MobyD's Humor Lenses

Everyone in the United States and Canada has heard about Groundhog Day on February 2. Punxsutawney Phil, the Pennsylvania groundhog, is a national icon. Whether or not he sees his shadow on Groundhog Day means there may or may not be six more weeks o...

"A Visit from St. Nicholas" by Clement C. Moore, also known as "The Night Before Christmas," is probably the most famous poem of the season. In the early 1990s I "translated" it into Anguish Languish. My first encounter with Anguish Languish was in...

We've all done it. We dry our tarnedest to cleak spearly and make our cleanings mere, but it rums out all cong. It might happen during a tight on the noun, when we've had tee many martoonis and are thunker than we drink. Or we could be serfectly pobe...

My website, Have Pun Will Travel, has a section called The Punnery. It's a collection of posts I made along with those of several friends on the now-defunct GEnie service's TeleJoke, which The Punnery was part of. It owed its name to Richard Lederer'...

Bill Bryson is an American author who has written several books on travel in Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States. He has also written several books on the English language, as well as a book on the history of science, a memoir, and a boo...

Sarah Vowell, known to many as the voice of Violet in The Incredibles, has also been, with her unforgettable voice, a regular contributor to Chicago Public Radio's This American Life. She has written five books. Her sharp wit, quirky humor, and...

Molly Ivins, known for her sharp wit and keen sense of observation, was a newspaper columnist and author of several best-selling books on politics. She started her journalism career in the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle, wrote for The...

"If one were given the task of creating Spider Robinson from scratch, the best way to do it would be to snatch James Joyce from history, force-feed him Marx Brothers films and good jazz for the better part of a decade, then turn him loose on a world...

Wait! What? A talking cactus? Yep. And not just any talking cactus. His name is McPedro. He's a talking Irish cactus. He only talks to Hazel the writer after she's had a few drinks, or maybe more than a few. In November 2009, Girls With Sling...

Tom Tomorrow is the pen name for editorial cartoonist Dan Perkins, who uses a retro mid-20th century advertising art style in a weekly strip about American politics. His strip runs in about 150 alternative and mainstream publications as well as on S...

The 43rd President of the United States always had a way with words. Whether it's a way a president should have is open to debate. Certainly everyone says something that makes himself or herself sound less than intelligent now and then, but not has e...

Novelty songs often become popular for a while at least. They enjoyed a lot of airplay in the 1950s and 1960s. Songs from those decades dominate the top 50 list of novelty songs. But many of the songs are from people who had their moment of fame with...