Amid all the news of the End Times, you may not have noticed that the New York Times Magazine introduced a new department last Sunday. They are calling it “The Funny Pages.” They are not funny.
The most obvious attempt at what would normally be called humor was Elizabeth Gilbert’s confessional essay on yoga, in which the author describes a yoga class she’d taken while living in Tennessee–the first time, she says, she’d ever lived in “the South.” She is obliged to overcome her yoga purism, which is a backward way of saying she thinks her Southern Belle instructor is an idiot, and this of course is funny in the traditional “Y’all talk funny down here!” line. The juxtaposition might be a humorous one in the hands of an actual humorist, but Gilbert really manages just one laughline, which she isn’t convinced y’all heard the first time, so she repeats it. (“Work them BOOBS off, y’all!” Would have been funnier if she’d said “tits,” but I don’t see the Times, or Elizabeth Gilbert for that matter, going there.) I like Elizabeth Gilbert fine–she’s done some really nice work, particularly when she’s following the wise instinct to write about other people. A few years ago, in speaking about her first book, “Pilgrims,” she told Ploughshares, “I did not want to write a thinly veiled, autobiographical, memoirish book. I wanted to tell stories about other people besides myself, stories about the kind of people I love and feel for in this world.” That is surely an admirable and rare instinct in a writer, and I don’t hold this yoga business against her. It just feels like a piece that had been lined up as a palliative evergreen for the terminally maudlin “Lives” department. I’d be more convinced by a piece from a practicing humorist like, say, Garrison Keillor or even Neal Pollack, or better yet, Jeff Johnson.
A reader starting from the back of “the Funny Pages” will find the first installment in a serialized novella called “Comfort to The Enemy.” Elmore Leonard, of course, is a great, unusual, underrated American writer. (So good, in fact, that he apparently has one of those coveted “no-edit” clauses in his contract with the Times, which led him to give his protagonist an honorary discharge from the Navy, rather than an honorable one; or maybe Carl has gone AWOL unintentially.) It is certainly a good thing to see Leonard writing in the popular press, and it reminds me of Stephen King’s awesome back page in Entertainment Weekly–an example of why great writers can make just about anything fun to read. I have to admit, though, that Leonard’s first chapter was an exhausting strafing of nouns. Also, it was not funny.
What may be the most obvious or literal feint at a “funny page” is Chris Ware’s page, a serialized panel in the stoic but expansive style of Jimmy Corrigan The Smartest Kid on Earth. It’s a nice gesture–and a symbolic one, the Times being probably the Last Major Periodical on Earth to publish serious adult comics. But a funny (weird) thing happens on the way to the printer. Given the otherwise relentlessly humorless context of the Times Magazine, the emotionally masochistic Ware is being positioned as humor– that is, as light, diversionary, experimental material–but this does him a great disservice and plays to the highly irritating, dated, and stereotypical misunderstanding that comics, especially “literary comics” or “graphic features” are necessarily funny, just like children’s books are always supposed to be moral fables, or a crime novel must always be a police procedural.
The funniest thing about the funny pages is probably the appropriation of Gen-X self-consciousness on the cover of the magazine, hawking the new department, which I can’t copy down for you, because I don’t have the thing in front of me at the moment. These antique stylings landed there no doubt at the gentle insistence of “Funny Pages” editor John Hodgman, and could have been lifted from McSweeney’s (a crush that has lately flowered publicly at the Times magazine, a couple years late, as befits the general Male Patttern Baldness of the Times magazine since Adam Moss left for, erm, New York). Editor Gerry Marzorarti may not be the hippest guy, but he eventually comes around to it. (He’s polite, though, and he apparently turns on the listening ears once in a while; Hodgman is a sort of second-string Dave Eggers who has been running the happy “Little Gray Book Lectures” for literary groupies in Brooklyn. Also, he knows how to roll logs for his friend Elizabeth Gilbert. She is not funny. Did we mention that?)
There is the possibility that the new elements are merely misnamed. As the editors themselves make clear, the new pages were inspired by a somewhat historic sense of the phrase “funny pages,” i.e. The American Weekly, a diversionary Sunday supplement slipped into Hearst newspapers during the Gilded Age. These sorts of things were really funny-weird as much as they were funny-ha-ha, but reappropriating that aesthetic to the twenty-first century is a little problematic, and feels more like hedging their bets against the notoriously brutal world in which professional humorists run.
Then too, it may be more an organizational issue than a content issue. If there is one thing that is most striking about the state of the art in American magazines today, it is that they take themselves far too seriously, and they read other magazines much too closely. There is little or no innovation. If the Times got one thing right, it is the impulse to look back through the yellowing stacks of the 20th century, and to see just how much has been lost. When magazines were the mass medium of entertainment, before radio, TV, and film, they were far more entertaining. Today, they either want to change the world or change your buying habits, but they figure you’ll entertain yourself someplace else. The Times magazine, to its credit, I think, has somehow managed to preserve the impulse (and, no doubt, the margins) to innovate and invent, and keep life interesting.
I realize that humor is a hard thing, but what’s wrong with, you know, the more obvious kind of funny-ha-ha humor? I’d guess that if the pages themselves don’t actually get funny before too long, in other words run the risk of being spectacularly unfunny (not precisely the same thing as being humorless) they’ll be dropped like a prom dress.
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