No, You May Not Make Jokes About That!

As the sun was nestling down close to the horizon one Saturday evening in May, I popped a quarter into the newspaper vending machine and grabbed the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.

Impatiently, I dumped the inner feature sections and snapped open the main news section to the last page, greedily scanning the letters to the editor. My intense curiosity was completely self-centered. The week before, the paper had published my humor essay, “Fear of Fat: Don’t Let it Make You Skinny.” It was a breakthrough—my first published humor essay, and my hands shook with excitement when I first saw it. I admit that I instantly fell in love with the sight of the big bold headline and of my first byline in a daily newspaper.

This is how my essay in the “Saturday Story” feature began:

Last Wednesday afternoon at 4:30, I was peacefully braising in the sauna of one of the local health clubs, now as common a fixture on our landscape as the golden arches. I had just toiled through another jazzercize class, led by a willowy, taut, and polished young woman dressed in a slick, expensive exercise outfit. I relaxed on the hot bench, feeling proud of myself for having exercised, trying to calculate how many calories I had burned up so far that day. Suddenly, the only other woman in the sauna—a perfect stranger—sat up and said, Potatoes are fattening, aren’t they?” in a tone suggesting that she had been stricken by some terrible revelation.

Well, there it was in black and white–a letter about my story! As I read it, my eyes bugged out and my jaw dropped open in a socially awkward manner.

The whole piece followed this same line, skewering the self-sabotaging habits of many women (myself included) who did silly things such as order a slab of chocolate fudge cake at a restaurant but shudder in horror at putting real sugar in their coffee. We tortured ourselves at the gym, dreaming the usually impossible dream of being a few dress sizes lower than we were. We were never satisfied with the bodies that worked so hard for us, day in and day out. Decades before the idea of “body positivity” became a “thing,” it was a call for body positivity.

I had noticed that letters to the editor about the “Saturday Story” feature almost always ran the following Saturday. Oh, how I longed to see a letter wildly applauding my essay, begging the editors to hear regularly from this talented Judy Rosenfeld. (You’d think I’d been completely unloved as a child given this out-of-control need for affirmation from complete strangers.)

Well, there it was in black and white–a letter about my story! As I read it, my eyes bugged out and my jaw dropped open in a socially awkward manner.

The letter—which I did not keep—was nothing less than a Jeremiad by a nabob from the American Diabetes Association. This correspondent scorched me for my irresponsible and cavalier attitude toward the nation’s obesity epidemic. What kind of heartless individual could joke about eating comfort foods like pumpkin pie or a Mr. Goodbar when at this very moment, somewhere in the nation a diabetic was having an insulin surge that could land her in the hospital?

I stood there on Main Street in Venice, California, where my date waited for me to stop staring at the newspaper and accompany him into the restaurant a few doors down before we lost our reservation.

“This was satire. Light humor! How could she have missed that?” I asked him when we were seated. It was a rhetorical question of course, but I was still in shock.

“Maybe she’s been sugar-deprived for too long?” he guessed, as we studied the menu at this new and trendy vegetarian eatery.

My date ordered some culinary atrocity involving kelp noodles with “feta.” Maybe it’s just me, but as a general rule I prefer eating foods that don’t require scare quotes.

“Why did they have to publish her stupid letter?” I groused. “Why didn’t they publish a positive letter? Unless. . . what if this was the only letter they got?” As I considered this mortifying possibility, surveying the menu of this obscenely overpriced restaurant did nothing to lift my mood. Lentil Tempeh Piccata. Eww. Stinging Nettle Aglonotti. What in God’s name was that? And sugar was supposed to be the big danger? I finally decided on Wood-Fired Aubergine “Meat” Lasagna, only after confirming that “aubergine” was eggplant. My date ordered some culinary atrocity involving kelp noodles with “feta.” Maybe it’s just me, but as a general rule I prefer eating foods that don’t require scare quotes.

We both agreed that the letter was ridiculous, but I was depressed and must have been lousy company. I knew that my disappointment would fade, and that I shouldn’t let the letter dampen my satisfaction at having sold my first humor essay. After all, newspapers like controversy. This lady gave it to them by punching through a parody with a grim reprimand. Over the next few days I fully recovered. After all, I now had a connection to an editor who liked my style. And that same evening, at the end of the date when I was still hungry after eating my miserly portion of overpriced “meat” lasagna, I ate a generous scoop of chocolate mint ice cream and visualized those feel-good endorphins ricocheting through my brain receptors, providing me with happy new ideas for satire.

Still, I wondered why all my “firsts” in journalism seemed to come packaged with disappointment. I had been deliriously happy two weeks earlier when the editor of the Saturday Story called me at home to say she wanted to buy my column. They pay was only fifty dollars; was that okay? If she only knew that I would have paid her fifty bucks to get that first byline!

A really good personal essay can make a reader think, reflect, perhaps spark tears of poignancy or of laughter. An outstanding personal essay would be remembered for years to come.

The essay had reflected weeks of dedicated effort: writing, rewriting, consulting, and further revising. I was intent on learning to master the personal essay and had enrolled in an extension class at UCLA focused on essays, taught by a successful writer whose work I admired from his column in a writer’s magazine I read religiously.

Good personal essays require different writing and storytelling skills than those required for hard news and features. In a personal essay, a writer needs to tell a story while revealing enough of herself to spark a reader’s empathy, kinship, perhaps a relatable type of memory or vision. If she’s trying to convince the reader of her point of view, she needs to offer compelling evidence without badgering or talking down to the reader. A really good personal essay will engage a reader to think and reflect, perhaps spark tears of poignancy or of laughter. An outstanding personal essay might be remembered for years to come.

My instructor focused a lot on writing strong query letters, which were essential. But it was Marge, an editor of one of the medical magazines at the publishing company where we both worked, whose tutelage added the grace notes that I knew resulted in the eventual sale. I liked and respected Marge very much and when I told her what I was working on she offered to critique it. Marge was in her early sixties and a great editor. Her ready smile and upbeat personality were doubtless essential traits because all day long she wrote about and edited articles about the extremely sobering issues about dialysis and transplantation.

When we sat down to review my piece, I saw that Marge had circled many of my weaker, unimaginative words and phrases in pencil, suggesting better, more sophisticated and vibrant ones. This is how my ho-hum phrase “lying in the sauna” smartened up into the phrase “peacefully braising,” and how my lackadaisical wording, “rail-thin, muscled young woman” was upgraded to “willowy, taut and polished young woman.” I was thrilled with Marge’s initial suggestions and went to town performing further renovations. I probably wouldn’t have sold that first piece if not for her suggestions and guidance.

I was gobsmacked by Perelman. Oh yes, I could learn much from this wickedly talented writer.

“Have you ever read S.J. Perelman?” she asked me during our discussion. I had never heard of him.

“Oh, you must if you want to keep writing humor. His writing is so inventive! You’ll see what I mean when you get one of his books,” she assured me.

Marge did not exaggerate. Here is the opening of Perelman’s short story, The Love Decoy: A story of youth in college today—awake, fearless, unashamed.

“Professor Gompers is ill!” The whisper spread like wildfire through the packed classroom. A feeling of emulsion swept over me. Kindly old Professor Gompers, whose grizzled chin and chiseled grin had made his name a byword at Tunafish College for Women! Ivy Nudnick, sauciest co-ed in the class, she of the unruly locks and the candied gray eye, leaned over to impart the latest gossip.”

I was gobsmacked by Perelman. Oh yes, I could learn much from this wickedly talented writer. His career spanned most of the 20^th century, and he wrote short stories for The New Yorker for several decades, along with books, plays and screenplays. Perelman’s adapted screenplay for the film Around the World in Eighty Days earned an Academy Award in 1956. Never in a million years could I touch his skill level. He was also from my grandparents’ generation, better and more broadly educated than I was, could toss in selective or selectively fudged French words into his stories for fun and profit, and could spin ingeniously hilarious phrases. But I wasn’t trying to imitate anyone, just to become the best writer I could be.

“. . . every so often somebody in the room overhead broke into a waltz clog in a pair of specially built lead shoes.”

Reading Perelman also reassured me that there were “evergreen” topics that would always become grist for the humor mill. Though he wrote in the 1920’s through the early 1970’s, his writing launch pad included such topics as customer complaints, health trends, romances gone wrong, and mishaps during travel. Here’s part of a line from the story, What Am I Doing Away from Home? about the impossibility of getting a good night’s sleep in a busy hotel: “. . . every so often somebody in the room overhead broke into a waltz clog in a pair of specially built lead shoes.”

Selling this first humor story taught me two valuable lessons, including one provided courtesy of the nabob from the American Diabetes Association. In her defense, she may have been born with the genetic abnormality of having no sense of humor, just as some people are born color-blind. This would not have been her fault. She taught me another lesson in “get over yourself.” Not everyone will like my humor. Everyone has their “hot-button” issues that are off-limits for jokes. I’d never please everyone and it was absurd to have ever thought it possible or even desirable.

Marge taught me that I’d need to reach far beyond my regular reading fare to grow as a writer. I’d need to continually expand my vocabulary and knowledge base by reading widely, seeking the greats, admiring different styles and the superior talents and visions of other and more experienced writers. This would be key for me to become the kind of professional I hoped to be one day.

Reading S.J. Perelman made the homework easy.