I finally figured out what I miss from the Sunday New York Times.
They used to do this thing in the magazine next to the comics (which, I’m sorry, I try to read each one but have always given up on) called True-Life Tales. It was kind of like Modern Love, in the Sunday Styles section, in that it had a similar brilliance-to-cringe ratio, say, 1:9. But I lived for that 1 in 9 chance. I guess, back in the day, when I read True-Life Tales and Modern Love I had a 2 in 9 chance of satisfaction, which is pretty significant. Every Sunday morning, I’m there with a big mug of coffee, a groggy head, and a couple of kids making a racket in the background - believe me, 2 in 9 looks great.
What I liked about True-Life tales was that it was pretty much as advertised. Normal people suffered the indignities of life and they wrote funny about the experience. I find this genre of writing incredibly comforting, I think because not only do I feel like I go through a lot of indignities but also because now I’m in my 40s I realize I could die any moment. And since death is the ultimate indignity, having a funny story about indignity represents some kind of triumph over mortality. Or at least that’s my explanation for why I like to read about petty humiliations.
The problem is, it’s not so easy to find funny writing. The New Yorker sometimes has funny Shouts and Murmurs. For instance, about five years ago they ran one that was a corporate-style memo announcing family layoffs. Since my husband has a joke he likes to repeat about how he’s doing my year-end performance review, I found this to be hilarious.
After an especially humorless stretch of Sundays, I decided to go back through the New York Times’s archives and see if the pieces I remembered as being so funny were actually any good. And my scientific conclusion? They were. So now I’m wondering, could someone please bring back True-Life Tales? To this day, I laugh whenever I think about the woman and the angry Mailboxes, Etc. guy and I repeat to myself the awesome last line (”Have some damn respect”). Or the one about the guy in France having to wear the Speedo, his principled refusal, his surprising reconciliation with sexy swimwear, and the sweet way he faces the real issue - which is, the memory of going on a beach vacation with his divorced father in the 1970s. Or the one that begins, “I think I may have accidentally ended up in a pornographic film.”
I realize if I’m that obsessed with funny I could be reading The Onion more often, or watching “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo” over and over again. But those are not funny Sunday morning experiences. Sunday morning - when I am thinking ahead to the beginning of the week and to the stuff not done from the previous week, when the house is trashed, when our dog has woken us up to go pee several times during the night, when we are all tired from having stayed up long past good sense the night before - Sunday morning is when I need my good news, my triumph over death, that insane Mailboxes guy and the Speedo and the adult film. So I’m just saying, New York Times, please. I’ve got the humiliation, you bring the funny. Because that stuff is keeping me alive.
