The Making of a Humorist

My fans often ask me how someone as modest and self-effacing as I am could reach the exalted status of America's Foremost Poker Humorist. Well, I never really achieved my potential. Someone with my talent should have written a best-selling humor book or Academy-Award winning script. Still, I suppose I have become famous in a way. After all, I write for the same magazine as Phil Hellmuth.

In any event, I was told that when the definitive history of humor in America is written, the author will need as much information as possible about me, so I'll outline the steps that took me to where I am today.

I guess I was destined to write humor. It was implanted in my subconscious when a delivery-room nurse exclaimed, "Wow! Isn't that kid funny?"

I was born into a poor and destitute family and forced to start working when I was 5. I would go around gathering newspapers and magazines from trash cans, landfills, and people's mailboxes to sell as salvage. I got into the habit of reading articles from humorists of the day, such as Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin, which inspired me to write funny stuff myself. I began going door-to-door selling jokes, quips, epigrams, and similar jocular material for a nickel each to budding stand-up comedians, housewives looking for a funny line for their canasta games, and ministers who wanted a few one-liners to liven things up at weddings and funerals. Business was so good that I tried to expand by writing humorous short stories for 25 cents, but I had out-priced myself. I went bankrupt and was forced to sell my own papers as salvage.

As the years went by, I had to take whatever writing assignments came along. For a while I worked for a Chinese fortune cookie company, devising clever and inspirational messages such as, "Much very good financial success will come your way," and, "You will be given much very good health and happiness this year." Eventually I got bored with all the cheeriness, and my mischievous side took over. It got me fired when a patron at a Chinese restaurant opened his fortune cookie and pulled out a slip of paper that read, "Do not eat the moo goo gai pan."

The low point in my writing career came when I was reduced to thinking up gags for Tom Arnold. I even had to supplement my meager income by shilling at Ralph the Rattler's home game.

Then, one day I heard of a new magazine called Card Player, which seemed ideal for my talents. I sent in some sample columns, but got no reply. Then, they had a crisis. An advertiser canceled at deadline time, and with nothing else to fill the space, they were forced to drop in one of my articles. (What they didn't know was that the casino pulled the ad when it was learned I might become one of the writers.)

I wasn't nearly as funny as Roy West or even Mason Malmuth, but I agreed to write for half-price, so they kept me on. But then I hit a roadblock. The only thing I could find to write about was Omaha high-low, and after a batch of columns in which all I talked about was getting counterfeited, the editor began to lose patience.

Then, I got lucky. I started to run into a batch of poker characters who would make my writing a cinch. The first to come into my column was Dirty Wally, an old reprobate with a cowboy hat, long gray hair, and whiskers, whose trademark was insulting other players. He regaled me with stories of the hundreds of tournaments he had won that nobody ever heard of, and the hundred movies he had starred in that were never released. I was hesitant to put his tales on paper until he promised to leave me his automobile after he passed on. I later discovered that his car was leased, but by then it was too late. Not only had I written about him numerous times, but his entire family, as well: his semisenile Confederate Army grandfather, Filthy Willy; his father, Smelly Kelly, a cook in World War I who killed off his entire regiment by opening a can of mustard that turned out to be mustard gas; and his repulsive sister, Dirty Gerty.

The ferocious Big Denny, of course, soon became my star act. I first met the big guy when I bought a car from him off his used car lot. I later learned that he turned back odometers several years, filled the transmissions with sawdust to muffle loose parts, and his famous "50-50 guarantee" meant 50 feet or 50 seconds, whichever came first. Next, he bought a dumpy hotel in Vegas that he grandly renamed "Big Denny's Hospitality Inn." He talked me into staying there after assuring me it overlooked a "scenic lake," which turned out to be a sewage sump. But he came into his own when he opened Big Denny's Barstow Card Casino in a converted cow barn, and his crooked games, thuggish dealers, and brushes with the law provided me unlimited material.

I befriended Aberdeen Angus McTavish, the world's tightest poker player, by saving his life. I pulled him loose after he had become wedged while trying to crawl under a pay-toilet door at the Barstow Card Casino. I hired the distinguished Sherman H. Shlock as my agent and financial adviser after he offered to throw in a pound of salami from my delicatessen. I met Dr. Wolfgang Krock, the eminent poker psychologist, when he spoke at a seminar on compulsive gambling. Unfortunately, he was two hours late because he had become badly stuck in a poker game.

And on they came: Break-Even Benny, Action Al, Ham Gristle, Aunt Sophie (the old yenta I rent from time to time from Michael Wiesenberg), and a whole cast of leading players who have made my writing so easy and memorable. Without them, I'd still be writing about getting counterfeited in Omaha high-low.

Thanks to all of my friends, only once have I felt the need to create a totally fictional character. Can you guess who it is?

Oklahoma Johnny Hale.