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The Reader’s Digest? Cool!

Posted on November 21, 2014 by Joe Toplyn

[Possibly NSFW because of the photo of Kim K.]

I had just posted this joke on Twitter:

Kim Kardashian tweet

Kim Kardashian on cover of Paper

 

 

Yes, sometimes I tweet jokes about Kim Kardashian’s butt.

 

 

Which is one reason I was surprised when my friend Phil told me that he’d seen one of my tweets in the Reader’s Digest.

 

 

He mailed me his copy of the Dec 2014/Jan 2015 issue. Here’s my tweet, in the “Laugh Lines” article on page 127:

Joe's Reader's Digest joke

Getting a joke in the Reader’s Digest is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. Yeah, I know most people don’t think of the magazine as cool. But it played an early role in steering me towards a career as a professional writer.

 

Reader's Digest cover

 

As a preteen I read my mother’s Reader’s Digests cover to cover. Each one was a tasting menu of attention-grabbing and invitingly short features.

 

The true stories expanded my horizons and sparked my imagination. The how-to articles fed my curiosity about how the real world operates.

 

 

 

Joe's sixth-grade report cardBut I especially gravitated toward the jokes, like the ones in “Humor in Uniform” and “Laughter is the Best Medicine.” I must have started cracking more jokes myself because on one sixth-grade report card my mark in Conduct slipped from its usual A to a B-minus.

The Reader’s Digest was turning me into a class clown.

Richard Speck

The magazine also played a role in my getting onto the Harvard Lampoon, my first step on the road to professional comedy.

One of the writing samples I submitted was a parody of a Reader’s Digest cover. A fake inspirational article was entitled, “Betty: The Nurse Who Wouldn’t Die, by Richard Speck.”

[Only six years earlier Speck had murdered eight student nurses, so my joke was a real test of the well-known formula “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.”]

 

 

David Letterman's Reader's Digest jokeA decade later I was crafting jokes for David Letterman, who appears in that same “Laugh Lines” article with me.

And now my comedy has come full circle, back to the cradle where it was nurtured, the Reader’s Digest. And that’s pretty cool.

 

Reader's Digest Laugh Lines

 

Plus the magazine paid me $25 for that Twitter joke.  So, sucker for positive reinforcement that I am, I decided to write another one for them.

Why did the Reader’s Digest pick up my first joke?

In my book, Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV, I talk about how important it is to capture the “voice” of the host. I’ve written for hosts from Dave Letterman to Caroline Rhea to Jay Leno. Now apparently I had captured the voice of the Reader’s Digest—homespun, good-natured, Middle American.

 

Can I do it again? Here’s my new joke:

Joe "Cake Boss" joke

Buy that joke, Reader’s Digest, and I’ll subscribe. That would be the least I could do for the magazine that gave birth to it.

 

Posted in Late-Night Writing | Tags: Cake Boss, comedy writing, Harvard Lampoon, Kim Kardashian, Reader's Digest, Richard Speck | 4 Comments
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4 thoughts on “The Reader’s Digest? Cool!”

  1. Salaam says:
    December 19, 2014 at 8:50 pm

    Big tip of the hat to you. RD is still quality in my head. I, too, grew up on the jokes scattered throughout the issues. My grandad instilled a value in me for clean humor via RD. My dad and I are vying to get a joke printed in RD. I hope all is well. Congrats!

    • Joe Toplyn says:
      December 20, 2014 at 12:03 pm

      Thanks for your comment. You’re right…clean humor is the best. Everybody can enjoy it. And because it doesn’t rely on blue material for easy laughs it forces you to be a smarter comedy writer. Good luck getting your own joke published in RD!

  2. Terry J. Erdmann says:
    November 22, 2014 at 12:20 pm

    Very, cool, Joe. Yeah, The Readers Digest is the only subscription of any kind that my parents ever had, and they kept it for decades. Nice treat for you.

    • Joe Toplyn says:
      November 23, 2014 at 11:51 am

      Yes, my mom subscribed for years, too, so getting my joke in the magazine really resonated for me.

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