As a prolific, insightful, handsome and modest writer, it saddens me to say that this is perhaps my last humour column. But fear not my little insignificant plebs, I will not leave you alone. Just as Moses descended from the mountain with his two tablets and was told by many where to shove them, my final work will be to teach you to live on by my Code of Humour.
I will teach you the sacred art of humour column writing. Be prepared to be violated.
The first thing you are going to need is a catchy title. I chose “Potent Potables.” You may be asking yourself, “What is the significance of this name, my lord?” And I could sit here on my high throne and tell you some story about how Potent Potables is a term for liquor, and I’ve planned all my humour columns around the idea that you should be able to take my bon mots to parties and your words will intoxicate some to the point that they might consider lowering their standards and sleeping with you. The truth is, though, I saw it in a SNL Jeopardy parody and thought it sounded funny.Which brings us to our second lesson.
Steal everything you can. Writing takes a lot of time and it seems creative ideas are hard to come by. Now stealing is a harsh word – I prefer to call it Thought Communism. Like other great artists of my time (for example Vanilla Ice) I take the thoughts from the creatively rich and dole it out to you, the mentally poor. Even this column is Thought Communism. I saw this how-to idea in a Maclean’s magazine. What can I say? I have parties to go to. And I’m out of Adderall.
Lesson number three: Drink heavily and drink often. I always think I’m funnier when I’m drunk and, honestly, the only time people are going to read this column is when they’re using it as a coaster for their beer. I’m just trying to get inside your sick little heads. Honestly, you’d want some liquid confidence too. Just make sure you edit sober in the morning or else you’ll sowned lik an idoit. After all, it’s a fine line between being a shining wit and whining shit.
The fourth lesson is to procrastinate until the last second. I find this adds pressure and helps the creative juices flow. Look at Socrates. He did some of best work on death row. Deadlines, man.
And the final lesson is: don’t contradict yourself and don’t lose your place.
The fifth and final lesson is avoid social media. If you go through my browse history and count the number of Wikipedia pages I’ve read on Lord of the Rings alone, you could write a fourth book in the trilogy, likely one where Pippin and Merry see a double rainbow, Aragorn rides a nyan cat and there’s some hot Frodo-on-Gollum action. I would read out the long list of Google searches I go through while writing, but I can’t be sure children aren’t reading this. I have dressed up like a goddamn pirate for my Instagram to avoid writing these columns.
Anyway, writing a humour column is not that hard. It just takes some clever thinking, some heavy drinking, selective stealing, lack of feeling and just enough bullshit to pull though. We aren’t all born to be stars, but to quote Shakespeare himself, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others forget how quotes end.”
Cheers.
