CALL ME SNAKE

I’ve been the humor columnist for the Cambridge newspaper for the past few years and off and on for the past 25 years. In recent years, I’ve had this domain all too myself. But in yesterday’s paper, there was not only a column by me but another column by a presumably younger upstart who, by his own admission, will do anything for a laugh. (I’m assuming that he’s younger because he claims to write comedy for late-night hosts, and I’m assuming that late-nights hosts want to keep current and will occasionally refer to things that happened after the 60s.)

Seeing that piece there, on the page before mine (though it was in a less auspicious setting on the page than mine, “below the fold,” as it were) was a wake-up call to me. They say that nothing fixes the concentration like the threat of a good hanging. Or the fact that someone else is gunning for you and employing every weapon in the arsenal of humor to bring you down.