Why is it great? We annotated this wonderful story last year, and the focus of the annotation was the rarity of humor in longform. This line makes me laugh even without the context of the story, which is about a war between rival ice-cream truck owners that gets pretty Gunfight at the Soft-Serve Corral (with popsicles instead guns). But at the same time I’m laughing, the line shows the inherent decency of the ice-cream truck operator. In the annotation, the writers put it best: “How do you showcase a person’s serious emotion toward something that others might find funny, yet do so without belittling or sounding snarky?” That’s what they accomplished in this great sentence, and in this great piece.
↧