This week: Working Hard Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Reality is easy. It's deception that's the hard work.
—Lauryn Hill
Sometimes hard work doesn't pay off.
—Jimmy Walker
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'
—Don Marquis |
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Comedy is hard work.
It may not seem like it, but all that snappy dialogue in movies and on TV? That stuff was brainstormed, pipelined, focus-grouped, revised, edited, condensed, and revised again. And don't even think about doing standup comedy without massive preparations. All of this hard work leads toward the goal of making it look easy, like the way a dancer pastes a fake smile on her face to cover up just how difficult that pirouine, or whatever, is.
We'd all—well, mostly me—like to think we'll always be ready with the perfect comeback, just like our comedy heroes. In the moment, though, one of three things will happen:
1) We end up quoting someone else's material, which was subject to the aforementioned hard work, just not by us;
2) We say "your mama," which, in our defense, is never not funny; or
3) We wake up at 3am a week later, the perfect retort having sprung, Athena-like, from our sleeping minds.
I was reminded of this the other day when I saw an article about a guy working for a week to polish what was a brief, almost throwaway, but intensely funny joke on Saturday Night Live, back in its early days. So, there it is, proof that hard work pays off.
...or is it? I remember those early Saturday Night Live shows. Not the details, of course; that was nearly 50 years ago. Some bits were funny, sure, and endure to this day and probably far into the future (assuming we have one). But most of them are forgotten, because, despite all the massive effort that went into them, they just weren't funny.
People love to talk about how wonderful hard work is, how it always leads to success, blah blah, whatever. Most of this is propaganda designed to make you feel better about working your ass off to make someone else rich. Usually someone whose definition of "hard work" involves finding people to do the work for them while they're playing Solitaire. But think about this: if hard work necessarily led to success, sharecroppers would be billionaires.
No, I find the opposite is true: hard work is just... work. Better to be lucky and have one or two moments of easy greatness that you can savor. More often than not, "hard work" is just time-filling labor with no real reward. As the saying goes (I stole this): Hard work may pay off someday, but laziness pays off now.
I bet you're wondering what that joke was on the early SNL was, the one I mentioned above that took a week to write. I present it to you now, with the only work I've put into it being a quick Google search:
(delivered by Chevy Chase in Weekend Update, October 11, 1975) The Post Office announced today that it is going to issue a stamp commemorating prostitution in the United States. It’s a ten-cent stamp, but if you want to lick it, it’s a quarter. |
Some picks from various corners of Writing.com:
And if you're looking for something to do in October, signups are ongoing and we're seeking judges for:
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Last time, in "Brevity" , I discussed, at length, brevity.
My hard work on the editorial was completely wasted, as no one commented on it.
So that's it for me for September! See you next month. Until then,
LAUGH ON!!!
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Comedy: September 13, 2023 Issue [#12169]
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