A few years ago I did an interview about this contest for British radio.  The host proved to be completely uninterested in the primary contest, and only wanted to talk about the Found division.  I guess that’s understandable.  “Intentional unintentional comedy” is kind of a tricky concept. 

• Unintentional comedy: someone says (or, in this case, writes) something ridiculous, and we laugh at that person.

• Intentional comedy: someone says or writes something ridiculous, and we realize from context, or from our knowledge of the person, or just from things like vocal cues, that the ridiculousness was on purpose, and we laugh with that person.

• Intentional unintentional comedy: an entry is ridiculous, yet plausible enough that we can laugh at the imaginary author who wasn’t trying to be funny, while simultaneously laughing with the real author who was clever enough to invent that imaginary author. 

It’s easy to see why the first concept on that list was considered more radio-friendly than the last.  And, yeah, I’m also aware that many Lyttle Lytton readers find the esoteric nature of the contest’s central task more irritating than interesting⁠—many entries don’t make it onto the page of winners because no one could possibly have written those sentences unintentionally, a consideration of no concern to people who just want to read a bunch of funny stuff.  On the flip side, plausibility is not a concern in the Found division: we generally know that the author was attempting to be serious, and the sheer shock value of that knowledge makes entries like this honorable mention seem funnier:

That said, the Found division was not created as an exercise in pointing and laughing at bad fiction.  It was supposed to be for taking lines from things like advertisements and news articles and showing how funny they would be if reimagined as the first lines of novels.  Consider this:

That isn’t too far off from the beginning of One Hundred Years of Solitude!  Or if the cadences of Anna Karenina are more your speed, here’s a line from a medical journal:

This, on the other hand, cuts a little too close to some of my own work (and life):

Yet the fact remains that most people who submit entries for the Found division of the contest pick their lines from works of fiction.  And I must confess that some do strike me as meriting inclusion.  Here’s one that caught my eye:

Apparently the typesetter spat it out too!  (And I guess in making that joke I have identified myself as old enough to remember typesetters.)

Here’s one for the "…whut?" files:

That concludes the honorable mentions in this category.  The winner of the Found division for 2014 is one that got passed around the Internet for a bit around this time last year and so may be old news to some; one that is taken from a piece of fan fiction, so kind of an easy target; one that doesn’t actually work all that well as the beginning of a novel, and so has no real right to win this award; and yet in so many ways reads like the ultimate Lyttle Lytton entry:

I’m pretty sure that this must be the Obama who was sitting in Clint Eastwood’s chair.

So, let’s go straight from side contest winner to main contest winner!  The winner of the 2014 Lyttle Lytton Contest is:

I’ve already written at some length about how inappropriate tagging is destroying civilization (see the Chuckle Box at the bottom of this page), so to that I’ll just add that it’s always a relief when, the first time I encounter a particular gimmick for this contest, it appears in an entry that’s done well.  The hashtag idea was almost certainly inevitable, but I can’t think of a funnier one to use than “#royalbaby”.  The Thrones‐y vibe of the sentence is also a fun poke at our pop-cultural moment.

Four runners-up this year; if the above entry is summa cum laude, the following are magna cum laude: 

That one has a bit of an Achewood feel to it.

It’s obvious how the effectiveness of the first of these hinges on the word “utilize”, but I would submit that the second works in large part because of the “it”.

I know that there’s a double entendre in there, and the beginning is nicely awkward and the tone is humorously inappropriate, but above all that, I’m just amused by the mental image.

The frightening thing is that this totally passes the plausibility test.  I would not be surprised if there were a real novel out there somewhere with an identical premise.

Many entries do fall into genre categories; here are a couple of others we can file under mystery (and I notice that all three of these are structured very similarly!):

Hannah with the two-fer there.  The choice of the word “surveying” is particularly good (or bad, depending on your perspective).

Romance is always popular as well:

You know, history professors always say that people in the Middle Ages didn’t think of themselves as living in the “Middle Ages”, but, like, did they not notice the knights running around and stuff?

In any case, most who submit entries in this genre skip the courtship and start off their imaginary novels with the hot stuff:

Sadly, most romances eventually end in heartbreak: 

This next one falls into the same category, but it also serves as the winner of a mini-contest that it seems like y’all were having without me: what was up with half the entries this year being about vampires?  Aren’t we supposed to have moved on to dystopian teenagers killing each other or something? 

There you go.  Vampire winner.

One last entry from the romance department, this one neither euphoric nor traumatized, but philosophical:

On a similar theme:

I was going to say, “That book is going to be long,” but it occurs to me that Borges once wrote something along those lines and it was actually pretty short.

What next?  How about sports?

Foreword by Donald Sterling.

Ah, dolphins, those lovable wall-touchers.

Our next genre is travel:

I dunno — I’ve lived in New York, and while money may once have been tight in the West 80s, I think folks in the East 80s have always been pretty flush.

Some entries don’t fall into standard publishing genres but do constitute part of one tradition or another among Lyttle Lytton entries.  There’s the ever-popular Sad Sack Sue/Stu:

“Appreciate nature” is an especially nice touch there.  Then we have the misapplication of verbs to bodily organs:

Like this year’s winner, the entry below plays off a popular web site:

I like this next one a lot⁠—it does hit that sweet spot of “Sigh, I actually did write sentences like this when I was fourteen or so and thought they were pretty good”:

And to conclude this year’s list of Lyttle Lytton winners, here’s one that pretty much broke the needle off my WTF meter.

It’s nice to have dreams.

So that’s it!  As always, let me say that there were many fine entries in addition to those above, and on a different day the list of winners might have looked a little different.  Thanks to all who entered, and to those who stopped by to read the results.  I hope you enjoyed them at least as much as Casie enjoyed orange – orange.  (And I am probably going to spend most of the time until the next contest trying to figure out what on earth that could possibly mean.)