Alright, let me try this, then;Susan Arendt said:
How about instead of blatantly giving us the punchline, why not let it stew a bit, give us a little bit more time to appreciate the material, what the joke involves, what the joke required as setup, as opposed to just rushing straight towards it like a hormone-engorged teen? Maybe it's a late night thing, maybe it's a quick throw-together, I don't know, but it feels rushed, and that's killing part of it. Let us immerse ourselves into the content of the joke, enjoying the subtle and the obvious, but, most importatly, enjoying the lead up. The punchline is delivered almost as soon as the opening thought has jumped over the gums and into the ears (or from text to eyes, as the case may be), and that's not enough to really lay it up. Subtle humor is one thing, and blatant is another, but worked with timing they mesh together for a stacked effect--a well placed balls joke can easily fit amongst a complicated pun about new marketing strategies that completely missed their intended audience, but when the line is done by quickly tripping over your entire material, you short-come yourself.
But, when the delivery is right, which it occasionally is, it tends to ruin itself by being more of a personal attack against something personal to the writer than by being a generalization that applies to all of its audience. Personal humor is fine, but only for those that know the individual (and in cases like this where the most we get to know of the person is what he writes for us to read, and little more than that) and in this form, that kind of humor just gets in the way. But, beyond that, the personal humor is a bit too personal, with jokes that the author might chuckle at (and this mainly seems to be the undercurrent of hyper-patriotic-anti-anything-foreign that shows up repeatedly, and often without any cause), but that kind of presentation just make things akward when delivered wrong (like being casually thrown into a serious bit).
Actually, I'll elaborate a bit, for constructive reasons, on that bit; off hand racial or foreign jokes are alright as long as we know you're being ironic about it, but when you flick back and forth between straightface irony and truthful irony, it starts to feel like the offhand jokes aren't as ironic as we might like them to be, which just makes them come off not as sarcastic humor but as grumpy and suppressed intolerance. Yes, you can play either, but you have to stick to it--going back and forth like and ADHD kid stuck between two shiny nickels on opposite sides of the room only begets confusion. Not every line needs to be humorous, and not all kinds of humor need to be pushed in just to pack in more. Take a little time, let the jokes that work with it do what they do to enhance the article, instead of dragging it down and leading to dissatisfaction.
