FeedMayor defends Peoria’s honor against beltway smartass
June 30, 2007 in Local Tags: Gene Weingarten, Jim Ardis, Play in Peoria, Washington Post
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Gene Weingarten is a columnist for the Washington Post. He recently learned that the Peoria Journal Star is going to give his column a test-run. Most journalists avoid cliches like the plague (ahem) because their use denotes lack of imagination and minimal writing skill. Nevertheless, virtually every journalist who visits or writes about this city finds some way to use that tired old vaudeville saying “will it play in Peoria” somewhere in their article. But Weingarten based an entire a freaking column on whether or not his column will “play in Peoria.” Good Lord.
So he got on the phone and called Peoria’s spokesman: Peoria Mayor Jim Ardis. I have to give the mayor credit. He did a fine job defending Peoria. Not that there was a lot of defending that needed to happen. As a humor columnist, I have to wonder how the Washington Post’s standards got so low. This exchange is typical:
Me: Maybe I should try out some humor on you.
The Mayor: Sure.
Me: I’m thinking that “Peoria” sounds like a combination of “pee” and “euphoria,” which is something many people can relate to, especially after a long car ride, which Peorians might want to take to get out of Peoria!
The Mayor: See, that’s the thing. A big part of the misperception of Peoria is that if you blink, you’ll pass us by. We have a Level 1 trauma center, and Caterpillar’s world headquarters is in Peoria. And we have a big agricultural research lab. A lot of people don’t know this, but penicillin was discovered here.
Me: Wow. I am beginning to like Peoria just fine! I might move there!
The Mayor: People come here and look around and are surprised, and they say, “Gee, where are the cornfields at?”
Me: So, where are the cornfields at?
The Mayor: About five miles outside of town.
Yeah, I was splitting my sides at that one.
But I do need to clarify several things: First, it’s the bean fields that are right outside city limits. Second, penicillin was discovered and then forgotten in France, and was later rediscovered in London by Sir Alexander Fleming (the one they mention in the histor books). It was in Peoria where scientists figured out how to mass produce penicillin, a development that has no doubt saved millions of lives.
Weingarten does his best to try to make a bumpkin out of Ardis. But Ardis isn’t having any of it. He’s been a member of the Fulton Avenue Debating Society too long to let an alleged humorist like Weingarten get the better of him. And I happen to know that Ardis has an good sense of humor, but was laughing at the “salad dressing” joke out of politeness.
So kudos to Mayor Ardis. And kudos also to Weingarten, who apparently isn’t afraid to embrace hoary old cliches and risk the scorn of better writers everwhere.
P.S. Wanna hear something really funny? The Washington Post apparently posts all of his columns online before they appear in print. So if Peorians want to read his stuff wihtout putting one nickle into the Journal Star’s pocket, they can do so. Now that’s hilarious!
June 30th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Bill, thanks for sticking up for the city and the surrounding area. Too bad you didn't spell check your comment of the Washington Post site before you posted it.
July 1st, 2007 at 8:23 am
What is your love affair with Ardis? The guy is a bumkin. Well at least as far as his campaign promises go.
July 3rd, 2007 at 1:04 pm
This post feels like an endorsement of the Banned for Life list, which, if enforced, would in particular forbid use of “play in Peoria” … I’m almost positive the chief of copy desks at the Post knows about the ban but I guess slack is cut for famous columnists.
July 3rd, 2007 at 1:20 pm
As a person from a real small town, and one that is now living in a major metropolitan area (I love both), I found the column to be incredibly funny; I felt the mayor came off as a wonderful character who most certainly was not a country bumpkin; and I felt like Peoria came off extremely well.
July 3rd, 2007 at 2:20 pm
You know, I’m a Weingarten fan from DC, and I have to say, that was one of his least-funny columns. He was clearly going for satire (satirizing the “big city know-it-all” is one of his shticks) but I don’t think it came through very well.
July 3rd, 2007 at 2:40 pm
I currently live in DC after growing up in central IL. A note on Weingarten, who I think is tremendously funny. Especially his online chats on the WashPost website. The central tenet of Weingarten’s humor is that he himself is the butt of his jokes. The column with Ardis is to illustrate much more about Weingarten’s own prejudices and faults.
The guy is a brilliant writer, too. Look for his piece on the violin player in the DC metro, or his profile of Battle Mountain, Nevada, the “armpit of America.”
July 3rd, 2007 at 4:44 pm
I lived in Pekin for a year in the ’90s. You can do better than mass-produced penicillin when singing the praises of your decaying Rust Belt metropolis. I miss Alexander’s Steakhouse, La Gondola, Bradley University basketball, the event where the Cat tractors dance in unison, the tenderloin sandwich and Vanna Whitewall (the giant fiberglass woman in a bikini). I do not miss Pekin’s odd corn-chemical smell, people burning their trash outdoors along major roads or winters so cold your skin hurts.
July 4th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
So, let me ask you something, Billy, as one humor writer to another:
Did it occur to you that a column that begins “For some reason, hicks feel that I talk down to them…” might not be intended completely seriously? That the butt of this column was not Peoria, at all, but my own chauvinism? Even your mayor understood that; he understood exactly what I was doing, and played along like a good sport. You, the journalist, were clueless.
Do you think that when I said that my politics were so wildly left-wing that “I could be tried for treason and executed” that this was a serious assessment of my politics? No? Then why would you take anything else in that column at face value?
It was a joke, dork. It was a joke about me and my cultural condescension. It was not even particularly subtle — some of your posters above understood it exactly.
A journalist who becomes a civic booster is a lousy journalist, Billy. Loses all sense of proportion and judgment. Not to mention his sense of humor. Cheers.
July 4th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
You are absolutely right, Gene.
Those of us who write with tongue planted in cheek (there’s a cliche for ya) are often utterly unable to recognize the fact when they are the subject matter of tongue-in-cheek articles.
Cheers.
July 4th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Woo Hoo! I’ve been called a “dork” before, but never by someone from the Washington Post. Perhaps I can get someone from the NYT to do the same.
July 4th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Oh, and as far as the “play in Peoria” cliche:
Gonna explain this only once. See if you can understand, so you don’t make the same bonehead mistake again.
A cliche is not badly used if it is used ironically, as in “avoid cliches like the plague”. (In your case, of course, you are about the 4,789th writer to make that joke, so you were not abusing a cliche so much as you were being a pathetic hack.)
But, I digress. My point is that the whole column was acknowledging the cliche and making fun of it. I wrote that I was willing to change my sense of humor because playing in Peoria was “important, metaphorically.” See? No foul; I was making fun of the cliche, not just reiterating it.
Got it? Good.
July 4th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Really? I defer to Tom Mangan keeper of the site “Banned for Life,” which tips copy editors to which phrases have become cliche and should be avoided:
And how does a columnist so thin-skinned manage to survive without his head exploding? Methinks someone can dish it out, but cannot take it.
July 4th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
Methinks someone should re-read what he wrote initially and then engage in profound public self-appraisal vis a vis the thesis that he is a dork.
July 4th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
So that’s what you are, but what am I?
July 4th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
Such thin skin, Gene!
As a DC-ite and regular Post reader, I say to you in Peoria that I have always found Weingarten strained, unoriginal, and just plain not that funny. In his Peoria column, he was just lazy and inane, and followed a tired path of Fun with the Hicks (and saying he was just making fun of his own chauvenism, or whatever, is only slightly less tired.) Then he criticised the Peoria dude for not laughing, and for sticking up for Peoria, and mainly for attacking Weingarten’s writing. This after Weingarten made a pee joke
I’ve not much to add here except to tell the Peorians that the Post columnists are a collective embarassment to our city. Weingarten is less of an embarassment only because he’s a “humor” writer in the rarely read Post Magazine section.
July 4th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Gentlemen, gentlemen. Please. I have no problem if you criticize my writing, for that is merely my writing. Others have said worse.
But I shan’t sit idly by and listen to you denigrate pee jokes.
July 4th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Or, frankly, to allow you to disgrace America by denigrating pee jokes ON THE FOURTH OF JULY.
July 4th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Sorry. Urine the minority if you think pee jokes are patriotic.
July 4th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
I think we’ve had enough of your mindless bladder for one day.
July 4th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
Ureters have long grown tired of this pissing match.
July 4th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
I’m sure that my readers have grown tired of this steady stream of yellow journalism.
July 4th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Urinal lot of trouble if you keep this up, mister.
July 4th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Number 1 thing to remember, puns are a very low form of humor.
July 4th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
I kidney you not, puns are NOT funny.
July 4th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Depends.
July 4th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
*snort*
Ok, you win the pun contest.
July 4th, 2007 at 11:18 pm
Very enjoyable, guys, that was some funny shit. Oops, wrong excretion.
July 4th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
Oh, p1ss off.
July 4th, 2007 at 11:32 pm
Call it stream of consciousness humor.
July 5th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
OH, c’mon guys I’m tryin to get some work done here…
July 5th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Diane: It can’t be helped. The blog’s initials are P.P., after all.