Monday, October 26, 2009

Humor and Puns: I Must Have Bad Comma

Every once in a while,  I feel the need to write something that's just purely pun--er, fun.  Recently I had a death in my family.  According to our family tradition, tragedy goes hand in hand with comedy.  When someone close to us dies, we use humor to help us deal with it.

So I thought for a break I'd post this piece that my husband and I worked on together.  Last year, we sent it in to the Reader's Digest black hole that is their submission pool and it got sucked in, never to return.

So here it is, for the enjoyment of writers and editors everywhere.  If you know somebody who would appreciate our rather silly style of humor, send them a link to this page.

Dear Sally,

Honestly, I must have bad comma!  I sent my story to the editor to check. Well! When he was through it felt like my colon had been hit with a semi. He said that on the uppercase, it was a bold story, but on the lowercase, it was too much for him to asterisk. My “quotations” he marked as questionable? Then he punctuated the insult by asking if it was my period. (!!!)

Somehow I kept from hyphenating. As I pounded out his number, I saw that he’d bracketed out “braces”—but that word had never crossed my ellipses! So naturally I called him a virgule back-slasher and said I really resented his parenthetical re-marks, and I simply had to dash.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but you see, italics like it is!” Then he underlined that if I failed to capitalize on his edicts, it would mean a death sentence for our noun-verb agreement.

At that point I had no choice. I issued a complete contraction. Basically, it was a total apostrophe! 


Kisses forever,
Pundalite


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