Posts Tagged ‘History Humor’

Reality TV Humor (New York Magazine Contest)

Tuesday, January 21st, 2014

New York Magazine recently started a new weekly contest. This week’s challenge is to invent titles of a “premodern reality-television series.” You can enter either on Twitter or in the contest page’s comment section.

Here are my entries (on Twitter) so far:

The Real Cavewives of Windsor

The Dinosaur Hunter

Reinventing The Wheel

Dancing With The Bard

Keeping Up With The Bardashians

The Sorcery Apprentice

Mary, Mary? Au Contrairie (Limerick)

Saturday, February 11th, 2012

Abe Lincoln historians and art historians alike have been stunned by this newly discovered art hoax:

For 32 years, a portrait of a serene Mary Todd Lincoln hung in the governor’s mansion in Springfield, Ill., signed by Francis Bicknell Carpenter, a celebrated painter who lived at the White House for six months in 1864.

The story behind the picture was compelling: Mrs. Lincoln had Mr. Carpenter secretly paint her portrait as a surprise for the president, but he was assassinated before she had a chance to present it to him.

Now it turns out that both the portrait and the touching tale accompanying it are false.

There’s a lot more to this story, so I recommend that you read the entire New York Times article. But before you leave me, here’s a limerick:

Mary, Mary? Au Contrairie (Limerick)
By Madeleine Begun Kane

Art historians suffered a shock:
Mrs. Lincoln’s famed portrait’s a crock.
A rip-off took place–
The pic hasn’t a trace
Of Abe’s Mary — it’s scam-ridden schlock.