When a hard-working humorist knuckles down to a grueling session of writing funny stuff, he is frequently confronted with a mortifying emptiness of the brain’s humor center known as “Humor Block.” God only knows how to deal with it—and these are His/Her/Its tips.

I went to my first school dance dressed as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It was spring of 1985 and Amadeus had just won Best Picture.

Try using compound one-word verbs. They prove your point, providing evidence that dependency is not totally wrong and that’s an argument you can’t ignore; two words binding tightly by an unbreakable bond, almost asphyxiating, to make sense. Not even a period in-between. Hyphenation isn’t a problem, as long as they count as one word by all word count applications.

Twelve is a hard age. At twelve you might equally make trouble by stealing a second helping of sugary cereal from the Shabbat morning breakfast buffet or by masturbating in your sleeping bag as your unsuspecting camp counselor leads a guided meditation. Jacob, the worst 12 year old I’ve ever known, showed me this during a three-week session at Camp Watahooga. “Hey bud, it’s not fair if you get more lucky charms when no one else does,” I told Jacob in the morning, and then later, “hey Bud, like we said before, you need to go to the all-gender single-use bathroom if you want to masturbate”–all this in the course of one terribly unrestful shabbat.

It’s a typical Wednesday morning at the office, and I am alternately revising a contract, sending calls from my mother to voicemail, Googling birthday party venues for my six year old, and scanning the latest Trump / border crisis / senseless gun violence related headlines. Looking down at my lap, my once crisply tailored slacks

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