I've noted about professional humor writers how hard it is for them to be consistently funny:
Even a great humor writer, like Dave Barry, is funny about 30% of the time. As in baseball, batting .300 in humor is the sign of a star. Gene Weingarten, on the other hand, is sometimes funny, but he seems to me to hover well below the Mendoza Line.)Weingarten, whose writing appears in the Post's Sunday Magazine, adds in the "annoying jerk" factor. Even when he's funny, it's often despite the fact that he's an annoying jerk -- possibly because he is.
Fortunately for all of us, we now know why his batting average is so low: "Washington has the worst sense of humor of any big city that is not either located in Germany or currently under military siege." He was talking about Arlen Specter doing stand-up comedy, by the way, but still.
Mario Mendoza has nothing to worry about.
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