By LYNN HOPPES
The Orlando Sentinel

Sports sections have had a hard time putting humor in the sports section. What do you do to try to get people to laugh at your section? Or is your section totally serious day in and day out? Do you see a place for it in your section?

Brad Nolan, Naperville (Ill.) Sun: We try and have as much fun in our section – the more fun, humor the better. But it's not always easy. Columns are a good opportunity for this in our section as well as some of our rails or breakouts. For instance, we do a Who's Hot and Who's Not for NFL players each week and the editor who takes care of this usually adds a joke or two when it works. Headlines are another good place for humor.

Michael Peters, Beaumont (Texas) Enterprise: One caller recently said it was all the mistakes we make that keep him laughing at our section. Unfortunately, we probably have a little too much unintentional humor and not enough of the kind you're asking about. It's important to not take yourself or your subject matter too seriously. But like everything else in life, I think moderation is the key. Most of our light touches are in the form of packages and columns. As an example – when quarterback David Carr threatened not to cut his hair until Houston won back-to-back games, we showed readers what he would look like wearing a number of famous hairstyles. We've also done other packages that weren't necessarily humorous, but were definitely light-hearted. Column writing might be one of the best ways to bring humor into the section – as long as you're picking the right tone and the right spots. We're lucky to have writers whose styles make them naturals.

Celeste Williams, Fort Worth Star-Telegram: Humor in the section: We try to have at least one humorous, edgy or off the wall feature per day in the section. We also have a humor column that runs three times a week – a Fans' Insider on Wednesday, an irreverent Week in Review on Sunday and a Two Bits feature on Monday that includes five topics to discuss around the water cooler on Monday and other fun topics. I have one writer who does all three for me. He's also my go-to guy when I'm looking for something that's a little big skewed. We have a Let Dave Do It feature in which he's been a batboy for our local minor league team, a member of the Mavs' ManiAACs male dance team (yes, he learned the dance routines), he tried curling and wrote about it during the Winter Games and next week he'll be a member of the Frog Horn delegation that celebrates each TCU touchdown by blowing a 120-decibel train horn. We love our fun features.

Jay Greeson, Chattanooga Times: In truth, we struggle to find humor. It's equal parts space and the difficulty of writing funny for us. We have one columnist that does it well and another that is subtly funny, but that's about it. We have incorporated some "tale of the tape," type stuff and mixed in some off the wall items that have ranged from capsules to pick columns to rankings. At times it can be difficult to make space for in my opinion, because if humor is done badly it's the worst waste of space of them all. I mean, a bad feature is still a feature on a player, team or individual in our area – bad humor is plain painful. I love it when we can be funny, but being funny and writing funny are two completely different attributes.

Glenn Schwarz, San Francisco Chronicle: I'm fortunate to have two columnists who provide humor, not to mention some beat writers with writing chops whose prose makes readers smile. We also have clever headline writers who help set a tone for the section.

Christopher Miller, Minneapolis Star-Tribune: Our Page 2 has been revamped in the past year. It is themed every day, with a centerpiece ranging from "10,000 stories" (a play on Minnesota as the Land of 10,000 Lakes) to a Q and A to a Weekend Spotlight to an expanded column to a letters page. But we also run "Buzz" items, quick-hitters that can be lifted from internet sites or created by staff members. We have a full-time Page 2 guy, Michael Rand, who can write funny and knows what our readers will think is funny. When he writes a Q and A, for example, many of the questions are tongue in cheek. We have figured out some writers who can write short quips (NFL writer Mark Craig is an example, with one-liners on NFL games: "In preparation for Sunday's home opener, the Broncos had "We Want Jay!" chants piped into practice."). The sacrifice, in this day of dramatic space cuts, is that we're forced to cut a page of "traditional" coverage, so there are cuts to coverage elsewhere. Also, we've made a concerted effort to inject humor into our covers, where appropriate, by trying alternative story forms and quick-hitting charts that take a light-hearted look at something relating to the story.

Mike Sherman, Daily Oklahoman: This is a great question. One of our editors does a column under the name Mr. Monday and it runs, surprise, in our SportsMonday our Monday morning section that is printed in a tab format. I'd like to have something like it every day. We're going to ask one of our page 2 columnists to introduce more humor into his package. He's funny on the radio so he'd better be funny in print to.

Steve Quintana, San Antonio Express-News: Our Page 2 is quirky, lighthearted, funny. It's an open canvass for some of our top writers. Each day of the week, a different writer takes the page. We give them license to cover any topic they want, and encourage them to make people laugh. Our goal on Page 2 is to entertain and inform. Some of our readers say it's their favorite page in the whole paper.

Keith Herrell, Cincinnati Post: Regarding humor: There's certainly a place for humor in Sports sections, but with our limited space we are unable to run a regular humor feature. Probably the most humor you'll find in the section comes from bright headlines (but no puns, please).

Gary Rogo, Connecticut Post: Humor certainly has a place in sports sections, and we attempt to find a place for it in ours. Are we laugh-out-loud funny? No, but we can at least, I hope, put a smile on a reader's face. We have a couple of outlets for humor. First, is our Sunday page 2.We run a column, courtesy of the L.A. Times, of selected morning briefings from the previous week. These are short items, no more than a paragraph or two. Two of our columnists on that page, one staffer and one correspondent, write about 15 inches each, broken into different categories. We asked them to write with a light touch and most of the time they succeed. Are they funny? Sometimes. Do they take themselves too seriously? Never. The other outlet we use are breakouts to accompany stories. For example, if the local AHL hockey team is the playoffs, offer 5 reasons why the games are worth attending. If, as happened in 2004 and '05, two major sporting events will be competing for attention in our small state during the same week, offer the readers advantages to attending one event over the other. Funny? Not all the time, but let's have some fun here. Do we offer enough humor? Unlikely, for whatever reasons. Deadlines, tight space, you name them.

Mike Bass, St. Paul Pioneer Press: We have added a daily Page 2, first on Sundays and now daily. It has a magazine-type feel to it. It includes a humor/one-liner element known as "The Loop" 2-3 times per week, written by a couple of staffers. We moved one of our daily columnists, Bob Sansevere, onto this page (a page we call The Daily Dose) to write short, front-of-the-magazine-type blurbs – everything from mini-columns to Q&As to players' favorite this-and-that to athletes' punch lines to non-athletes' sporting moments. We have polls and reader comments on those polls, as well as a guest diary from a local NASCAR racer, and more. Outside of Page 2, we have other features. On Sundays, we also have point-counterpoints between our beat reporters on items every week, and we answer fans' e-mail questions (we answer hundreds of Vikings online questions, as well). There definitely is a place in our section for humor, as well as commentary, analysis, attitude, the off-beat, etc. Still, nothing beats breaking a big story.

Tom Bergeron, Newark Star-Ledger: Humor "Make me laugh" is one of the main things I'm looking for. How do we do it? A number of ways. 1. Graphics: For a story on Olivia Manning on the day of the Brothers Bowl, we did a graphic on noteworthy mothers, from Mother Theresa, to best TV mom past (Mrs. C) and present (Debra Barone), Mommie Dearest, that Iowa Mom (septuplet lady), Mother of all Battles, the Motherland to "Mother" – and unappreciated song on Synchronicity by The Police. 2. Within news displays. We had daily rails on men and women from the U.S. Open. And we made sure they weren't all top players. My favorite: Don King. We interviewed him on his tennis days. We do a comment on each of the Top 25 teams in the poll. Some are serious, most are not. And we love the phrase: "What we learned." Lots to work with there. 3. Q&A format. We either interject humor in questions we ask (Randy Jackson of American Idol fame is a big tennis fan, we did a Q&A with him before the open last year. I made sure we asked him how many times a week does something ask him about his days in the Jackson Five. We often use Q&A format to explain news events or add to special event coverage. Here we supply both the Q and the A - and if you can't be funny then ...

Mark Faller, Arizona Republic: We produce an irreverant page 2 column called The Heat Index five days a week, devoting one full-time writer to it. It is supposed to be funny and light-hearted, although we've had opportunities to do some live reporting and commentary with the page as well. It runs about 22" with art and is the page's centerpiece. The page also has our TV/calendar listings and usually wire briefs. Hopefully, the readers agree there is still room for fun and games in the sports section.

Brent Neal, Lansing (Mich.) Journal: We have virtually no Dave Barry-type, laugh-out-loud humor in our section. But we do try to provide some make-you-smile fun. We attempt to do that through several methods: headlines with some attitude, stories with voice, a fun breakout that goes with a serious story and local stories. Admittedly, we don't as much as we used to because breaking news and added online responsibilities have taken precedence over providing fun, but we do see a place for it in our section.

John Quinn, Philadelphia Inquirer: Sports sections have had a hard time putting humor in the sports section. What do you do to try to get people to laugh at your section? Frank Fitzpatrick has a weekly notesy Friday column that is almost exclusively tongue in cheek. Don McKee has a weekly notesy Sunday column that is humorous/critical. We have a Sunday Page Two collection of items called Stuff, put together by Don Steinberg that is clearly aimed at the lighter side. Or is your section totally serious day in and day out? Do you see a place for it in your section?

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