Monkeys, Knuckleheads & Inverted Pyramids
My crowning achievement in journalism
Some knucklehead of a city editor once suggested I write a column for The Monterey County Herald. I suspect he thought a column might finally shut me up.
I admit to being a disruptive influence in the Herald’s newsroom, the sort of problem employee who pissed and moaned incessantly about the dummies who ran the joint. In my view, the publisher was a low-functioning moron and the managing editor was a weak-kneed milquetoast who had no business calling himself a journalist. In that regard I was not unlike any other sniveling reporter who ever worked in any newsroom anywhere.
My knucklehead city editor apparently grew impatient with the volumes of interoffice memorandums I sent to him complaining about the moron publisher. My complaints were based on a string of management decisions that were plunging The Herald into a spiral of irrelevance.
I wasn’t wrong, of course, but I was sort of a dick about it and the knucklehead city editor soon wearied of my grumbling. So he did what any great editor would do. He gave me a weekly column. He told me he didn’t care what I wrote about, but he had one request: “Just make it funny,” he said.
The trouble was, I didn’t know how to write funny. I was never trained that way. I was trained in journalism school to write in inverted pyramids, which really doesn’t lend itself to funny business. Think about it; how many funny stories have you ever read about inverted pyramids?
I thought long and hard about my dilemma. How would I write columns funny enough to satisfy the knucklehead without proper training? I read joke books and comic books. I watched George Carlin’s YouTube videos and old Get Smart clips. But I drew blanks when I tried to write funny.
And then I remembered that monkeys, apes and primates are always funny. I can never see a monkey without laughing out loud, especially if the monkey is wearing a tuxedo or riding a racehorse like a professional jockey.
I mean, have you seen the meme depicting a monkey banging on a typewriter? If you can’t laugh at a typing monkey, I don’t even want to know you.
Monkeys were the answer to my problem. And so I resolved to interject at least one monkey reference into every column I wrote.
My weekly columns weren’t actually about monkeys, per se. That would be too obvious. My goal was to get myself into a monkey frame of mind by sneaking primate prose wherever possible. Monkeys were my column’s Easter eggs. I even once managed to introduce a Micky Dolenz reference into one of my monkey columns.
I thought I was clever, sort of like how blithering idiots think they’re smart.
My monkey column wasn’t exactly hard-hitting journalism. But it kept me entertained and, more important, I stopped sending angry memos to the knucklehead city editor.
The knucklehead might have been happy, but apparently the milquetoast managing editor was not, and so he called me into his office. Milquetoast was not the sort of guy I really cared to know, much less work for. You know the type. No one ever willingly popped into his office to say howdy, and he only invited employees in when he needed to issue stern reprimands. And he wasn’t very good at it.
So there I was, sitting in his office and listening to him hem and haw like a milquetoast before he got around to telling me that the monkey columns were an atrocity. He hated the damn things. He told me that a serious newspaper like The Herald should never lower itself to monkey humor. Then he got to the point:
"Lose the f'ing monkeys," he demanded.
A couple of months later my favorite monkey columns won a runner-up prize in a national monkey column contest. It wasn’t even first place. Second place. But it was good enough to make me think I’d proven something important.
Better yet, I convinced the managing editor to send me to Louisville, Kentucky, so I could pick up my prize. While there I was able to tour the Louisville Slugger factory, so it wasn’t a wasted trip.
My column was the crowning achievement of my journalism career. And I owe it all to those f’ing monkeys.