I'm in a book! (part II)
I have been informed that "a joke or jokes" of mine has or have been included in "THE COMPLETE IDIOT'S GUIDE TO JOKES," edited by Larry Getlen, which will be released in September of this year through Alpha Books, a division of Penguin Publishing.
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I'm in a book! A real book! One I'm probably not going to mail to my parents.
posted by JenIsFamous at 4/02/2006 02:52:00 PM
1 Comments:
While I am, of course, pleased to hear that you will be included in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Jokes, I would like to meet the complete idiot who determined that a Jennifer Dziura anecdote belongs in a primer on humor. Shouldn't we be starting with something a lot simpler in Ha Ha 101, like a knock knock joke? I mean, my four and a half year old niece understands that "Orange Who?; Orange you glad to see me?" is in some way meant to be funny. But your humor, Jen, is going to go over the head of anyone whose IQ doesn't exceed his or golf score.
Take that as the compliment it is. I wouldn't put Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Robert Klein, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, Steven Wright, Dennis Miller, or Janeane Garofalo--heroes all--in a Complete Idiot's guide to jokes, either. (They are, like you, all too cerebral. And like you, none tells what would be considered by anyone to be a "joke".)
Andrew Dice Clay ain't gonna make anyone's brain hurt from thinking too hard. It doesn't take much to get a dirty nursery rhyme like his take on "Hickory Dickory Dock". Similarly, while Bill Cosby and Jerry Seinfeld have (unlike the Diceman) worked clean most of their careers, neither's subject matter is so incredibly subtle. But you need to have done the required reading, or at least gotten the notes from a classmate, to follow Mort Sahl, Dennis Miller, or Janeane Garofalo. Or Jen Dziura.
"The Honeymooners" belongs in a primer on television comedy (because so much of what followed as far as TV sitcoms goes is absolutely derivative of that conceit); "Curb Your Enthusiasm" does not. The same could be said of a primer on pop music: if you cannot understand the contribution made by a band who wrote "I Wanna Hold Your Hand", why for a time everyone wanted to copy that sound, why even today acts like Lenny Kravitz and Oasis borrow heavily from the Beatles' oeuvre. . .you're not ready for a discussion of Robert Fripp and King Crimson, okay?
If stand-up comedy, like fiction, has its own sub-genre into which its "literature" falls, certainly there are comics who are more worthy than others of being considered so-called "Nobel laureates" or Pulitzer Prize or Thalberg Award winners. George Carlin, for example, is the High Priest of Observational Humor. Andrew Dice Clay is bathroom reading, while Chris Rock is actually something you could be seen with in a Starbucks or on a bus. But Lenny Bruce is James Joyce, for godsake.
Mind you, I am not saying that beach reading doesn't have its place; that I don't find Joyce annoyingly obtuse, Bruce often not funny so much as self-righteous. That isn't my point at all. You gotta walk before you can run. THAT'S my point. The Complete Idiot's Guide to Jokes is therefore a bit of a misnomer, I suspect. Love him or hate him, if you GET Lenny Bruce (or George Carlin, or Dennis Miller) you cannot be a complete idiot. Ditto Jen Dziura.
Anyway. . .
Perhaps you know this--where do the Complete Idiots books fall on the hierarchy of "you are hopeless"-ness? I went to the Barnes & Noble this morning to purchase some tome on Microsoft FrontPage. The helpful young "sales associate" (read: white person with college degree; nevertheless lacking ambition and a desire to wait tables or work in retail) asked if I wanted the Dummies book, or would prefer the Complete Idiot's one. I looked at her and wiped the drool from my lip. I pulled my paw up from the floor on which it was dragging, as I shrugged.
"I don't know," I offered, as if it should have come as a complete surprise. "Do I look to you like a COMPLETE idiot, or just a real dummy?"
She laughed and handed me a yellow book I'm still coloring.
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