Greetings!
I’ve added once again to the giggle gallery featuring early ‘90s greeting card jokes I wrote and got paid for doing so. What a racket.
The 10 new ones are all from Current Inc., a Colorado Springs company that’s still a going concern, the internet tells me by the presence of its website. By all means, go to currentcatalog.com and buy some stuff. And then go under the multimedia tab above and select the greeting cards section to peruse the funny cards I wrote, illustrated by art I did not draw.
Way back in my early ‘90s greeting card heyday Current was known, at least to me, for its custom licensed bank checks and craft-y printed goods sold through a catalog found most frequently in the teachers’ lounges of our nation’s public schools. I sold a bunch of humorous greeting cards to Current. It was a volume game with them. I would submit card ideas to its editors last among those I regularly made sales to because the company paid the least. I gave a card gag a chance to be purchased for $150 before I offered its rejected ass to Current for $50. There were still plenty of gems*, by my estimation, making it through the gauntlet of critical market judgment represented by half a dozen previous editors from Cincinnati to Kansas City to Boston to Rochester, Vermont. Three leftovers sold to Current was as good as a single fresh and hot-right-out-of-the-oven joke bought by Gibson Inc.
I had a semi-elaborate system of cataloging my thousands of ideas written in thematic groupings and assigned an occasion-specific batch number and tracking the path of ideas rejected, held for review, or purchased outright from submission made to as many as 10 different publishers in sequence. Included in each was a cover letter of submission on embossed letterhead, a rubber-band secured stack of 3 x 5 index cards, and a pink No. 9 self-addressed, stamped envelope for return of the losing contestants. After running the full gamut of consideration from Hallmark International to Noble & Associates, batches were retired from active submission and archived in long, metal file drawers – I think I had three double-barrel sets of drawers for six separate stacks of cards labeled by category. It might be a set of HB (happy birthday) cards, the most frequent. Or the group may be a seasonal offering, CH for Christmas or EA for Easter. It was all very involved and included pink No. 9 self-addressed stamped envelopes to return rejects – that’s a separate post.
At the apex of my greeting card career (and apex here is used in same sense as describing Britton Hill as Florida’s highest point at 345 feet above sea level; it’s true, but it’s not saying much), I signed a contract to write exclusively for Gibson Greetings Inc. of Cincinnati, Ohio. This was the death knell, though I did not hear it toll at the time, marking the end of my greeting card-writing success. Among many other more significant factors, the contract status fundamentally changed my approach to coming up with gags. In short, I lost my mojo. I was a complete bust as a writer for hire. My editor worked with me diligently and generously. Nonetheless, I failed to get even close to the number of cards I had previously sold as a free-lancer approved as a writer under contract.
This, however, is only a detour from the point.
Under the terms of my contract with Gibson, I stopped submitting to the score of card publishers I worked with regularly. There sat my archive of more than 12,000 index cards, each one its own snowflake of occasion-specific connection from one person to another. This productive trove was now a fallow field.
Or was it?
When I alerted my regular card publisher clients I was taking myself out of the game, my Current editor contacted me. Would I be interested in selling my entire backlog?
The answer was clearly yes. Here were three shoeboxes full of index cards, written on by a dot-matrix printer beepingly, buzzingly tattooing out an inked version of a joke in a rudimentary format.
O) Stood for outside, the cover of the card…
I) While this stood for inside, generally where the punchline was delivered. It seemed vaguely alternative, which is to say transgressive, to put the gag payoff on the cover.
Most frequently this alternative approach was achieved as a caption to a panel cartoon all on the cover. It was an homage to The Far Side, a feature I longed to duplicate. It counted for alternative in the context of the staid greeting card world. There is a version of what I am talking about in this new batch. Can you guess which one?
The end of the story is I packed up those index cards, shipped them to Colorado Springs, and happily cashed the biggest check up to that point in my life. Here’s to you, Current, Inc.
*A greeting card joke’s objective quality had a correlation coefficient of zero-point-zero for commercial sales. The cards I thought and knew to be genuinely funny rarely sold. Scores of demonstrably mediocre laugh lines were sold and published. There is, indeed, no accounting for taste.