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"The author does not happen to agree with the gentleman from the Washington Post--a boomer of course--who, in the spring of 2006, suggested that such generational generalizations are 'baloney.' The author prefers to think that the generalizations in X Saves the World are more along the lines of mortadella, which is that really expensive and delicious baloney they make in Italy."

Do you have any idea how hard it is to write a sentence like that? The first part makes you giggle, but suddenly, with that last twisty turn, you are laughing out loud.

That's why I brought journalist Jeff Gordinier on to the site--to teach us how to write funnier prose. Gordinier has spent years as a magazine writer at Details magazine, honing some of the funniest, brightest ideas you'll read anywhere.

They are all collected in X Saves the World, a book that explores Generation X and all it's contradictions. Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions.

In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
It is so hard to write a funny, simple sentence like this:  Nevertheless, every page of this book has a smart metaphor with a funny twist at the end. How do you layer humor into your essays about Serious Cultural Subjects? Any tips for taking a boring sentence and giving it the Gordinier jolt?

Jeff Gordinier:

For some reason, most of the prose stylists I keep returning to, in awe, whenever I have time to read for pleasure — George Saunders, Sarah Vowell, Anthony Lane, David Foster Wallace, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, golden-age New Yorker wits like E.B. White and Dorothy Parker, and then of course we probably ought to go all the way back to Mark Twain — seem to be humorists at heart. Continue reading...

Being funny is a lovely rhetorical tool, right? It’s disarming. A writer who gets all gasbaggy and James Liptonish about Serious Cultural Subjects (as you put it) is sort of asking to be lampooned, whereas I find it hard to disagree completely with any writer who makes me laugh.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a book or an essay being…fun to read. That said, as any professional sketch comedy writer can tell you, it’s not easy to be funny, and to be as consistently clever as, say, Anthony Lane — well, that requires a level of brilliance that I’m flagrantly just not equipped with.

I’m glad that people don’t see my rough drafts, for instance, because those drafts tend to be chock full of boring sentences.

My approach seems to be: lay down the data first, the infrastructure, and then go back and joke it up, give it some “flair,” as they said in Office Space. If some of the sentences in X Saves the World do have that “jolt” that you refer to (um, thanks, by the way), well, that only emerged during the revisions.

Trust me, before I’d revised them, those sentences were as flat and dull as something you’d read in the operating manual for a dehumidifier. Of course, when a sentence seems effortless, that usually means that the writer put great gobs of effort into it.