The 2007 Winners"What? Those are the winners?! Where is my glorious entry? Dammit, you wouldn't know funny if it bit you on the ass!" No doubt. This sort of thing is enormously subjective. It's hard to draw a line between those that just barely make it in and those which are just barely left out; this year, however, I convened an impromptu jury to weigh in on whether anything in the Maybe pile definitely deserved inclusion. Still, if your sentence doesn't appear below, that doesn't necessarily mean it was no good — in some cases, on another day I might well have chosen it. And of course, I wouldn't know funny if it bit me on the ass. As I've noted in the past, it has become clear over the years that this contest is hard. It is basically an exercise in intentional unintentional comedy. Here's an entry by Kevin Hogg that is funny, or at least worthy of a groan, but doesn't really fit the parameters: "As I walked out the front door, it dawned on me — and, for that matter, everyone else north of the equator in my time zone." Why is that funny? Because of the pun. Is the pun unintentional? No, the structure and diction of the sentence make it clear it is no accident. Therefore, this isn't the sort of thing that fits. Another example, by Lauren Thompson: "James would later realize that bringing the severed head to the church was not an appropriate way to arrive at the funeral for the body." That is a comedic situation, wittily described. Again, it misses the "unintentional" part. It's difficult to be unintentionally funny on purpose! This is why it's often easier to find good entries than to compose original ones. We'll get to the Found contest in a bit, but let's start with the main event. The winner of the 2007 Lyttle Lytton Contest is:
Comedy is to a great extent an exercise in short-circuiting expectations. So we start reading — "It clawed its way out of..." — and next up should be what, "the crypt"? "Hell"? And instead we get... "Katie"! Any actual name would have been funny in that spot, but "Katie" in particular forces us to replace our image of a subterranean prison with that of a pert-nosed Girl Scout. Then we get to "bit through the cord," which is both unexpectedly gruesome and rejiggers our mental image again (oh, so this is a pregnancy! described in such a way as to make the whole concept of pregnancy horrifying!) before the coup de grâce: "and started clearing." What does the demon baby do upon emerging? Tear out the throat of the obstetrician? Unleash a torrent of hellfire? No, it just starts clearing — funny because it's unexpectedly peaceful, funny because Scientology is inherently hilarious, and funny because now we have to readjust our mental reconstruction of events yet again to account for the realization that this sentence must describing the birth of Suri Cruise. Winner. But right on its heels is the runner-up:
I think this one is funny for three reasons. One is, again, the subversion of expectations: we anticipate that the police captain will have something measured and authoritative to say on the subject of crime, but he doesn't. Second, the conniption fit described is hilarious. For months now, I have found myself in odd moments crying, "Crime is everywhere, crime, crime!" and then giggling like an idiot. Finally, this sentence functions as a parody of a lot of hysterical law-and-order narrative. I mean, "Crime is everywhere, crime, crime!" is basically Batman's motto, not to mention that of a lot of political campaigns. An interesting note about this one is that it was a reworking of an earlier entry, which was "'Crime,' evoked the head of police forces Captain, 'is every where, crime, crime!'" That the earlier sentence is not funny at all teaches a valuable lesson: know the source of your humor. Does the humor derive from the sources described above, or from the writer's butchering of the English language? Trying to make it both is futile, because the latter undercuts the former. And butchering the language is not nearly as funny as the type of humor embodied in the reworked sentence. I don't normally do third place, but this was a strong enough field that this year I'll make an exception. In fact, two exceptions. (Not three, because I don't want Joe Lieberman to think that there's such a thing as a three-way tie for third.)
A guy getting kicked in the crotch is not funny. Having the crotch kick described as the delivery, by a foot, of "an unending holocaust of pain" is the sort of thing that makes this contest worth running. At first I thought that "Zamboni" diluted the humor by seeming to allude to the ice-smoothing vehicle, but upon consideration, nah, it's fine. The other third-place winner:
This is splendid. The mere fact of trying to describe Paris by naming four fancy-sounding French comestibles in awkward couplets would be amusing enough, but the fact that tiramisu is Italian and "au jus" is a phrase meaning "with broth" makes it all the more awesome. Aw, hell with it. Three-way tie for third. Frickin' Lieberman. The third third-place winner:
Many sources of humor here. Exploding cake is funny. The fact that the writer feels the need to explain that someone didn't like exploding cake is funny. The mere assertion that Emperor Wu liked cake is funny. I picture Emperor Wu on his throne being presented with a small square of white cake with pink icing on it, and his face lighting up with delight. On to the honorable mentions! In the introduction I mentioned some types of humor that don't really work in this contest. But I do tend to like sentences that on the surface seem perfectly reasonable but then a moment later make you say, "Hey, wait—" For example:
It only takes a second to realize that the simile in that one might be a bit too apt. Here's one that's subtler:
That's funny because of the perkiness, but I like how it takes quite a long moment before you think, "Hang on — how does the name 'salsa dancing' suggest that one will be saying 'phew' afterwards?" Here's another one that sounds perfectly reasonable... at first:
I'm a sucker for subtle syllepsis. In fact, it's my latest Livejournal interest. Here are a couple of others that make the list because they happen to appeal to my own quirks:
I don't think the joke here is all that funny, but this entry had me at "the skeleton was a sheila." Actually, any use of the word "sheila" (or, even better, "sheilas") gets an unjustifiable number of bonus points as far as I'm concerned.
Why do I find orbital mishaps hilarious? I don't know! At least Comrade Todd now has some company.
I like the solemnity of that one. Angus MacGyver, lion in winter. Making radios out of denture adhesive and jars of Metamucil. Okay, ready to wince? Here we go!
Aieee! Though this one's even worse:
Hello, imaginary author! Care to join the 21st century? Or at least the 18th? On to the jury prizes, rescued from the Maybe pile by my hand-picked team of comedy experts, by which I mean some people in a chatroom.
That last one once again proves my theory: focus groups like a monkey. They also evidently really like sex. And while saying so more or less guarantees that next year I will be inundated with sentences about monkey sex, they can hardly be more painful than these, which the jurors gleefully plucked from the Maybe pile:
One juror notes about the last entry, "It's funnier if you imagine the hand gestures." But who says romance is dead?:
Sound effects were popular this year:
And here's a sound-effects entry for the Freeform contest:
Note that the Freeform contest was not intended as a division for interminable entries; save those for the Bulwer-Lytton. No, Freeform is just for when you want to break things up into a couple of sentences, or go a bit beyond the 25 words. There were only a couple of other entries that preserved the spirit of Lyttle Lytton; this one's the winner:
I think the sort of contrast there has been done before, but "context-free grammars" is intrinsically funny. This one's also good:
I was on the fence about that one until I realized that Adam says "Jesus." Throwing in a subtle anachronism along with your register shift is going the extra mile. On to the Found contest. I'll ramble about this in a minute, but first, here's the winner:
"Fukutsuru" is funny. "Fukutsuru died in 2005," as the start of a novel, is funnier. Add "but his frozen sperm lived on" and it's funnier still. Add "for people's benefit" and you have comedy gold. (By the way, Fukutsuru was a bull. As the article notes, that makes him an even-toed ungulate.) One thing I found while looking through the Found entries is that non-fiction was much funnier for the purposes of this contest than fiction was. Imagine this as the beginning of a tale of court intrigue:
Academic writing is actually improved by imagining it as postmodern fiction:
Sportswriting is... well, really, no context could make this mixed metaphor work:
Advertising becomes hip second-person narrative (it's all the rage these days, you hear):
I don't know what's funnier, interpreting it as "the natural beauty of the deer," or as the deer saying, "Hey, how's it goin'" as you drive in. Here's someone who was evidently paid by the prepositional phrase:
By contrast, grabbing bad writing out of works of fiction doesn't really work for some reason. I guess it's the repurposing that I find amusing. Just trawling fanfiction.net or some such seems too easy. I don't really have much interest in running a "mock other people's existing writing" contest. That said, here are a couple of entries drawn from fiction:
Because, y'know, in most countries a million dollars is chicken feed.
I imagine this one was submitted because of the "no Anamaria in Anamaria's bed" line, but I think that's fine — it's the "Anamaria had already gotten up obviously" part that telegraphs this as the work of an amateur. Still here? Okay, then let's wrap up with the screenplays. Winner:
A big part of why I run this contest year after year is to learn more about comedy. This entry would not be funny if the "Mooooooo" were given to the cow instead of the narrator. I find that fascinating — the fine line between stupid and clever.
This next one I almost left out because it hits a little too close to something I'm working on now!:
And finally:
Nah, let's conclude. In summary, I think 2007 was the best Lyttle Lytton Contest to date. I hope you agree! Or at the very least, I hope you didn't find it an unending holocaust of pain.
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