Too much bubblewrap, not enough toy

Is Kevin Myers having trouble hitting his word-count? His latest effort is remarkable not for assaults on logic or decency, but for the extraordinary exhaustion of its prose style. Look at the first paragraph. 

Whoa there. Few people who know the RTE HQ at Montrose in Donnybrook would lament plans to bulldoze the lot -- but that doesn't mean that RTE should then be allowed to charge off with fresh plans, once again misusing and abusing its virtual monopoly in the marketplace.

What is the distinction between misusing and abusing here? What does either add to the sense which the other doesn't supply? It's a small point, perhaps, but this is like the thematic anouncement of a laziness that infects the whole article. It is particularly invidious with jokes, which depend on clarity and speed. 

Now, I accept that putting the terms "government" and "decisions" together is like putting "frogspawn" and "nuclear fission" in the same sentence. Only by a strenuous feat of grammar and imagination can the former be construed as being capable of making the latter.

It's not punchy, is it? We have the woozy verbosity of the opening. Worse, it muffs its own punchline. Frogspawn making nuclear fission just doesn't work as an image. He wants something which could conceivably try to split atoms, but inevitably and hilariously fail. And nuclear fission is surely "produced" rather than made.

The whole thing is so clumsy we start to look for a culprit. Did he mean that nuclear fission couldn't make frogspawn? It's marginally funnier that way around. Did he mix up former and latter?

Either way, this reeks of first thoughts.

Despite the €160 licence fee, true public service broadcasting remains as rare on RTE as nude sunbathing on Radio Telefis Saudi Arabia.

Pick one, Kevin. The joke is either the incongruity of nudity in Saudi Arabia, or the incongruity of the Irish language designation of a Saudi broadcaster, or the incongruity of nudity on the radio. Don't just slop them all on and hope something sticks.

But to wait with bated breath for a lucid, well-informed debate on this subject from our elected representatives is probably like expecting a useful forum in Haiti on saving the polar bear.

This is more flab. Drop with bated breath. It's a cliche, and it adds nothing. Choose either lucid or well-informed. Drop probably. And come up with something better than a forum, for the love of God. We should be laughing at your punchline, not listening to the small voice pointing out that there is nothing inherently ridiculous, after all, in an environmental conference which doesn't limit its concerns to the animals outside the window. 

His peroration shows the same clutter of verbal underbrush between the reader and the point.

For RTE is rather like the multi-seat constituency, the Hapsburg chin and Lurgan: almost no one wants it, but equally, no one quite knows how to get rid of it.

This has potential, but he gabbles and wastes it. What might a second draft have looked like? Without altering the materials of the joke, we get this.

RTE is like the multi-seat constituency, the Hapsburg chin and Lurgan: nobody wants it, but nobody knows how to get rid of it.

It's still not Groucho Marx, but it works as a joke because someone has thought about it for longer than it took to ink it onto a beermat. Why won't Myers?