Aiming for the Heart

La Rochefoucauld defined an author's wit as hinging on his delicacy of expression. I would like to support this with some of my own thoughts on the subject. Firstly, I am hurt by intellectual property lawyers who asked me if the ones who plagiarized my content had merely parodied me. If these offenders had merely parodied me, they would have used their own words to do it. They did not use their own words to broadcast my work, they used my words to broadcast my work. And they used my words to broadcast my work because they lack the delicacy of an effective comedy writer. I wonder who paid these I.P. lawyers to hurt me like that. As I have already said, I approach the authoring of a comedy script much as I would the creation of a JavaScript program. In computer programming language must be extremely precise. If even one character is out of place, the program fails to work. In a comedy script the same care must be exercised to prevent language from stepping on its humor. A good example is my Shirley Sureloins script. Its ribaldry could either charm or repulse, depending on the delicacy of its language. If the ham-handed Jay Leno, for instance, had tried to author such a script from scratch, he probably would have opened with a line like She's a shoplifter who shoves things in her pussy! Ha! Ha! Ha! Is that funny? Of course not, it's crass. Instead I wrote She's a shoplifter with a diabolical command of illusion.. And the TV plagiarized what I wrote because their writers lack the refinement to write it as well for themselves. But they certainly don't lack the money to interfere with their victim's justice, as this discouraging uncertainty about parodying from two different IP lawyers indicates. Nor do they lack the funds to put themselves on top of the newspaper's 'world's funniest people' list - a hundred and fifty million dollars - as Leno managed to do in 2009 at the peak of his success with my words. Boorish broadcasters and asinine advertisers have been making life miserable for talent for a long time. The late John Candy cancelled his appearance as the host of an awards show because of the witlessness of the advertisers of the event, who thought they were winning laughs by making fun of his weight in a magazine ad. On the contrary, they offended the star and repulsed a lot of readers. Candy explained that they should have let him write the ad if they wanted to joke about his weight because he would have done a good job. But advertisers and broadcasters think they can easily be as funny as John Candy. And this attitude seems to find its way down to consumers of commercial broadcasting, such as those who thought it was funny to take my name and turn it into an incoherent load of idiotic gibberish. They even needed to add an extra syllable to accomplish this poor joke. (Why stop there? Why not make your own paragraph out of it?) They'd think it was hilarious to point to the name Bathurst at the Toronto subway station and share out loud, 'I need to take a bath here because I'm thirsty! Ha! Ha! Ha!' Would you? A certain amount of intellectual refinement may help with comedy writing, but the effort of choosing words precisely and steering clear of crassness actually aims more for the heart than the head. Poor comedy usually offends because of a dismissal of the feelings of others more than from any intellectual deficit. I saw Michael Richards yelling the 'n' word at the top of his lungs at that comedy show. Poor Seinfeld, having to be associated with a senseless brute like that. I thought Seinfeld was pretty good - though I disliked that slappy bass sound he used to join his segments. Why did so many TV shows depend on my comedy alone? Why aren't there more good comedy writers working in the industry? I believe that the best comedy writers get jobs in other fields without ever discovering their talent. They work as architects or anthropologists or computer programmers or some such profession and disdain the shallow world of stars and broadcasters. I only discovered my talent by accident, as a consequence of being unemployed for long periods and needing to stay active. Even so, my 2004 writings show that I had a long way to go before I could produce good work consistently. They embarrass me somewhat now, but I must include them in this account to undo the fraud that was committed with them by unscrupulous TV shows since I first shared them online. Since it took me a few thousands of pages of effort to arrive at my current level of literary accomplishment, I am offended by so many novice authors who believe they can outmatch me on their first or second attempt. Sheer brutality might give you an edge in the competition for a good job, but delicacy will always outmatch it in the competition for good taste. In this evil age of the image our language skills seem to decline more and more. And while broadcasters favor the image to communicate their message, God chose instead the Word to share His.
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