I wrote a joke yesterday.

The premise is okay, but the execution needs work. It goes:

I'm gonna put an assortment of my personal essays into one book, and call them a manual biography.

The punchline relies upon the audience associating a manual biography with an autobiography.

Unfortunately, the phrasing does a lousy job of leading the audience to the punchline. This was confirmed by my test audience. My mother was part of the test audience.

Meanwhile.

I've written a lot of poems. I hadn't read 'em for a while, but I remember they were publishable-ish. My ego could use a boost...and I guess I could deign to be published...so I looked back over the ol' oeuvre.

The good news: my poems are pretty good.

The bad news: my poems are all about male insecurity and masturbation.

There's not much of a market for that.

I presented this problem to my mother. "Should I widen the scope of my subject matter," I asked, "or should I publish a book of poems about male insecurity and masturbation?"

Mom thought hard for a moment, and then her eyes lit up.

"If you did the latter," she said, "it would definitely be a manual biography!"