm sure this will put an end to all those tremendously un-funny jokes.

The oatmeal-Obamacare connection...  

In what may be one of his best columns ever, Rex Huppke at the Chicago Tribune connects two widely spaced dots to sound the alarm for "rill 'Mericans":

Fortunately, there's something we can do about this desecration of an American breakfast tradition. And it can be done while also trying to prevent millions of people from getting health care, thus killing two — or possibly 30 million — birds with one stone.
A brave group of tea party Republicans has decided that the best way to get rid of Obamacare — since voting to repeal it 39 times doesn't seem to be working — is to not fund the law. Heroes like Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Sen. Ted Cruz of Hateseverythingistan say they'll oppose any budget that gives money to the health care law, even if that means risking a government shutdown.
This is similar to when Abraham Lincoln famously avoided an American civil war by holding his breath until the South agreed to free the slaves.
The tactics of Cruz and company have been praised by many Republicans, including North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, who called it "the dumbest idea I've ever heard."
In a recent speech, Cruz said that the Obama administration's tactic is to "get everyone addicted" to Obamacare, thus making it impossible to abolish. He's right. Outside of caffeine and cocaine, there are few things more addictive than access to affordable health care.
My guess is this is the same trick Jamba Juice has up its hemp sleeve. The company — clearly a radical left-wing group of nutrition Nazis — has co-opted something all Americans want (oatmeal) and is using it to get us hooked on smoothies that will turn us into dope-smoking pacifists.
So today I call on Sens. Cruz, Rubio and Lee to not just demand the defunding of Obamacare, but to hold the country's budget hostage until Jamba Juice promises to take its mitts off our oatmeal.
Because if there's one thing that's worth risking the full faith and credit of the United States over, it's anything that might possibly make us healthier. [Read the whole thing to start your day right in multiple ways]

The defund movement has gathered enough big names (all the assumed GOP presidential timber - which says something about the field) to make it newsworthy for that fact alone. But saner voices are coming forward to point out some flaws with this strategy. Like lowering expectations.

SK: What do you expect the Obamacare rollout to be like this October?

TC: I don’t know. What I do know is if you do say it;s going to be terrible, terrible, terrible as Republicans have been saying, and it’s only one terrible, it’s going to look good. We shouldn’t overhype things. We should just watch. The fact that they’re going to do everything they can to get as many people as possible to participate matters. [More]

I have a sad suspicion we are heading toward a total meltdown on the right as the divisions in the GOP make any legislative action impossible.

This includes a farm bill, BTW.

I can't write jokes this good...

Correction of the Week:

[Source]

The first thing to go...

Is not the knees - contrary to popular opinion.  It's the sense of humor.

The National Pork Producers just could not find the funny in this spoof ad.

[More]

We'd like to publicly apologize to the NPB for the confusion over unicorn and pork--and for their awkward extended pause on the phone after we had explained our unicorn meat doesn't actually exist. From our press release [PDF]:

"It was never our intention to cause a national crisis and misguide American citizens regarding the differences between the pig and the unicorn," said Scott Kauffman, President and CEO of Geeknet. "In fact, ThinkGeek's canned unicorn meat is sparkly, a bit red, and not approved by any government entity."

We'd also like to extend a special discount to everyone we offended with our portrayal of Unicorn Meat as "the new white meat." For a limited time, take $10 off any order of $40 or more by using the code PORKBOARD at checkout, good until 6/30/2010 at 11:59PM ET.
Thanks, National Pork Board, for giving us yet another reason to keep the April Fool's Day tradition alive. We'll always wonder if our Canned Unicorn Meat played some small, magical part in your rethinking of your brand.

UPDATE 6/21 2:50p ET: Due to popular request, and after some interest on the intarwebz, you can now download our original press release [PDF]. It was unfortunately rejected by the newswires so you won't find it elsewhere--kinda like unicorn meat.

[More - check out the lawyer letter]

 Sometimes ag is its own worst enemy.

I guess I got off lucky.

Then The Dear Leader says...

Jokes from North Korea.

- Chang Man Yong works on a collective farm in North Korea. He goes fishing, gets lucky, and brings a fish home. Happy about his catch, he tells his wife: "Look what I've got. Shall we eat fried fish today?"
   
The wife says: "We've got no cooking oil!"
   
"Shall we stew it, then?"
   
"We've got no pot!"
   
"Shall we grill it?"
   
"We've got no firewood!"
   
Chang Man Yong gets angry, goes back to the river, and throws the fish back into the water.
The fish, happy to have had such a narrow escape, sticks its head out of the water and cheerfully yells: "Long live General Kim Jong Il!"

It is one of my greatest hopes to see those people freed in my lifetime. And I hope the PRC does it.

Or a lumberjack, eh?...

I read this in the Globe and Mail when I was in Canada last week: Real Men Eat Healthy.

The ironic thing is that I'm married to a public-health nurse whose career mission is to promote healthier lifestyles. You could wallpaper our house with the healthy lifestyle literature she's brought home. Low-fat cookbooks overflow from our shelves. I have a drawer full of Healthy Heart T-shirts (size XXL – more irony there). I can recite the seven benefits of broccoli. Still, I ate like I owned Frito-Lay stock. Clearly it's not lack of information that kept me from proper eating.

Personally, I blame the low-fat yogurt ads. You've seen them – women doing high kicks in swirly skirts while sipping yogurt from ever-so-pretty containers and dancing, always dancing. These cute and colourful health-conscious messages are clearly not aimed at your average guy.

By contrast are the fast-food ads in which two men feed burgers into their mouths like steel billets through a rolling mill while discussing the merits of seared cattle flesh. Eat like a man is the message here, and saturated fats are the medium. [Great short essay]

New to me...

A stunning development on our farm today.  No - not the Crop Report.  I have officially lost my mind.

Or at least my memory. I was working on a humor article when I wondered if I had already used a particularly lame gag.  So I went to my FJ archives...

While scrolling through the list, I stumbled across one literary effort of which I had no - as in zero - recall:

© 2003 John Phipps

                    Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt

Wadded into our drawers or lurking under our dress shirts, t-shirts threaten
to overtake modern man’s casual attire. Not a moment too soon, I say. The
concept of using a garment that is essentially underwear for outerwear is a
breakthrough that should no longer be just Victoria’s Secret.

My vast t-shirt collection is more than an enormous source of laundry for
Jan or shop-rags-in-waiting. It is a combination of photo album, travel diary,
cultural achievement summary, and family history. Long after I have
forgotten where Churchill is buried (somewhere overseas, I think) I will
recall with perfect clarity the underground shop where I first saw the “Mind
the Gap” London Tube t-shirt. T-shirts have become life’s mnemonic
devices – jogging tired memory cells to semi-awareness. 

Almost every event, no matter how trivial can merit a t-shirt. Had your
wisdom teeth pulled? How ‘bout a t-shirt emblazoned with a catchy slogan
like “Novocain is for sissies”. I’ve seen shirts saying “Ask me about my
grandpuppies” and “My child is an honor student at IL State Juvenile
Facility”.

Like modern headwear, T-shirts allow modest and soft-spoken people to
shout comments sartorially. When our spouse starts wearing an “I’m with
stupid” shirt, we reach for our “– for the time being” shirt. In fact, when we
notice a white T-shirt unblemished by ad or admonition, we are often taken
aback by the avoidance of public discourse. I mean everybody has one
opinion, surely.

Our first emblems of belonging are often T-ball t-shirts that hang like
nightgowns on miniature ballplayers. Later in life our companies, customers
and vendors will try to “T-brand” us with perverse offers of free underwear
from strangers. (And we worry about candy?)

Many of my t-shirts are remembrances of museum visits in exotic locations
– Amsterdam, London, Cleveland. These proofs-of-culture are proudly worn
to display my tractability as a husband, evidence that when vacations are
planned, nobody consults me. Still they differentiate me in farmer groups
from those who wear mostly what arrives free in the mail.

In fact, my rule for “Great Art” has become: If it doesn’t look good on the
paunch of an unshaven middle-aged farmer, it isn’t Great Art.  I have t-shirt
versions of Monet’s “Water Lilies”, Van Gogh’s “Wheatfield”, and Miss
Piggy as Mona Lisa.

Recently the Hanes Company, in an unexpected fit of customer empathy
announced that it would no longer attach scratchy tags to the back of the
collar of their t-shirts. It amazed me that several decades of t-shirts had to be
manufactured before someone in the company actually wore one for a day.
At any rate, this development has altered my marriage.

Jan once – no, make that has repeatedly – pointed out that our marriage
vows contained no reference to tediously picking out the stitching on t-shirt
tags. I countered with the salient argument: “Awww, jeeez!”  Having
suffered without silence for most of my adolescent years from scratchy-tag
syndrome (yes, we’re talking the heartbreak of STS) the prospect of relief
without the gash that removal with tin snips produces was a key factor in my
decision to wed. If only I had waited 32 years.

Recently I have become fascinated with the problem of t-shirt aging. Where
do the little holes come from? And why do they seem to invite fingers to be
stuck through them, sometimes while in the choir loft. While it can make
amusing horseplay for tenors and other children, these small holes seem to
appear at random and frequently after I have used an air hose to blow the
crud and corrosion off a tractor battery. I sense a pattern here…

T-shirts also shrink disproportionately. Mine seem intent on strangling my
armpits while the neck sags to catch chaff and dust from above. Still, their
remarkable tensile strength comes in handy when shirt buttons fail and
unrestrained abdomens threaten to escape to freedom.

T-shirts are marvelous in their versatility. Caught without a handkerchief
during allergy season? That’s what shirttails are for. In fact, as a high school
basketball apprentice whose nose ran when his feet did (and yes, they both
smell – har, har!), I discovered that blowing your nose on your T-shirttails
not only was handy, it kept defenders from hand-checking or pushing off.

Few things can comfort like an old t-shirt fresh from the dryer on a cold day.
Moreover, nothing says love like identically folded t-shirts stacked neatly in
a drawer. And of course one mustn’t discount the benefits of wet t-shirts,
such as livening up a lackluster seed corn meeting.

Perhaps Plato put it best: “Underestimating underwear undermines
understanding”. Or was that Bluto?

Did I write this?  I have no idea.  (Oddly, one reason may be its outstanding hilarity, according to real science.)


Depending on whether you enjoy it, consider that I may have.

No wonder it's getting harder...

As I stare another Farm Journal deadline in the face, the paucity of new material weighs on me.  After 15 years of humor, I've covered many acres of farm humor. I enjpy the work, but recently discovered a new appreciation for the fact it is work.

All humorists approach the task differently. At the risk of being self-serving, I have tried to avoid three topics:

• Manure jokes - done to death, folks.  The fact that we handle animal waste and others don't ceased to tickle me at about age 12.
• Ditzy females - too many farm humor articles are about women trying to do work for which they are poorly prepared and unkindly measured.  Self-denigrating humor by female farm writers (I left the gate open and the cows all got out...) does poor credit to the thousands of female farmers who by ingenuity and perseverance rise to meet the challenges of our male-dominated profession.
• Unsafety - Stupid farmer tricks.  We lose too many farmers and children to thinking scorn for safety measures is a mark of manliness or ability.

In the end though, I do note a familiarity in my work - repetitive patterns of humor.  I just found out why.

Evolutionary theorist Alastair Clarke has today published details of eight patterns he claims to be the basis of all the humour that has ever been imagined or expressed, regardless of civilization, culture or personal taste.
Clarke has stated before that humour is based on the surprise recognition of patterns but this is the first time he has identified the precise nature of the patterns involved, addressing the deceptively simple unit and context relationships at their foundation. His research goes on to demonstrate the universality of the theory by showing how these few basic patterns are recognized in more than a hundred different types of humour.
Clarke explains: "One of the most beautiful things about the theory is that, while denying all previous theories, it also unites them for the first time. For decades researchers have concentrated on limited areas of humour and have each argued for causality based on their specific interest. Now that we have pattern recognition theory, all previous explanations are accommodated by a single over-arching concept present in all of them.
"The eight patterns divide into two main categories. The first four are patterns of fidelity, by which we recognize the repetition of units within the same context, and the second four are patterns of magnitude, by which we recognize the same unit repeated in multiple contexts.
"What this all means is that the basic faculty of pattern recognition equips us to compare multiple units for their appropriateness within a certain context, effectively selecting the best tool for the job, and then to apply our chosen unit to as wide a range of contexts as possible, effectively discovering the largest number of jobs that tool is good for.
"Basically humour is all about information processing, accelerating faculties that enable us to analyse and then manipulate incoming data."

Clarke lists the patterns that are active in humour as positive repetition, division, completion, translation, applicative and qualitative recontextualization, opposition and scale. [More]

This kind of deep thought drains much of the fun, don't you think?

Lemme see.  Stop me if you've heard this: A farmer, a corn borer, and Pamela Anderson walk into a bar...

As usual, somebody else beat me to it...

After reading Harrington's World in the latest issue of Progressive Farmer (yes, even humor writers check out the competition), I was baffled.  It's not online (that I could find, anyway) as my articles are, but I was frankly blown away by the tone of the article.

Please find a copy and read it yourself, but my lingering impressions are attempts at risibility from the Guatanamo Bay prison and waterboarding.  Of course, I'm a limp-wristed lefty who opposes farm subsidies and favors reinstituting the draft, but...

I was appalled.

As a veteran of a war so unsupported by the public I was reluctant to fly home in uniform to get married (an airline requirement for the fare I could afford), I found references to the subversion of habeus corpus (imprisonment without charges) and torture in the military to be an overreach into repugnance. To appear in a farm magazine was even more startling.

At the same time, as a competitor, I first considered, "Whoa, John's got nothing this month."  Lord knows I've been there. It's pretty well documented that writing humor is a young man's game.  It is also very possible that John's brilliance simply escapes me because he is a competitor.

But after some quality time in Zippy the Car getting to London, ON to speak tomorrow, I struggled to another conclusion.  This particular epiphany had begun during my presentations this year, and Harrington's work simply helped it coalesce.

Snark is soooo 2008.

Snarking is cultural vandalism. I have arrived at this conclusion belatedly. I have been guilty of snarking, and of enjoying snarks. In the matter of snarking, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But it has grown entirely out of hand. It is time to put away childish things. I must restore my balance, view the world in a fair way, hope to inspire more appreciation than ridicule. No doubt there will always be a role for snarking, given the proper target and an appropriate venue, and I reserve the right to snark when it is deserved, as in certain movie reviews. But in general I must become more well-behaved.

A snarker is one who snarks. The word is said to be a combination of snide and remark. There are slithering undertones of shark, bark, and stark. There is also, for me, an association with snipe. The practice involves holding someone up to ridicule not so much for anything they actually did, as for having the presumption to be who they are. [More]

Snarking is the privilege of a society with money to burn and feelings to disregard.  The disdain is offset by the oodles of wealth to soothe the pain. So you're disgusted, we say, it's not like you're losing money.

I have written with poison pen, and remarkably wittily, I must say, and have always regretted it in the long run. Some of my readers have brought me up short on such posts as well.

But it is easy to point out faults, I fumed, when you are not doing the work.  The demands of producing output overrides niceties such as common courtesy or benefit of the doubt.  Especially if it gets a laugh at an opponent's expense.

However, I have been forced to consider that  relentless satire is a luxury good, dependent on a surplus of good feeling that allows readers to absorb invective and mean spirits with aplomb if cleverly phrased.  Laughing at the foibles of others, after all, can make us feel better.

Well, until we see them flinch, anyway. Or weep.

Once when I was reading P. J. O'Rourke (I recommend "Age and Guile...") I stopped between chuckles to grasp how vicious his incredible intellect could be.  This guy could write Harrington and I both under the table - sober. With a wit second to none - and I have read much of Mencken - he relentlessly eviscerates those who hold opposing views. It is apparently debilitating work, as his blog constipation seems to suggest. He was a hero of mine.

In a different way, Garrison Keillor can alternately inspire and rabbit-punch this humorist wanna-be.  In his gently-worded Lutheranish, he can insert barbs equal to O'Rourke.

But at the same time we have been tickled by Dave Barry.  And now Joel Stein. Their ability to amuse without leaving scars reveals by comparison the garishness of some "humor" (mine included). Perhaps it's fresh brain cells or simple genius, but I'm groping to the realization that ridicule has replaced the pun as the lowest form of humor.

Humor also has to fit the context of the times.  There was a good reason why slapstick and vaudville (think Three Stooges) and sappy movies worked during the Depression.  It's because an act like George Carlson would have triggered so many short fuses in the audience he would not have survived opening night.

With a populace on edge, maybe snark is the Hummer of 2009 - a belly laugh few of us can stomach.  Too many of us are too anxious to embrace an additional attack on who we have been and what we have believed in, however illuminating. We're too emotionally exhausted to appreciate how an irritating insight should poke us into a "clearer picture of The Truth".

Alas, I have gotten so many laughs from that technique I suspect I will be slow to rebalance, but at least it has dawned on me what isn't working with my audiences.

More importantly, I've discovered what isn't working for me in 2009.