A comedy theory: The smaller geographic area a news source covers, the greater the comedic potential inherent in the stories that news source publishes. Thus the nationwide New York Times is rarely funny, while my local daily rag, The Oregonian, is full of stories that read like some of the less-funny SNL skits (stories, for example, about a cemetery lake). How are local newspapers so funny? I imagine that on a day the Washington Post runs an article about increasing car bombs and declining oil revenues in Iraq, the Mosul Herald Tribune has a 2,700 word piece about a local Shiite pinball mechanic who is frantically training a duck to fight a chicken.

Although not all large news sources are unfunny. The BBC–which covers the entire world–has those wacky stories every day. And I guess a NASA newspaper which covered the entire solar system would be pretty funny, too–if only for the image of a 1920s newsboy in a spacesuit hollering, “EXTREEY! EXTREEY! READ ALL ABOUT IT! MANIC MARTIAN MARTYR MARS MASTER MOON MOGUL’S MALAYSIAN MEAL!” That would be really, really funny. So forget the theory.

Anyway… this all came to mind today when, after spending the good part of an hour scouring the NYT for something funny to blog about only to be depressed by dead Burmese and a dying candidacy. So I switch to The Oregonian’s website and the first headline I see is a story about the caffeine addled seventh-graders of Twality Middle School in Tigard, Oregon: “Energy Drink Rattles School.” Some of these kids are drinking as many as five energy drinks a day! According to an email sent by teachers to the entire school: “The result is that some students are literally drunk on a caffeine buzz, or falling off a caffeine crash.”

Of course I went over to the school to see for myself. Outside the school a ninety pound sixth-grader student had just mainlined three Amp(TM) energy drinks and was chasing a schoolmate with a 12-foot piece of vinyl siding he had stripped from a nearby Seven Eleven; another student had passed out on top of a flagpole; the surviving teachers had constructed a crude blockade from desks and energy drink machines (ha!) and had barricaded themselves in the women’s bathroom.

I turned away from the scene in disgust: There was nothing humorous about this situation. The Oregonian was right: Twality Middle School was a hell-hole. Then I caught the sight of the ragged edge of a newspaper. It was today’s edition of the student newspaper, the Twality Middle School Pioneer, smeared with blood and shit and Red Bull(TM). The lead headline: “Bobby Renquist Peed a Little On Himself in the Bathroom.”

Actually, I’m going to keep working on my theory.