Roger and Me

I don’t often get depressed while reading The Onion, but today at lunch, while thumbing through the usually uplifting weekly commentary on pop culture, I happened upon an article written by a “humor columnist” Roger Dudek, that sort of made me rethink my entire existence.
 

The premise borders on offensive from the outset. Roger has been writing professionally for more than 20 years but has only been published intermittently. While reading his article you get the feeling that Roger thinks he’s pretty funny – after all he is a Professional Syndicated Humor Columnist and has written an as-yet-unpublished humor book, Memoirs of a Guy-sha – but there is absolutely nothing funny about anything the man says.
 

The humor is weak at best – “I don’t need the government taking money out of my wallet and deciding how to spend it…. That’s my wife’s job!”His structure is classic humor article style – ending every paragraph with a real hum-zinger and going off-topic just to work in the joke. (And, there are more than enough parenthetical references.) In a word, the writing is horrific, and honestly if I hadn’t internalized the experience and gone in a completely different direction, I probably would have felt bad for Roger.
 

Of course, Roger is not an actual columnist, but a construct dreamed up by The Onion to personify all the would-be humor columnists of the world. The Onion has always been elitist – they don’t accept contributions and they only hire the most inside of insiders – usually relatives of current staffers.If one were to look at it in a certain way, one might say that they were a humor paper monopoly. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they’ve “eliminated” writers that posed a threat to them, but I can’t say that it’s never happened.
 

When you read the article, you understand that, for all of Roger’s efforts, he sucks. When you go deeper, and envision an Onion staffer writing this piece as Roger, thinking to himself “what would a really bad writer who thinks he is funny say here,” you begin to see why this piece touched a nerve with me. The Onion has drawn a line in the sand and said “We, The Onion, are actual humor writers. The guys like Roger are just foolish and inconsequential. Anyone who attempts humor and is not associated with out paper is just so much wasted carbon.Making fun of them is how we stay relevant.”
 

I’m not saying I am like Roger, but at moments in my life I know that my attempts at writing humor have strayed dangerously close to the Roger realm. Further, I often have occasion to read writers who would think Roger was a laugh-riot.I’ve read humor writer who were lucky enough to gain some internet notoriety and have their articles appear on Digg, only to have some Digg lifer say “just another Onion wannabe.”If The Onion is the gold standard, but also completely untouchable, then where, as humor writers, are we supposed to go?
 

The reason it bothered me so was that the giant spotlight was blinding and a bit too warm. I too have been writing for close to 20 years with only a few publications to show for all the effort. I tend to change directions quite a bit, and subsequently lose my way more often than I’d prefer, but if you were to ask me what type of writer I am, my gut reaction would be “humor writer.”I could never write for The Onion because I am not crass enough, nor do I readily dismiss the thoughtfulness of a moment to go for the kill. But, in the end, I am some type of humor writer, so if we have The Onion in one corner, and Roger in the other, I suppose I’ll have to saunter over to Roger’s side and try to give him a few bits of magic.
 

Of course, The Onion wouldn’t be doing their job if they hadn’t nailed Roger, so in a way, my reaction to the piece actually justifies their work. When Roger says “My columns can’t be reduced to a snarky one-liner you can slap on a mousepad,” and then in the next line says “Besides, if I wanted to spend my time filling out T-shirts, I’d become Pamela Anderson,” you sort of have to admire the actual writer for being so damn talented.
 

Sigh.
 

This too, shall pass. I don’t think I’ll read the paper next week, out of protest, but in two weeks I will likely have forgotten why I was so ill at ease with The Onion and I’ll pick it up, laugh a little, and life will be back to normal.If I were Dave Barry, I would close here with a really strong tie-in to the first point I made. I am not Dave, so I failed to make a strong point near the beginning of this piece, so instead I think I’ll close with another quote from Roger. As long as I am rethinking my existence, why not lower my expectations as well. It would be much easier to attain Roger status than Dave status anyway, and easy is what I’m all about.
 

“There’s no point in splitting hairs here (it’d take too long to find one on this cue ball of mine anyway!), so I’m just going to give it to you straight: We’re in a recession. A deep one. Deeper than Dolly Parton’s cleavage. Deeper than a poetry reading at the bottom of the ocean. I’m telling you, we’re so deep in this recession, I just watched the dollar fall below a dinosaur fossil.
 

“One still buried underground!”