Our mix of news and features, I felt, needed a dose of local humor — a poke at how serious we take ourselves in the town sometimes. And I didn’t want to hear yet one more time, “Cartoons in the Town Crier are never funny.”
I wanted something people would say was funny, an idea poking fun at life in Idyllwild and relevant to our uniqueness. I felt I had found it when I read through some of his submissions. Dr KIA’s author submitted the idea at just the time I pondered a need for more humor. It’s not a cartoon but I tried it out.
Alas, the column is getting mixed reviews from readers. You either love it or you hate it.
People stop me to rave about it and repeat their favorites. And people want to hang me because they say it’s juvenile or it teaches kids bad things or it attacks tourists, even though the author owns a business that caters to visitors.
“In the process of looking for comedy, you have to be deeply honest. And in doing that, you’ll find out here’s the other side. You’ll be looking under the rock occasionally for the laughter,” Robin Williams once said.
OK, I get it. It’s not your sense of humor. Are all TC readers required to possess the same sense of humor? No. In fact, I imagine some readers don’t possess a sense of humor at all.
But to soften the blow to those of you who can’t resist reading something that offends your tastes, I’m backing off Dr KIA to once a month. I also asked him to ease up on areas people may be sensitive to.
But don’t put away that rope too soon. Conor O’Farrell and Frank Ferro are planning to revive the TC blog Bad Advice in the Morning, except as bi-monthly and in the newspaper. I hope that goes over better.
Becky Clark,
Editor
