He Ain't Sneezy, He's My Brother
Eric Metaxas
October 1, 1996
Let's get the facts out of the way: Trying to make a living writing humor is an exercise in self-deception on par with toupees and elevator shoes. And don't let this essay fool you. It's just forestalling the inevitable. I envision myself pondering the humor writing successes of Laurence Stern and Steve Martin as I feed copies of Tristram Shandy and Cruel Shoes into the sputtering wood stove for warmth. An orange stack of Wodehouse Penguins cowers nearby.
The trouble is there are just no outlets for literary humor these days. So you can imagine my happiness when the New York Times Sunday Magazine premiered its humorous "Endpaper" column a few years ago-and then decided to publish some of my own humor pieces. Someone pinch me!
Well, someone did, and I'd like to tell you about it. It began when the editor said he'd be calling me up after the fact-checkers had gone over the piece. Fact-checkers? Realize we're talking about a humor piece entitled "Gretel's Skull Discovered!", on the incredible discovery of Gretel's tomb in the Black Forest. (Incidentally, that never happened.) The piece relates other faux archeological discoveries from the realm of fairy tales and folklore: the moldering cottage of the three bears, the skull of the giant in the Jack and the Beanstalk story, and so on-all pretty far-fetched, n'est-ce pas? I wondered what fact-checkers might have to say about the mummified remains of my non-existent braid-wearing heroine.
Actually, the first "factual difficulty" had to do with Hansel. In the piece I had him emigrating to Constantinople where he opened a candy store and was eventually killed by an exploding mortar shell. I was informed that mortar shells weren't around in 1453, before Constantinople fell. True enough. ...
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