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