Identity Crisis: Am I Funny?

I think I’m a funny guy. No, I take that back. I’m certain I’m a funny guy. I wield my wit as Errol Flynn wields the epee (we’ll talk about my ego later). I'm always reliable for a snappy one-liner or witty retort. Yet the more I consider it, the more I realize that my expertise in all things wiseass is best suited for conversation. I could never be a stand-up comic because I work better when I have somebody to return my volleys. The great tragedy of my give-and-take humor is that it doesn’t translate readily to the page. I start writing and an impenetrable earnestness wraps around me, stifling whatever jovial or light-hearted spirit that initially compelled me to write. It’s as if my subconscious sees humor as a slight on my character.

“Funny people aren’t taken seriously,” the Gravitas Gnome in my head warns. And like the great sage Lindsay Lohan says every time she stumbles out of The Viper Room and pukes in a paparazzo’s lap, “I really want to be taken seriously.”

This inherent weakness revealed itself when a friend passed me a classified ad searching for columnists for a film and television website. Can you say wheelhouse? I revisited some of the columns I’ve composed over the past year to see what I could scrounge up for a potential writing sample. I wanted something brief and glib, something to demonstrate my deft touch with the written word. Instead what I found were dozens of long-winded essays that, while heavy on the insight, lacked a certain flair that made them even slightly readable. I mean how can a review of a film as laughably atrocious as Fantastic Four want of any genuine laughs of its own? That’s not natural.

If only there were a surgical procedure -- a hubrisectomy, if you will -- that could alleviate the gravity with which I conduct my pop culture examinations. They have a pill for everything these days. Why not one that removes the stick from one’s ass? Well, until Merck sees the profitability in curbing pretension, I guess I’ll just have to be satisfied with my conversational dexterity and hope that my drollness eventually seeps into my literary endeavors.