I can has hedline?

YOU win some, you lose some. I’ve never been that good at pun headlines but this column was crying out for a touch of LOLcat. It was nixed on the grounds that the average newspaper reader wouldn’t get it because the average newspaper reader is about 98, or something. One bright note: it’s going to be used when the column goes online as the website’s demographic is younger.

The background: the Pasadena Sun ran a story claiming the cheeseburger was invented in the city because apparently Americans care about that sort of thing. Thanks to the magic of the interwebs, the story was seen by Doug Moe, a Wisconsin journalist who wrote a column about how Wisconsin is the birthplace of the cheeseburger because apparently Americans care about that sort of thing. We got permission to reprint Doug’s column and the headline (to me, anyway) just seemed the perfect one. (It’s going to be “Cheesed off with Pasadena’s claim to fame” now).

There is another reason my headline wasn’t used: the potential flood of letters along the lines of, “Duh you spelled ‘cheeseburger’ wrong and it should be ‘have’ and you’re stupid and you should feel bad”. This happened a few years back when I used “pizza the action” as a pun for a story that I’m guessing involved pizzas as frankly I cannot remember anything about it except the headline. We had a load of letters from people who simply didn’t get that “pizza” was a play on “piece of” and, naturally, I got in trouble. I was pretty surprised — when I worked on Wales on Sunday, “pizza the action” was Standard Pun #224b for headlines involving Wales playing Italy. Shit, if Julian or me didn’t get the phrase into a headline at some point during the Six Nations we were given a damn good thrashing and put on tea-making duty for a month.

I also got in trouble for one I did when working for the hellhole that is Celtic Newspapers (or was, as for all I know it’s been sacrificed to keep the Western Fail Mail staggering along). When designing a story about a girl who was the Wales Under-16 Taekwondo champion, I remembered these adverts:

The headline? “You know when you’ve been tai-kwon-do’d”. The reason I got in trouble, though, wasn’t because people wrote in to complain about it; instead my editor decided no one would get it because he so obviously didn’t get it. After doing some quick market research in the office and discovering that 100% of designers not in the should-have-been-retired-years-ago demographic liked it, I changed it to something dull then changed it back just before I sent the paper to the press. How was I to know the bloody editor was going to spot it the next day? Even when it was published in the UK Press Gazette’s Headline Of The Month section he didn’t calm down.

Bloody old people.