The Funnies
Senior executive editor Paul Burka and senior editor Anne Dingus discuss this year’s Bum Steer Awards.
Paul Burka: We’re all aware that staleness is a danger. Staleness usually means predictable headlines. Anne Dingus and I start out editing each other. If a headline gets an approving sound from the other (laugh or groan), we tend to keep it. If there’s a silence, you know it’s back to the drawing boards. Then we go through the same process with our editor, Evan Smith. We have to have our standards as high—or low, depending on the kind of humor—for Bum Steers as for any other story. Another way to avoid staleness is through new layouts. Art director Scott Dadich is always thinking up new things to try. Last year it was an Anna Nicole Smith board game. This year it was larger art and type for certain items, and unexpected displays, such as a movie poster for the troubled Alamo film or an unemployment application for acquitted murder defendant Robert Durst.
Anne Dingus: I think the phrase “year after year” contains a clue to the answer. If we had to do this feature more than once a year, it would probably lose its charm and its popularity, and heaven knows we would lose our enthusiasm. But because Bum Steers is an annual attraction, we have a full twelve months’ worth of foibles and absurdities to draw on for assembling a feature that not only extends over several pages but also manages to sustain a high humor level from beginning to end. “We” is the editorial department of the magazine, by the way, but senior executive editor Paul Burka is the driving force behind the feature (and has been for thirty years now!). He is the Bum Steers foreman, and one of the funniest people east or west of the Rio Grande. I’m the chief Bum Steer wrangler, in that I work most closely with the art, copy, and fact departments and with our deputy editor, Jane Dure, to track all the little steers and keep them herded, branded, and corralled.
The raw material for “BS,” as we often abbreviate it, comes from news sources all over the state, chiefly papers and TV stations and their Web sites. Over the course of the year, everyone in the editorial department of Texas Monthly brings in Bum Steers nominations, usually in the forms of clippings or printouts, as do staffers in other areas of the magazine. So do many of our freelance contributors, from veteran music writer John Morthland to hockey scribe Jason Cohen. And God bless our readers—scores of them send in nominees, and some even go to the trouble to compile pictures, photocopies, phone numbers, and additional information. Ultimately we end up with several hundred possible Bum Steers, from torn-out pieces of paper roughly a couple of inches square to entire front-page sections with a single story circled in marker halfway through. We read them all—variously laughing, frowning, or wrinkling our collective brow—and eventually we sift and sort through them and end up with about one hundred items for the actual feature.
texasmonthly.com: Was this year’s Bum Steer Awards more challenging than any of the others? If so, why?
AD: The Bum Steer Awards we’re currently working on ALWAYS seem more challenging! Or maybe it’s just that last year’s version seems so easy in retrospect, because the memories of the hard work and the inevitable problems are long gone. (Like childbirth: The event seems only rosy once the pain has faded.) But Bum Steers do have a different character from year to year. For example, partly because of the war in Iraq and partly because George W. Bush is now a much more seasoned speechifier, there are far fewer Bum Steers on him this year than there were in 2002 and 2003. Instead, the 2004 Bum Steers included “ebush,” a gift guide devoted to select (and silly) Dubya-themed merchandise. We did note an increase in the number of Bum Steers inspired by Web sites—an inevitable result of the ever-burgeoning cyber universe—and those given to high schools. The latter seem to earn their awards because the interpretation of zero tolerance can often quickly veer from rigid to ridiculous.
texasmonthly.com: What is the most difficult aspect of working on Bum Steers?
AD: The single most annoying thing about working on Bum Steers is discovering (secondhand, through the hard work of Texas Monthly’s fact-checkers) that the details in a newspaper or Web site article are wrong and that the item must be deleted—or slaughtered as it were. Sometimes this means an illustration or a photograph that has already been paid for also goes to waste. Of course, we are indebted to these stories for ideas in the first place, so I shouldn’t complain; also, newspaper and TV reporters are working on a daily deadline, which certainly limits their researching and reporting time. Still, it’s annoying. Fortunately, we don’t lose that many items because of fact problems, and I’ve learned to keep some backups around, just in case.
Let me just add, though, that it’s easier to be an editor for Bum Steers than a fact-checker. My first job for Texas Monthly was in the fact-checking department, and believe me, it’s not a lot of fun calling up people and asking them questions about Bum Steers, which nearly always involve embarrassing incidents. A typical conversation might go like this: “Hello. May I speak to Mrs. Lotta Persimmons? Mrs. Persimmons? Hello, I’m with Texas Monthly magazine … no, I’m not trying to sell you a subscription. I just need to verify one bit of information for a story we’re running in our January issue. Can you confirm that you were caught in flagrante delicto with the Reverend Horace Stringbean at the Yours Forever tent during the Marriage Revival rally last June? … Hello? Hello?”
texasmonthly.com: What do you like best about working on Bum Steers?
PB: Above all, I like the chance to write with a sense of humor. Most of the time I’m writing about politics, which isn’t exactly rib-tickling these days. It’s a chance to have fun and still do some social commentary, only with a light touch.
AD: Writing headlines! Or rather, listening to what other people have written. It’s so much fun—the kind of activity where you find yourself thinking, “I get paid for this?!” Again, many Texas Monthly editorial staffers—and employees in other departments—suggest possible headlines, as do our writers-at-large. Sometimes the Great Minds Think Alike rule is in effect: For the item about Texas actor Benjamin Curtis, who played “Steven” in the Dell computer commercials, getting arrested for possession of marijuana, at least half a dozen people independently came up with “Dude, You’re Gettin’ a Cell.” It may have appeared elsewhere, sure, but it remains the most instantly and constantly funny headline for the item—nothing else we came up with could beat it out.
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