In my book “Writing Tools” I make the argument that a writer should know “when to back off and when to show off.” The more serious the topic, I argued, the more the writer should soft-pedal the language. The less serious the topic, the more the writer can twist and shout.
Then, one day, I confronted a writing task that demanded I turn my own advice upside down. I wanted, more than anything, to write a funny essay about colon cancer. This impulse was inspired by my pastor, Rev. Robert Gibbons, who underwent emergency surgery after a colonoscopy, the most reliable test now available to detect the polyps that can turn deadly.
When the good padre returned to his parish after treatment, I rushed up to him with a hug and this declaration: “Congratulations, Father, you are now one of the few people in America who knows how to use a semi-colon.” To my relief, he laughed.
Now it was my turn to have a colonoscopy, so I wrote about the experience:
“Not my butt, per se, but what’s in my butt.
“What’s in my butt at the moment is a tube with a camera and light on the end. It is snaking its way up my colon, which photographically looks like the Lincoln Tunnel, searching for a little cave-dwelling bioterrorist I’ve named Osama bin Polyp.
“I am not awake, but on Cloud 18, and learn all this later.
“The camera finds bin Polyp and projects his image onto a video monitor. He looks like a tiny white bump, the size of a yogurt-covered raisin, but in real life he is much smaller, maybe three or four times the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Snip.
“It will take a few days for the lab results: Will it be benign? Precancerous? Malignant?
“What then?
“But first, a few more words about the junk in my trunk — and yours ….”
I’ve read this passage aloud to groups large and small, and it always evokes laughter, some uproarious, but some nervous.
The nervous laughter is understandable. One woman I’ve known for years told me that she would rather die of cancer than submit to a test “down there.” I pray that the squeamishness expressed in that euphemism not prove fatal.
In a mission statement for my story, I described my desire to write a story unlike any other composed on this topic, containing graphically humorous elements rare in a newspaper. That is, I wanted to defuse the fear, ignorance and anxiety that pervade public understanding of this procedure so that vulnerable readers might overcome their inhibitions and get tested.
“Why didn’t you write: ‘My butt could save your ass’?” asked one curious critic.
I knew why. I wanted those six words (each a one-syllable word) to foreshadow the tone of the story. This would be a humorous story about a deadly serious topic, so I wanted to join two words not usually juxtaposed: “butt” and “life.”
Let’s X-Ray the sentence and consider the practical language decisions that shape its meaning:
Notice how each word carries special weight:
“My” : The possessive form of the first person singular signals that this is an intimate account from the get-go.
“butt”: A funny noun, down and dirty, but not filthy. Slang that reflects informality.
“could”: A helping verb that informs readers that this life-saving statement is conditional, dependent upon their choices and actions.
“save”: A strong, transitive verb in the active voice. The meaning transfers directly from subject to object.
“your”: The second person “your” parallels “my” and turns the sentence into a conversation, a transaction with the reader.
“life”: The most important noun, the direct object, comes at the end — raising the stakes and moving the sentence from comedy to potential tragedy.
Humor depends upon the strategic use of language, such tools as the hyperbolic metaphor (comparing the picture of my colon to the Lincoln Tunnel); comic personification (comparing my polyp to a notorious terrorist); the use of allusions and rhymes from popular culture (such as the “junk in my trunk”); even a single word of onomatopoeia (the intentional fragment “Snip.”)
What follows, of course, is a series of quite serious questions, a cliffhanger that keeps the reader in the story, I hope, eager to find out the results of my test. This pattern defines the structure of the entire essay: Anytime the piece gets too serious, a bit of humor relieves the tension. Anytime it threatens to become silly, a shadow appears overhead. To be honest, I learned this technique from none other than Willy Shakespeare, often condemned in the 18th century for mixing comic and tragic elements in his most enduring plays.
It worked, I am happy to say. Two weeks after my story appeared, a woman arrived at the clinic where I was tested. She told the nurse that she had read the story and that it had inspired her to get tested. She was 50-years-old, with no family history of cancer, but the test discovered malignant polyps, early enough in their development, I pray, to make effective treatment possible.
So not only can my butt save your life — but so can the glamour, the alluring power of grammar.
