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| "AMERICA'S FUNNIEST HUMOR"TM
SHOWCASE
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August /
September 2006 Contest Results |
Grating
Cards
By Joel Schwartzberg,
New Jersey
June and July
are big celebration months for me. In addition to Father’s Day, the birthdays of all thee of my children and my mother’s
and father’s birthdays all fall in the twin J’s as well.
Not all of
these events require gifts (not since the Great Schwartzberg Family
Gift-Giving Compromise of 2003), but they all require cards. At about
$3.50 a card, that’s nearly 25 bucks spent to have complete strangers
talk intimately to my close family on my behalf, roughly equivalent to
eight movie rentals, 12 ice cream cones, or half a New York City
haircut.
The price would be okay if the people who wrote and approved American
greeting cards spent a little time here on Planet Earth. But can you
remember the last time you picked out a card and thought: “Gosh, this
expresses my feelings perfectly!” More likely, you scanned a bunch of
cards, put most back, and reluctantly settled on the one with the fewest
words and the most innocuous picture. You’re not alone. Most people
enter card stores hopeful, but leave disappointed. Kind of like Giants
Stadium.
When I graduated from high school, my classmates and I paid to have
little cards made with our names elegantly printed on them. We exchanged
these with each other and coveted them like they were pieces of
ourselves. A few years later I came across my accumulated cards, all
with the same flowery font, the same embossed border, the same soft
white background, and thought, “what was the point in that?” Even the
plumber’s card has his fax number.
Store-bought greeting cards are no
different, really. Sure, we add a personalized TO YOU at the top and a
LOVE, ME at the bottom, but really it’s just a generic, overpriced piece
of colorful cardstock with insipid verse and the kind of art you
associate with very cheap motels.
Birthday cards are probably the most popular of all greeting cards, but
why do so many of them treat aging past 40 as something that deserves
cruel and often sadistic ridicule? If it’s not acceptable to tell your
grandfather he’s becoming a fossil to his face, why is it any more
acceptable to say it in a card? Nonetheless, card companies insist on
creating cards that basically say, ""I’m sure glad I’m not as old as you
are!"" Nice.
Oddly, the funniest event cards I’ve seen are the ones you buy on behalf
of your pets. What makes it odd is that, as far as I can tell, pets
don’t possess a sense of humor, much less an event calendar. No one
really needs or expects a card from their pet. Card companies are just
leveraging the unconditional love you have for them to take another
$3.50 from you. But do your poor, slobbering, incontinent pets ever see
a dime of that money? Nope.
Sympathy cards frustrate me even more. They expound ad nauseum on themes
of life and loss in a way that make Chinese fortune cookies read like
Shakespeare. And why do so many sympathy cards rhyme? A sad person needs
a rhyming sympathy card like a happy person needs a kick in the shins.
Forget the rhymes and the egregious calligraphy; I suggest sympathy
cards just catch up with the times: how about ""So Sorry To Hear You
Were Job-Eliminated"", ""Condolences on Your Bankruptcy” or ""Sorry
About Your Recent Indictment""?
Sometimes you’ll see a perfectly good card on the outside. You think to
yourself, ""there could be nothing but white space on the inside and I’d
still get it. What could ruin it?"" Then you open it and find something
so crude, dumb, or ridiculous that you have to put it back immediately.
But you can’t find the exact spot from which you plucked it, so you
nervously place it in front of a Garfield card and quickly leave the
store. It’s okay, no one buys Garfield cards.
I think we should resist bad cards altogether. Start making your own.
What does it take, really? A piece of paper, a pen, and the rare ability
to fold things in half. Just write what you feel, whether it’s one word
or one hundred. The result is something relatively free to you but
probably invaluable to the receiving party.
When you’re done, take the $3.50 you saved and buy some ice-cream for
both you and your recipient. Lick for lick, ice cream tastes way better
than envelope glue.
www.jesttokill.com
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