I first acquired a connoisseur’s interest in dull headlines in 1963, when I read, in a note in the air edition of the English New Statesman, that the London Times had staged a contest for the dullest headline to appear in the paper over the past year. The winning entry was “Small Earthquake in Chile, Not Many Dead.” Something exquisite about the irrelevance of that headline: an earthquake so far away and one with apparently so little consequence. Every word in it suggests there is no need to read the story beneath it.
As my own interests narrow, I find more and more headlines above stories that cry out to be ignored. Two from the Wall Street Journal that recently caught and instantly glazed my eyes are: “Highway Bill Heads for House” (December 5, 2015) and “E-Commerce in Mexico Takes Coaxing” (January 1, 2016). Years ago a New York Times headline that I thought a genuine nongrabber read: “Chief Justice Warren Sees No Trend in Burger Court.” All three of these headlines are up there with that old suburban neighborhood paper perennial, “Cookie Sale Planned.”
A headline is the barker outside the strip joint, promising something enticing to bring in customers. The 1983 New York Post headline “Headless Body in Topless Bar” does the job nicely. Some headlines live off their cleverness. Variety‘s “Sticks Nix Hick Pix,” describing rural audiences’ lack of interest in movies about rural subjects, qualifies splendidly here. The New York Daily News was known in an earlier day for startling headlines. During the 1962 New York newspaper strike, a humor magazine edited by Victor Navasky called Monocle ran parody issues of all the New York papers. The headline they used on the front page of the Daily News parody issue was “Priest Plugs Punk.” The story beneath recounted how a priest shot a young thug coming down the nave of his church with a zip gun. “How the priest came into possession of the zip gun is unknown” was the story’s final sentence.
During the days before it began whoring after youthful readers, the New York Times ran many notably dull headlines. The ever-alert Tom Wolfe caught this and remarked that the standard New York Times Magazine cover of that time might show a water buffalo standing in a rice paddy, under the headline “Asia Tackles Poverty,” or, as Wolfe then put it, “some such masculine verb.” Sports headlines, of course, go in heavily for masculine verbs, almost to the point of unnecessary roughness, with teams trouncing, crushing, and smashing one another.
The most mistaken headline written in the modern era, surely, is the Chicago Daily Tribune‘s 1948 dazzler, “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Whoever wrote that, or had ordered it written, must have found it a touch difficult to come into work the next morning. A shame the Onion wasn’t in business in those days to mock it. I don’t see the Onion regularly, but two headlines from its pages that have stuck in my mind are “[Bill] Clinton Vaguely Disappointed by Lack of Assassination Attempts” and, shortly after the election in 2008 of Barack Obama, “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.”
I never worked on a metropolitan daily, and so never had a hand in composing headlines. I did work for a few years on a New York weekly political magazine, the New Leader, and suggested headlines for articles and reviews, not all of which found acceptance. For the review of the complaint-filled memoirs of an East Indian woman I suggested “Days of Whine and Neurosis,” but, alas, it didn’t get through. More than fifty years later I still can’t forget a New Leader headline that read “Agonizing Opportunity in Southeast Asia.” The reason I can’t forget it is that I hear the young Lauren Bacall saying, “You know how to create an ‘Agonizing Opportunity in Southeast Asia,’ don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”
I find pleasure in supplying titles, which are in effect headlines, for compositions of my own. My favorite among these is “Why Madame Bovary Couldn’t Make Love in the Concrete,” which comes from a line in a student paper from my teaching days. I still rather fancy the title “Don Juan Zimmerman,” which I gave to a short story about a skirt-chasing Chicago lawyer. The favorite of my own book titles is Fabulous Small Jews, a phrase I found in a Karl Shapiro poem.
A group of publisher’s editors, over drinks, decided that the title for a certain bestseller would be Lincoln’s Mother’s Doctor’s Dog, which has all the subjects of which bestsellers are made: Lincoln, mothers, doctors, and dogs. At this same barroom session they decided that the world’s dullest possible book title would be Canada, Sleeping Giant to the North. Sounds a winner in the dullness derby to me. Wuxtry, wuxtry, no need to read all about it.
