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Wait, your ‘Top Ten’ are all true and unfunny

Published onMar 23, 2009
Wait, your ‘Top Ten’ are all true and unfunny

I’ve commented on this before, but sometimes news headlines can be completely misleading. Usually, the articles that follow them are even worse, because bad headlines often reflect either a bad or distracted editorial staff that for some reason places less weight on its headlines - essentially the most important aspect of getting people to read the article - than other things, whatever they end up being.

So here’s an article from Warner Brother’s Extra covering, and I apologize for getting into celebrity gossip here, David Letterman’s marriage to longtime girlfriend Regina Lasko. I’m a huge Letterman (well, Late Show, to be more accurate) fan, so I couldn’t help being interested in the story, especially when I saw the following headline:

10 Things about Letterman’s Wedding!

Let’s ignore the 90s rainbow TV news-style background, the completely random appearance of (I think) Mario Lopez’s face above the logo, and the fact that a video plays automatically with the sound every time you so much as glance at the site. When I read the headline, I assumed, given the obvious reference to Letterman’s hilarious Top Ten List and the somewhat whimsical exclamation point at the end of the headline, that it would be a somewhat snarky list of 10 jokes about Dave’s marriage, somewhat like this 2003 (please forgive me) People spread about the birth of Letterman’s son, Harry.

You’d think that would be the case, but unfortunately, the article just lists 10 completely true facts about Letterman, the marriage, and the news coverage surrounding it in a sentence or two. In fact, the only thing remotely funny about the article is that it ends most (but not all, God forbid a little consistency) of those facts with a cheeky exclamation point, as if doing so makes each useless piece of information worth putting on something other than toilet paper. For example:

8. The wedding was so top secret that Regis Philbin didn’t know Dave was getting hitched — and they’ve known each other since 1983!

Badum-ching? I don’t get it.

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