The Greatest Editing Decision of All Time

Hello.

Today I am going to tell you the secret story of The Greatest Editing Decision of All Time. It occurred in 1995. I was the beneficiary. The editor was Mary Hadar, the beloved longtime boss of the Style Section of The Washington Post. Taste alert: This story involves penises.

(Note: I never wrote about this in The Post, for obvious reasons. It did appear, in truncated form, in Dave Kindred’s excellent 2010 book about The Post, “The Morning Miracle,” because I had told him about it.)

Here’s the story in full:

This occurred during the second year of The Style Invitational, the weekly humor contest I had started in 1993. At the time, the Invitational — a sometimes rude feature that was constantly pushing envelopes — was a highly controversial subject among the senior management at The Post, who seemed always to be on the brink of closing us down for cause.

As you know, the nature of the contest changes ever week; on this particular week, I had asked Bob Staake, the freelance artist we’d hired to illustrate the Invitational, to draw a few cartoons. Then we would challenge readers to tell us “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” The joke, the underlying gimmick, was that everything was wrong with the pictures.

Anyway, the entries began rolling in.

On Sunday, at home, I sat down to judge them. Back then, they came in by snail mail. After about ten minutes, I came across an entry that made me laugh out loud. An Invitational stalwart, Jean Sorensen, had cut out one of the cartoons from the newspaper (the one at the top of this column) and drawn a penis in, in that crude and vulgar bathroom-stall style. She then circled it, and wrote “THIS is wrong!” It was a funny thing to do, an in-joke to us at the Invitational, obviously nothing I could publish.

I passed it by, and kept reading.

There were a couple of more puzzling entries that obliquely mentioned matters groinal, which got me thinking, with growing alarm — “Wait a minute. She DID draw that in, right?”

I grabbed the hard copy of that morning’s newspaper, frantically flipped to the Invitational, and ….

AUGGH.

There was a little dick and balls in Mrs. Katharine Graham’s newspaper, the same newspaper that had published the Pentagon Papers and brought down Richard Nixon and primly covered society cotillions and thus such.

(See if you can find it. It is very small, but we had invited readers to scour every square millimeter of these cartoons.)

I should say this was a somewhat different time, in journalism and humor. The Post, in particular, was quite Victorian in its sensibilities. This was waaaay over the line.

I phoned Bob Staake, who sheepishly conceded that, uh, yeah, he had put some male genitalia into his drawing, and done it after he had submitted his last rough draft for my approval. He thought it was funny, and okay, and small enough to attract no attention. Staake was, and is, a great cartoonist, but I ended his contract on the spot. I had to.

The Earth rotated. A day passed. Monday arrived, and I had no choice but to go to work, shuffle disconsolately into the corner office of my boss, Mary Hadar, and tell her what had happened. This I did. Burning with shame, I showed her the art. I assured her that I had fired Staake, and that I accepted ultimate responsibility, and offered to resign.

It is now time for the Gene Pool Gene Poll.

Okay, don’t be bashful. Make a choice. Hint: Try to think like an editor.

I’m going to give you the right answer below, at the bottom of the column, but first a small digression, AND another puzzle.

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Last night, Rachel and I went out for dinner at an excellent, bougie artisanal pizza joint in D.C. named Little Grand. She ordered a pepperoni and potato pizza and I ordered a meatball and mozzarella pizza. Both were 12 inches in diameter, served on individual pizza pans. When we were ready to leave, Rachel had half a pizza remaining on her pan, and I had no pizza remaining on my pan BUT WE HAD EACH EATEN THE SAME AMOUNT OF PIZZA. Neither of us had had any of each other’s pizza, and no third party had had any of ours.

How is this possible?

You can submit your guesses here, to the great Questions and Observations Button:

I will give you the answer in the next Gene Pool.

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Okay, back to the Greatest Editing Decision Ever Made.

There is really only one great answer that solves the problem perfectly and puts no one in jeopardy. Mary is a very smart and savvy person, a skilled and nimble navigator of newsroom culture, and an excellent editor. This was her answer:

“Oh, THAT’s not a dick and balls.”

(She added: “It’s a gun or something.”)

Then she kind of waited impatiently for me to leave her office. She had important work to do.

Look what she did:

1. The Invitational would survive and prosper, to become the longest-running newspaper humor contest in American history. Also, incidentally, I would survive. Mary liked me.

2. Bob Staake would survive. His termination was rescinded. There had been no reason to fire him because he had committed no malfeasance! He had betrayed neither me nor the paper! Instead of being a disgraced has-been living in a packing crate in Hoboken, N.J., Bob would go on to an amazing career as an illustrator, with many, many New Yorker covers and books and whatnot.

3. Mary had a perfect answer if she were ever confronted about this by higher ups because, in mutely accepting her decision, I had implicitly ratified its truth. We were partners in this shabby enterprise.

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Okay, that’s it! See you soon.