Language and Humor Blog

It’s time for the results of San Jose State University English Department’s annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (sjsu.edu/depts/english/2007.htm). [EDIT (6/6/10): dead link] According to the official site, the contest is

a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.

The authors have fun with the good bad-writing. I especially liked the delightful audacity of

• the Children’s Literature winner, Dave McKenzie (“Danny, the little Grizzly cub . . .”), and
• the Romance dishonorable mention, Linda Morgan (“Ruthanne felt as though she was frozen in time . . .”).

Sadly, the English Department missed a simple fact of math when they said:

2007 is the silver anniversary of the Contest that began at San Jose State University in 1982, making Jim Gleeson the 25th grand prize winner.

It is the 25th, silver, anniversary (Current year – First year), but they presumably awarded a prize the first year, making 2007′s Jim Gleeson the 26th grand prize winner (Current year – First year + 1).

See also my post:
2006 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winners

MySpace is celebrating the first anniversary of its comedians’ section and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Just for Laughs/Juste pour Rire Montreal comedy festival (July 12-22, 2007) by showing live video from the festival.

MySpace already has short clips from past festivals on the Just for Laughs MySpace page (no big laughs, but I liked Dane Cook’s and Ray Romano’s clips).

Just for Laughs official site

Juste pour Rire site officiel

The New Yorker magazine is known for its cartoons (site) as much as for its articles. You can join the party by submitting a caption for other cartoons in their contest.

If you’re a U.S. resident, 18 years old or older, you can enter and possibly win a print of the cartoon with your caption and the artist’s signature. Before that, the three finalists (with names, cities, and states) will have their captions published in the magazine in order to be voted on.

Official Rules

As for the regular cartoons, Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker, said in a November 2006 interview, that he’s looking for a variety of humor: gags, ridicule, incongruity, “Theory of Mind” (showing a character’s perspective), “ludic” (playful silliness, which can be somewhat subversive presumably in the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Monty Python tradition), and so forth.

More generally, Mankoff said in a 2004 Q&A that he wants cartoons that are “funny and communicate some idea about our culture.”

See also:

• Book collections and more of New Yorker cartoons
• 2004 radio interview with Robert Mankoff