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Funny Ha-Ha and McClure's detail magic

This past Tuesday night, I went to Funny Ha-Ha, a quarterly humor event held at Chicago’s Hideout and hosted by my talented pals Claire Zulkey and Steve Delahoyde.

Author Wendy McClure, the evening’s second performer, read three short nonfiction pieces. I’ve heard Wendy read before and enjoyed her work, but the pieces she read last night demonstrated a mastery of the short nonfiction form. The magic of Wendy’s work lies, it seems to me, in the details. The precision of her writing makes it easy to believe. She chooses from among the millions of available details the most relevant and revealing. McClure doesn’t play too hard for laughs, but because we’re immersed in the world of her piece, she gets them.

Take, for example, the piece Wendy wrote for The New York Times. Reading it (or, if you’re fortunate enough, hearing McClure read it), you feel the agony and determination of the patrons of Rossi’s, both tortured and rapt by the hour-long Brian Eno song that someone—they don’t know who—has purchased on the jukebox. What’s more, Rossi’s (“an amiable dive bar where everything was burnished with nicotine”) and the actions of its patrons (“People were turning in their seats to stare at the jukebox and then glance at the Michelob Ultra clock”) appear in the imagination in focused Technicolor, making a nonfiction humor piece something more without sacrificing—in fact, probably increasing—the humor.

If you appreciate what a writer’s precision gives a reader, you might check out Wendy McClure’s I’m Not The New Me, or her reading tonight for the Fixx Reading Series.