Are sportswriters funny anymore?

Between layoffs and space issues, few papers have notes columnists anymore and those are the guys who are usually the best at humor.

 

Nobody can be funny all the time, and most shouldn't try to be, but for my money, Mark Whicker's stuff often can make me laugh.

 

The softball is lobbed, and it's over the plate...

 

I have always liked Filip Bondy at the NY Daily News. And Sarah Spain is humorous.

 

Great thread. Lots of good insight. And not just because DD was so flattering.

To echo the replies to the titular question: yes, there's plenty of funny sports writing. The Internet is a obvious enabler/boon. I agree with the notion that this is something of a golden age. I also think that tech has allowed funny writers to more easily play with form and crack on sports in other ways -- with memes, gifs, video, etc.

Gee is absolutely right in saying that funny is hard. It's also risky, in that there's a much greater chance of whiffing. Moreover, even the home runs leave lots of readers unhappy, because humor is so very subjective.

One thing I've noticed is that while most funny writers see the world in a different way, they also just see the world -- that is, they're pretty perceptive and observant. Eyes open. Tend to overthink things. Pick up on patterns. In other words, they're good reporters, if not in the classic sense of the term.

Another thought on funny being hard: it's easy to fall into a rut over time, especially if you've had some success at humorous writing and there's an expectation that you repeat the same trick. That can break two ways: you become stale, a hack, or you become comforting and beloved.

 

Whitley's great.

 

Your sense of humor is about 30 years older than you.

 

I blame ESPN and TV in general. A generation of journos grew up with Stuart Scott or Dan Patrick or Keith Olbermann or Craig Kilborn or Chris Berman on SportsCenter. Everyone's got to have a punchline. We've become so desensitized to it that nothing is funny and everyone seems like a copycat.

I was talking with a high school radio guy that we work with the other day. He said "radio, TV is where it's at. Everyone knows Gus Johnson." I had to chomp on my tongue to tell the kid that he's never going to be Gus Johnson. Try being a professional announcer first, then develop your own style.

I worked at a college station in Indiana in the mid-1990s, when Bob and Tom were drawing humongous ratings in Indianapolis. *Every* DJ show on the station was one or two people trying to be Bob and Tom. None came close.

 

If you have to ask, you already know the answer.

 

This is an interesting thread. Was just talking about this with work the other day. I think we could use more funny in sportswriting—the problem, of course, is that funny is hard. I tried to write a funny column the other day and we ended up killing it because it felt inconsequential and derivative, and because something better came along. But I'd still like to try it sometime. I think the hardest trick is to be both funny and meaningful. That's the golden goose.

 

It's tough to be funny when you're writing for a general audience. Funny requires intelligent, informed readers who grasp subtle sarcasm and parody and know all the inside jokes.

When Spencer Hall is funny, he's simultaneously giving the middle finger to any reader who doesn't know that Will Muschamp is Coach Boom.