Close to Ten Tips on Writing a Funny Blog Post

As you know, my Meme-Wraith, Grundir the Implacable, generally dispatches all troublesome rodents and memes that attempt to violate the sanctity of Chez* Diesel. Today, however, Grundir humbly approached me cradling a delicate young meme bearing an insignia resembling a giant malformed spermatozoan.

“Cast it into the Crack of Mount Doom, you fool!” I howled at my Nazgul minion. Then I burst into a fit of giggles, because I can’t say “Crack of Mount Doom” without laughing. Grundir tolerates this with admirable aplomb. Being dead for 900 years gives you a certain amount of patience.

“It’s bears the ominous mark of Brent Diggs, m’lord,” rasped Grundir.

“Ah yes,” I said. “The universally recognized Giant Malformed Spermatazoan of Brent Diggs!”

“I believe it is a comma, sir. An Ominous Comma.”

“I know what a comma looks like!” I snapped. “Why, my gentle wraith, surely you’re aware of my affinity for the comma, the most sublime of punctuation marks, the enabler of superfluous modifiers, the – ”

“Indeed, m'lord. Shall I bury this meme in the orchard with the ditch digger?”

“It’s called a shovel, worm-brain.”

“No, m’lord, I mean…”

“Silence, fool! I must maintain plausible deniability. No, my rotted friend, I shall answer this meme. Read it to me, please. My eyes fail me in this light.”

“As I’ve tried to tell you, m’lord, your perpetually tinted glasses –”

“I’ll perpetually tint you if you don’t start reading, Stiffy.”

“It reads, ‘In my brief foray onto the internet I have –’”

“Good lord, how long is this thing? Cut to the part with Liv Tyler already!”

“He wants you to write something funny and yet educational. To impart some of your wisdom about blogging to the masses, if you will.”

“Brilliant! I shall give the masses Ten Tips on Writing a Funny Blog Post.”

“Excellent, m’lord.”

“Tip number one: Self-reference is always funny.”

“I’m sorry, m'lord. Would you care to elaborate?”

“Yes, take this down: ‘As you know, my Meme-Wraith, Grundir the Implacable, generally dispatches all troublesome rodents and…’ Wait, how many commas is that?”

“Three, m’lord.”

“Ok, good enough. Point number two: Don’t belabor a joke. Stop right before the reader understands what you’re doing. Good readers like to think a little. And bad readers, well, f—k ‘em. Except don’t write ‘f—k.’ Put dashes in the middle or something.”

“Very good, m’lord. What else?”

“Point four: Writing a post in dialog form automatically makes it 43.7% funnier. Oh, and point five: Needless, unjustifiable precision is also funny.
“Point six. Wait, I’m not sure about point three. Strike that one for now. Remind me to come back to it later.”

“As you wish, m’lord.”

"Where was I?"

"Point six."

"Right, point six. Sprinkle your post with obscure pop culture references. They'll go over the heads of a lot of your readers, but the real Ainur will eat it up. Point seven. Make fun of yourself, but don’t be too obvious about it. Make yourself out to be a huge ass, even if you’re really a nice guy. Of course, it works better if you really are a huge ass, like me. Am I talking too fast for you, Casper?”

“No, m’lord.”

“Point eight: Give yourself a straight man. Somebody the readers can identify with. But somebody who doesn’t seem very relatable at first glance. Toy with the readers’ expectations a bit.”

“Very good, m’lord. I never could have devised such a brilliant notion.”

“Of course not. You’re a 900 year old medieval jerkwad who sold his soul for something shiny. And finally, point nine: Always leave the reader wanting more. Now slap the Mattress Police seal on that baby and send it back to Diggs. We’ll show him what a real blogging insignia looks like. No sperm for us!”

“Of course not, m’lord.”

“On second thought, throw a little sperm on that baby. Can’t hurt.

“Yes, m’lord.”


For this non-meme, I anoint the following individuals:
1. Dave Barry
2. Sinister Dan
3. Scott Adams
4. Ecstatic Wavelength Lady
5. David Sedaris
6. Sue Piltdown
7. Bill Watterson
8. Leigh (on the condition that she does not offer any boob-related advice or pictures)
9. Voltaire
10. Jocelyn Hergenfliffer

*Pronounced "CHEEZ"

If you enjoyed this post, may I also recommend: Tremble Before the Meme Wraith! | Can You Dig It? | Tremble Before My Shovel! Looking for a funny blog?

A Bunch of Weird Things About Me

So I had this great idea for a post about how Spider-Man is the Antichrist, but I couldn't come up with any evidence except this:



Which is probably enough for these guys, but I was hoping to find something a little more damning. But let's face it, Spider-Man is just a pretty decent guy.

And then I had this idea for an offshoot of the scrapbooking line Creative Memories called "Painful Memories." There would be themes like "Nobody Understands Me", "Alone Again", and "Don't Take Pictures of Daddy When He's Drinking." I was going to come up with all kinds of depressing backgrounds with barbed wire, broken glass, Edward Gorey prints, etc. But after working on it for an hour, I realized that it was more depressing than funny. Between that, watching 2 hours of Battlestar Galactica and reading three chapters of Fast Food Nation, I had some pretty interesting nightmares that night. So I had to scrap the that idea as well.

Since I'm running short on material, I'm going to post Six Weird Things About Me, despite the fact that no one has tagged me (probably because the last person who tagged me found out I'm not so good at following rules). Speaking of not being able to follow rules, unlike some people whose idea of something weird is "I don't like vegetables," there are so many weird things about me that I found it impossible to limit the list to six.

So without further ado I present A Bunch of Weird Things About Me. You may suspect, after reading some of these, that I have a mild form of Asperger's Syndrome. You may be right.

• By coincidence, I live next door to a guy I went to high school with. Which wouldn't be weird, except that I live in California and went to high school in Michigan.
• I've always been bad at managing finances. I've never balanced a checkbook in my life. I'm also my church's treasurer.
• Both of my parents were English professors. My B.A. is in philosophy. Currently I'm pursuing a master's degree in the humanities. And I've never voted for a Democrat.
  
• When I feel lonely, I get a physical pain in my right hand (insert onanism joke here).
  
• Despite disliking math, never having taken a computer programming class, and majoring in philosophy, I spent the last 8 years as a computer programmer.
• I have a serious aversion to cheap velvet. Real, nice, velvet is ok, but that cheap velour/velveteen/whatever stuff totally gives me the creeps. I can hardly even write about it, it creeps me out so bad.
• I saw a UFO when I was 9. It looked like a profile view of the planet Saturn, but it was glowing orange and moving randomly about the sky. Eventually I got bored with it and went inside.
• I have a habit of calling my wife and children by whatever nickname pops into my head. Bubbles, Giggles, Goober, Bobo, Wuzzles, whatever. Anything except their actual name or something normal, like "honey."
• I got a perfect score on the verbal section of the GRE.
  
• I love imagining things twirling around, like a rock on a piece of string. I like the idea of centrifugal motion.
  
• I often experience sleep paralysis. Sometime I mostly wake up but am unable to move or even open my eyes. With great effort I can manage to move my head and eventually get my eyes open. It's generally pretty terrifying.
  
• I have a recurring nightmare that there was an error with my high school transcript so I have to go back to take one more class. I've had it so many times that at least once I've explained to the principal in the dream, "You don't understand. This is just like a dream that I keep having."
  
• I obsessively count in my head to time myself when I'm feeling impatient with a routine task, like walking to my car or washing my hands.
• I'm ridiculously healthy. I've had fewer than one cold per year for the last five years.
  
• There are certain phrases that I automatically use as a sort of mantra to distract myself whenever my mind drifts to an unpleasant or embarrassing memory. I seem to use the same phrase for several years in a row. Currently the phrase is "Let's say I've got fifty grand and I drop twenty."
• I find it very difficult to work without music playing. I generally listen to music all day every day.
  
• I dislike what I call "purposeless" physical contact. Hugs, kisses, and handshakes are fine, but I have a hard time sitting right next to someone on a couch. I absolutely cannot "spoon." Well, I could, but I'd be awake all night.
  
• I can hold my breath for 4 minutes.
• At 6' 2", I'm the shortest of my parents' three children. None of us can play basketball worth a darn.
• I wear size 13 shoes.
• I have a hard time focusing on what someone is saying for more than about 12 seconds. My mind automatically starts thinking about something else when someone talks. Despite this, I can generally remember the main points of a sermon or lecture better than most people. I just can't remember details, like when I'm supposed to take the roast out of the freezer.
  
• I can draw superheroes really well. Unfortunately, that's about all I can draw.
• I can do impressions of Kermit the Frog, Ernie from Sesame Street, and Sean Connery.
  
• My first, middle and last names each have six letters. 6-6-6, just like Ronald Wilson Reagan.
• I believe that there are very few foods that can't be improved by adding either raisins or bacon. I add raisins to my ham and cheese sandwiches.
• I've never left North America.
• Despite being known for my sense of humor and inability to take anything seriously, I've suffered from fairly severe depression since about the fifth grade. I'm fine now; I'm on medication. Thanks for asking.
• I have a very low threshold for breaking into tears. This trait is exaggerated by my depression, but it seems to be a separate physiological phenomena. I've never known another man who cries as easily as I do. It's kind of a pain in the ass, to tell you the truth.
• I seem to trigger false alarms with those theft-protection devices at stores at an unusually high rate. It's gotten to the point where I walk in a store, the alarm goes off, and I state loudly, "It's just me!" It could be my cell phone or something, but my wife has the same phone and it doesn't seem to happen to her.

Weird enough for you?

Mattress Tags: Six Weird Things

Or Maybe "I See a Red Door and I Want It Painted Black"

I've been tagged with a Christmas meme by Poppy of Opiate of the Masses. I'm supposed to list what I got for Christmas, or didn't get, or wanted to get, or something. I'm not so good with following rules. It doesn't look like Poppy followed them precisely either, nor did the person who tagged her. So I'm figuring that by this point this meme is probably like one of those games of telephone where the first person says "There's another city under attack" and the last person hears "Things are going swimmingly in Iraq."

Anyway, here's a list of things I got for Christmas. I may have embellished a few of them. If you feel like playing, consider yourself tagged.

• My daughter Maddie gave me a grocery bag full of all of the vegetables she hadn't eaten over the previous year. It smelled like cabbage and sneakers.
• My mentally challenged brother Phil gave me a comic book that he made by cutting pictures of people out of Sports Illustrated, Fangoria and Martha Stewart Living magazines and pasting speech bubbles over their heads. The story is about a team of superheroes led by Joe Montana who defeat an army of Uruk-Hai and zombies led by Martha Stewart. In the climax, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods meet their match in the form of a giant robot made of pine cones and taffeta.
• My neighbor Billy gave me a "time machine" comprised of a refrigerator box with a bottle of Jim Beam inside.
• My mother-in-law, mindful of my high blood pressure and a family tree regularly pruned by strokes and massive heart attacks, gave me a deep fryer and fifty pounds of bacon-wrapped twinkies.
• My wife promised to stop having "feminine troubles" for a year.
• My freshman year college roommate Scott sent me the wad of hair he fished out of our dorm room shower at the end of the 1988-89 school year with a note that said, "I think I'm finally at a point emotionally where I don't need this any more."
• Marilu Henner dropped the restraining order.
• My cheap great-uncle Walt gave me an LED watch. He said he thought it might be broken, but I told him that was ok, because I didn't really care what time it was in 1984 anyway.
• My friend Joe gave me Season One of Friends on DVD, which is great, because I've almost stopped seeing the reruns on my eyelids.
• Uncle Karl stopped by and finally gave my nose back. He tried telling me that it was all a "trick", but I beat him with a tire iron until he fessed up and gave it back. Then I took his.