Leeuna Foster is a professional humoringulist, and though it’s possible I might have copied her byline down improperly, that’s a pretty heavy title. I mean, it’s up there with telling the batter what pitch is coming, or phoning-ahead to tell an embassy when you’re planning to blow them up – telegraphed like a bad pass, and two steps behind what no description would bring in terms of expectation. As things stand now, of course, Ms. Foster has to make me laugh.Fortunately, she is neither snotty nor condescending, atypical of self-proclaimed humour-bloggers, and I’m assuming that this is at least partially because she is an honest-to-christ professional writer, a paid scribe in possession or her own humour column. This fact cannot be overstated, and certainly not around here, with the limping reams of violently-offensive grammatical atrociousness we receive with regularity. Her work flows, is concise and astute, the very antithesis of what we’ve all come to expect from the humour-blog genre, and my relief is a goddamned rainbow of appreciation.
This is what I like to call Grown-Up Writing: mild, inoffensive pabulum, the soft, palatable alternative to the writing that makes you jump out of your seat like both it and your ass were on fire. My pop, Dadjobber, also writes for a newspaper, and his work is very similar: Disneyfied, Nickelodeonized, with an eye to the wide-market, mass-appeal of any newspaper’s circulation. Ms. Foster isn’t, nor is she likely to become, someone who’s going to make me fall out of my chair or spit coffee on the screen; if I’m looking for Jimi Hendrix, which I am, there aren't enough tie-dyed headbands or gasoline-torched guitars in the universe to make Pat Boone into what I'm hoping for. Ms. Foster isn’t writing for me, nor, presumably, would she or should she care to. She’s writing for people who want the Big Mac and the option of salad, and I’m reading at the greasy-spoon down the street.
My Mind Wandered... (the actual name of the blog, I believe) is observational humour that stands a couple of ticks above, “what’s the deal with airline peanuts?”, and has none of the oomph, the aaag, the omigod-there’s-a-zombie-behind-me-GRAAAAAGH! that I tend to look for whilst clicking through cyberspace. Then again, I need my eyeballs sliced against the edgy writing of surprise, of the inexplicable, of head-scratching delight, so take that into account as I slide into the seamy underbelly of personal preference.
I’m going with a couple of these:
Nothing about Leeuna Foster makes me the slightest bit uncomfortable, and that’s both heroically positive and unfortunately negative, neither of which makes her blog particularly bad.
Part Two: tomorrow. Hold on to your fucking hats.
