The Dallas Morning News and its Jewish humor problem
Well, truth be told, they have a courtesy problem to boot. And had it not been for the latter, I might not be writing about the former. Nothing, it seems, irritates me quite so much these days as good old rudeness.
Here’s what I’m talking about:
Two weeks ago I had a little humor piece run on the op-ed page of the Sunday New York Times. It poked fun—in a decidedly Long Island Jewish kind of way—at virtuous and wise blue-collar fathers, the ones only political candidates seem to have. A week later, it was reprinted in the Dallas Morning News. Normally, this is a good thing for a writer, unless, of course, the newspaper doing the reprinting can't tell a bagel from a black and white cookie. Here's the original and here's the Dallas version-for-the-humor-averse.
See, some dopey editor at the Morning News, apparently baffled by this thing called satire—do they not have The Daily Show in Texas?-- edited most of the punch lines out of the piece. At first, I laughed at this bizarre conversion from humorous to downright confusing and left a funny note on the DMN website. But the more I thought about what exactly was excised, the more baffled I became. Like good humor itself, there's always a deeper meaning. And so I wrote a nice note and cc'ed four editors at the Morning News. What a shock: not one had the courtesy to respond. Given that newspapers are at at Death's door, I guess I'm not too surprised no one paid much attention to a joke crashing and burning.
So rather than lose sleep waiting for an explanation that obviously ain't a coming, here’s a little primer on the basics of Jewish humor for those cowgirls and cowboys over at the Morning News.
Rule #1:
You don't cut the set-up.
Every good joke has a set-up. You know, like, "A guy walks into a bar," that kind of thing. In my case, the set-up was a pair of quotes, one from the Republican and one from the Democratic conventions. You guys eliminated them both.
“Champ, when you get knocked down, get up.” — Joe Biden, relating advice from his father at the Democratic convention.
“My dad ... worked hard, lifted heavy things, and got his hands dirty. The only soap we had at my house was Lava.” — Mike Huckabee speaking at the Republican convention.
By editing the set-up from the story, you kill the context. And context, dear Dallas, is key to a joke. If there's no "Did 'ja hear the one about the..." in a joke, it can't get off the ground. Kapeesh?
Rule #2:
You can take the boy out of Long Island, but you can't take Long Island out of the story.
In your effort to remove any hint of regionalism from the piece, you guys edited out all of the proper names that make the story, well, funny. "Long Island Expressway" became, simply, "expressway," and "Walt Whitman Mall" became, well, invisible. I can understand to some extent, but it gets better.
Original story: "Jay Mendelsohn: American hero. For 35 years, dabbling away at the everyday problems of random variables and the Cooley-Tukey algorithm in his lab at the Grumman Aerospace Corporation, kept warm only by an open fire and the strains of the “Moonlight Sonata” wafting through the office."
Dallas Morning News: "Jay Mendelsohn: American hero. For 35 years, he dabbled away at the everyday problems of random variables in his lab at the Grumman Aerospace Corp."
Oy vey, we have our work cut out for us, don't we? You see, all that extra junk that you threw away is actually comedy gold. Open fire, Moonlight Sonata, the good old Cooley-Tukey algorithm. Gold! You probably thought you were doing your readers a service by relieving them of the burden of the Cooley-Tukey algorithm but here's a news flash: you're not supposed to know what it is! Cool, eh? It's a trick! Good catch, editor.
In another paragraph, one that mentions the baseball heroes of my youth, you curiously left in Jerry Koosman, a great, if not somewhat obscure, pitcher for the New York Mets. But you edited out Tug McGraw, an affable reliever, famous for his "Ya Gotta Believe!" rallying cry during the 1973 season. In choosing, Grasshopper, you chose wrong, as many of your readers in Dallas might actually recall that Tug is the father of country music superstar Tim McGraw. Always better to let the readers have all the information, silly wabbit.
Rule #3:
Stay away--far, far away--from punch lines:
Part of the fun of the piece is that I made a joke out of those torturous racing car problems we used to have to endure from my mathematician dad. In my silly example, I said that the racing cars left Detroit and Memphis and arrived in Chicago. The punch line went like this:
"And even though only one of his five children went on to get a Ph.D. in anything remotely math-related, the prescience of his words gives me pause. Looking back, I can now so clearly see that by invoking “Detroit,” my father was trying to shape our young minds toward the plight of the American autoworker. “Memphis” was so obviously an allusion to the teachings of Dr. King. And there can be no doubt that in having both racing cars arrive in Chicago, my father meant to hearken back to the site of Enrico Fermi’s first atomic pile."
You guys ran it like this:
"Looking back, I can now so clearly see that by invoking "Detroit," my father was trying to shape our young minds toward the plight of the American autoworker. "Memphis" was so obviously an allusion to the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr."
Um, hello? Earth to Dallas. I know you guys wouldn't get the Ph.D. thing (kidding!), but you can't break up the sacred Rule of Threes, a fundamental tenet of Jewish comedy dating back to the time of the Maccabees. Without Enrico Fermi, the joke dies a cruel death. Cruel.
Rule #4:
You can edit us out, but we won't go away.
Curiously--very curiously, actually--is that in all the chopping that went on, the only paragraph that you guys deleted completely is this one:
"This is the reason I must now make a painful admission: that I made up large portions of my bar mitzvah haphtara, mumbling through certain key sections. No one really noticed anyway, except my grandfather, who had flown in from Miami Beach and proclaimed, as his father had before him, “You call this a synagogue?”
Admit it, you laughed. I know. So why the disappearing act? This is a tough one. You see, our people--even the reform ones (joking!)--don't cotton too well to being vaporized. The good-natured Long Island Jew in me says, Oh, someone was simply protecting all those cattle ranchers and oil tycoons from those crazy sounding words like "bar mitzvah" and "haphtara" (a toughie, for sure.) Our readers won't get this, you probably figured. Trust me, I barely understood, either, and I was the one doing the reciting all those years ago.
But another part me of me thinks that...well, let's just hope it's the first reason.
E.B. White famously said that, "Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it."
My apologies, E.B.
Matt
matt
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Reader Comments (23)
Thanks for making me lough at this late hour:)
I just can't believe they did it. I am simultaneously incredulous AND laughing at the absurdity of editing what they edited. What do you think they do with New Yorker cartoon captions?
Wow. I thought editors were supposed to work with an eye toward improving the pieces they touch. Whoever touched yours eviscerated it.
Anyway, in answer to your Daily Show in Texas question, it's really only available in Austin. In Dallas you have to watch from an underground bunker where your neighbors and your boss can't see you, and as you can imagine, the reception's not very good.
This almost reads like a bad foreign language translation...
Ah, the curse of the writer. No one, save the author, can fully appreciate the brilliance of the piece. I am heartbroken by this tragic desecration of your flawless work of art.
As a retired newspaper copy editor of many years, I first thought, "Yeah, just another prima donna who fancies himself as a humorist being offended that anyone would touch his pristine prose." Uh, no. This is copy editing at its worst. Yecch. Your outrage is fully justified.
And journalists wonder why people aren't reading papers anymore. Yes, let's imagine our readers want to read writing the quality of thrice recycled cardboard. Subtlty? That's for pointy-headed academics. Style? The only style is no style - our articles must be comprehensible to a half-wit.
Now, to consider this from a practical perspective, if space was at such a premium that the copyeditor had to employ a wrecking ball, the piece should have been held or the writer asked to make it shorter. If, on the other hand, there wasn't a space problem, and there is an editor at the Dallas Morning News who believes these edits are justified, then the piece shouldn't have been run. A humor/opinion piece that "demands" such heavy excision isn't fit for the paper to begin with. Having said all that, Occam's razor suggests that the copyeditor is a simpleton. Well done for calling him or her on it though...
A a longtime reporter and copy editor none of this shocks me. There are too many copy editors --- or worse, designers --- handling copy who have no writing experience and hence just don't get it.
I got a good laugh out of the copy editor's reasoning: "it had to be trimmed." A few tips before removing the color from a writer's work: first look for redundancy, then useless quotes, then widows, then adjectives.
When in doubt, PICK UP THE PHONE AND CALL THE WRITER.You'd be surprised how easily things can be solved by talking. Also, if a writer knows his or her copy is being cut for space, they take it a lot better if you tell them in a conversation, rather than discovering it in an e-mail.
Finally, having said all this, I feel the copy editor's pain: four editors were informed of the writer's concerns and nothing was passed on to the copy editor. That NEVER happens in our office. . .
Are you sure the original NYT piece wasn't influenced by those long years studying "The Canterbury Tales" by Jeffrey Chaucer? I understand that he too was influenced by the great satirists of his era: Henny Youngman, Myron Cohen, Uncle Miltie, Mel Brooks, Buddy Hackett, Shecky Greene, Jackie Mason, Phil Silver, George Jessel and Pauly Shore.
I know for a fact that grouchy Wayne in Texas works for the DMN.
I'm just sayin'... ;-)
Matt: Both pieces, the original in the Times and your response here are priceless, simply priceless.
I once worked as a copy editor at a small daily. It was the early days of pagination. We'd do the next morning's op-ed page right after that day's paper had gone to the presses. The text boxes never varied in size from day to day. The editor would tell us "Put Royko in Box 1, Charley Reese in Box 2 and letters to the editor in Box 3. We couldn't change the box size or protest that the column's were 600 words long and the boxes would only hold 300. "Edit to fit," he'd say. "Then get started on the TV page."
The only consolation I could take was that it seemed very unlikely any of the national columnist were likely to notice how badly their stuff was being butchered for readers in small-town Wisconsin.
I like the edited version better. It's a better read.
Matt,
The Dallas paper used to be a good one, with many excellent reporters, but it has always been a boring one with no voice, no style, and not a single writer of note. The editors like it that way. Below I've pasted a passage from a columnist's 2006 farewell. Note her last line.
"I'm not sure what editors were smoking when they asked me to write a weekly Collin-centric column in 1999. But I'm sure glad they did ...
No first-person navel-gazing, the powers that be warned. They wanted something light that local readers could relate to."
Long-suffering Dallas reader
All the copy editors -- currently and blessedly former -- nailed it. It's the all-the op/ed-that'll-fit-the-space practice of daily jounalism.
The sad part? The guy (or woman) who did it probably felt he (or she) did a pretty good job.And you can take this as some small consolation: It coulda been worse. Really.
Matt,
I came to this blog via Romenesko. At first, reading your protest letter, I took your side, as a writer myself. So i read the DMN piece. It was also good. You protesteth too much. You're a photographer by profession, not a writer by profession, am I right? So you don't really understand how copy editors work. Sometimes they edit for space. Sometimes they edit for their particular readership. Sometimes of course they edit poorly and incorreectly, but in this case, really, i like you, Matt, i loved the NYT piece, because as Jewish humorist myself, I could enjoy the entire pioece in the Times. well done, sir. But the DMN piece was also good, very good, watered down a bit for that goyishe readership, but hey, Matt, this is America, not Brooklyn. Brookly is not America. Just a tiny part of America. So you doth protesteth too much. BOTH PIECES were good. really. I read the DMN piece first, as a test, and i loved it. Nothing was lost in translation. Go back to photography, and don't ever let anyone tell you how to crop a photo. you know best, I am sure. And also, keep writing, because you got the rhythm and you got a good sense of humour, and I am sure the Times will love to get more pieces from you in future. really. you are true humporist. but you doth protesteth too much here. Still, I hear ya, man, i know where you are coming from. But relax, mate, dude, mensch, the second piece was also very well done and it worked. the editors there did a good cut. for their space allocation and their readership. not everything Yiddishkeit translates into Dallasese. This is America, the golden land. SMILE
By the way, young Turk, how did you get the piece into the TImes in the first place. Do you know an editor at the OP ED page? bcause they never never never take pieces without commissining them or assignign them first to a write by email or phone. They never take stories cold. So dish, who was your entreee there......there is a story there! dish.
and yes, this blog made my day too. HUMOUR is good for everyone, and even though you OVERreacted, Matt, even your over reaction, was Talmuddishly fummy. advice to your altergo. Don't try to count how many hairs are on your pupick. Kapeesh!
i say all this with love and humor....keep being the funny guy you are!
danny bloom
Tufts 1971
http://danbloom888.blogspot.com
writing in from ..go figure...Taiwan,,,,,where I have retired from the meshagus of the world....
Matt,
what is your email address? email me at danbloom AT gmail URGENT!
note: at least DALLAS paper gave out your website address. NYTimes did not.
so Dallas wins 1-0....on that one...
both pieces were very good, quit your bellaching, mensch!
SMILE
by the way, Matt, just kidding you above, but how did you get OPED piece in times? they never take cold pieces, they always assign piecves, so who assigned you thqat piece? you have friend at OPED page? tell me the truth. how did you get that in TImes. i have tried for 40 years and never got one piece in....NOT FAIR!
I used to work with Mendelsohn in New York. He was pompous and self-important then, remains so now. I hate people who feel they can't be edited, especially those who aren't writers by trade.
Frame the NY Times piece, Matt. Your ego seems to demand it.
Did we work together at the Busy Bee convenience store in Binghamton during college? Must be. 'Cause I haven't worked in New York otherwise.
I predict bigger things to come for Matt. He is a natural born humorist, and after the Wash Post piece and now this in the NY Times, I can see him getting pubbed in future in New Yorker mag, too, and even an agent will come calling (Me, if i was an agent, but alas I am not, just a PR maven) and put together a humor collection of his pieces.....god knows, i mean, G-d knows, America needs more humor now. How can anyone take Sarah Palin's candidacy seriously? It begs the question. America has gone wacko on her. Good woman, but way out of her league. She can see Russia from Alaska. Even that is not true. Only if you are standing on Little Diomede Island....but not from Wasilla or Juneau....Matt, why a humor piece about Palin, she deserves a humorist's touch!
danny
aka "Leinad Moolb"
Interesting that "An editor" who supposedly worked with you in New York didn't leave a name. What a wuss.
Yes, Matt L., for a person this smart, you would have thought he'd have heard of reverse DNS lookup by now. Call me--matt
Matt,
Great piece in the NYT. As a fellow Plainview JFK grad,I can relate to everything you state. Very funny column. Living in Indianapolis is great, but miss all the distinctively Long Island Jewish references. LIE, mumbling through the haphtora, black and white cookies...oh those were the days. Been following you through your website the last year or so. Great to see your success. As you know, my wife Joanne is photographer, and she often views your website. By the way, saw Mallomars on the shelf this weekend for the first time since last Fall---bought four boxes, and they are almost all gone. Need to stock up for the long winter season. Will try to contact you at some point.
Derek Mandel
JFK Class of 80