Dear Mr. Schmutter - They're Asking Me?

Newspaper advice columns are a weird tradition: “Let me ask a total stranger about my personal problems, so he can answer in front of thousands of other total strangers in nothing resembling a timely manner. And hope I don’t have to ask a follow-up question.” In a way, it’s a cheaper version of therapy. Like if you pay the going hourly rate, you get a whole forty-five minutes, there are no spectators to your personal problems, and there are free tissues. But for the cost of a newspaper subscription, this is what you get. And you’re going to be happy with it. Until now. Ever since Mordechai Schmutter began writing humor columns, people have been coming up to him and asking him questions. Most of them unprintable. And that’s weird, because, as he’s demonstrated in his columns, he is not an expert on anything. But some of the questions are printable, to the point where he has selflessly decided to start a second column, a column dedicated to answering these questions, a column that puts the “um” in Advice Column, a column that places a prime emphasis not on embarrassing the person asking the question, but on dwarfing it with the extent to which he embarrasses himself. And rather than give advice that is helpful only for that one person in one specific situation that may no longer be relevant, he heroically gives advice that’s not actually helpful at all. That way, everyone wins. This is his first collection of this column—a column that, above all, proves that there is no such thing as a ridiculous question. Just ridiculous answers.