Humor is best when funny

Extract

[...] Humor is best when funny Here's a question. How necessarily serious should news be? Should it be straight forward, void of emotion? The powers that be taught us early on that news needs to be unbiased, objective, to the point. However, recently, the current trend is to throw a little of yourself into your work- real journalism, just like real people can never be truly unbiased and totally objective and so forth. Yet can news be funny? Should a newspaper, a paper of news, allow a section that provides no real news content, a section that is only inserted strictly to elicit laughter? [...]

[...] The New York Times and Newsweek are assumably going to cover more in-depth professional stories than say People magazine or magazines like ESPN. Yet, the comics section is prevalent in nearly all newspapers. As is the crossword, words scramble, etc. If you feel the humor section isn't necessary, then one can hardly say the Opinion section is necessary. The point being that not only humor sections exist simply to entertain. Many other sections have the same purpose. Despite the questions Barry's works raise, I think many can agree that [...]

[...] So when a person buys a newspaper are they paying to be informed, to be entertained, or both? Does an article that serves no informative purpose belong in newspapers as opposed to magazines. Finally, what about the question of honesty and accuracy? What does the public expect? Personally, my own columns (following Barry's lead) make a habit of not only making up quotations, but making up facts and events. These works of understood fiction are only intending to create laughter, but does that make it right? [...]