“Chief Hosa Lodge, the handsome stone pavilion built by the city in Genesee Mountain Park, has opened its doors this summer under a new management,” announced the June-July 1921 issue of Municipal Facts, an informative, if slightly propagandistic, publication once put out by the City and County of Denver. In…

What the fuck was Michael Brown thinking when he decided to go on The Colbert Report on March 28? Survey says: He wasn’t thinking. Matter of fact, the ex-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief is getting pretty famous for not thinking, an oversight reflected in everything from his infamous musings about…

It’s springtime in the Rockies, and things are officially getting weird. For the third year in a row, Governor Owens and Mayor Hickenlooper engaged in their annual game of catch, and right when Owens was answering a reporter’s question, Hick up and fired the high heat, beaning the Guv square…

You wouldn’t want to be What’s So Funny’s child. Sure, it might sound like a real choice deal: the good looks, the slice of the What’s So Funny fortune, the awe on people’s faces when they overhear you at some Tuscany villa dinner party saying, “That’s right — Funny, as…

Every other week, we, the fine citizens of Denver, are afforded the rare opportunity to flex our sinewy, civic muscles, explore our carnal yearnings for environmental consciousness, fill our purple bins with waste of the bottle and newsprint variety, and scream to the heavens, “Recycle this, oh ye god of…

As a cocksure leader rather than a cock-dubious follower, I have always managed to buck the trends. (I have also managed to tuck the bends, at least back in my seafaring days when a little man-on-man action with a tattooed first mate by the name of Queequeg wasn’t so frowned…

Sue Garber slides a small piece of paper across the table: a drawing done by her daughter, Emily Rae Rice, of Emily’s hamster, Leche. “She called him ‘Leche’ because he was white,” Sue explains. Two days before she died in the Denver City Jail, Emily had given the picture to…

She almost spotted me. God, that would have infuriated my mother. All that preparation (the workout sessions in the pool, the treadmill, the baths) blown in one instant because Sylvia — I’m sorry, Pond Hollow Sylvia James, as she is known in the circuit — caught wind of me and…

Through no fault of my own, actual pieces of news sometimes, somehow, work their way into the inner confines of What’s So Funny headquarters. Situated comfortably in my vacuum-sealed, germ-free giant obelisk that hovers menacingly above the city, kestrel-like in its vigilance, one would think mine would be an impregnable…

Look, I’m not going to lie to you. Originally, this column was going to be a cheap attempt to make fun of a hippie. I wasn’t really proud of that, but I was going to do it anyway. Because it was so there for the taking. It was as if…

My freshman year of college was not going so well when my mother paid a visit. My attempts to write a column for the shitty school rag had blown up in my face like Peter North on an Asian, and it seemed my sophisticated new Connecticut acquaintances were not nearly…

Is What’s So Funny really going to write about the Denver Broncos again? Doesn’t that little fancy-pantsed dandelion remember the outpouring of heinous, misspelled hate mail sent by the slack-jawed “Superfans” the last time he set pen to paper on the Donkeys? Is he really mimicking the disbelieving voice of…

The clock was pushing closer and closer toward three in the morning, and Jody Velarde had still not heard from her boy. For most mothers, this would not be that unusual; few expect to get a call from a grown son after he’s spent a night out on the town…

Like any good Colorado native, as a kid I was placed on a bus, Saturday after Saturday, and shipped off to the hills to learn how to ski. I do not recall requesting such a thing, nor do I recall being asked if this was an activity that I might…

Have you seen What’s So Funny around lately? If not, you haven’t been paying attention, sucka. Because I am what the kids call “on the scene.” Not a day goes by when you can’t catch me fox-trotting down the 16th Street Mall, deftly avoiding eye contact with the imploring homeless…

Well, gang, it’s been one hell of a year, and What’s So Funny is officially spent. Really, we’re fucking exhausted. Beat. Sapped. Expended. Out of gas. It’s gotten so bad that we’ve simply started listing synonyms in an effort to make this column long enough to declare it finished –…

What’s So Funny was angry when the clerk at the ticket counter informed him that the plane to San Antonio was full and that he would not be able to switch out his middle seat. He muttered his way through security, sure that he would find himself sandwiched between some…

Gather ’round, children, it’s time that you hear a What’s So Funny holiday tale full of wonder and cheer. It’s not every day that What’s So Funny gets to wax all daily columnist and stuff insipid doses of Hallmark happiness down your throat in an attempt to harvest some sort…

In every person’s childhood, there’s a special moment that stands out from the rest like a corpulent cheerleader. For some, it was the day they defied the hapless music teacher by saying, “I will no longer play this neophyte recorder like these unskilled philistines. For I am a far more…

The front entrance to Herman’s Hideaway looked like a hippie revolving door on a recent Friday night. A steady parade of dreadlocked white people danced to the music of Lion SoulJahs for fifteen to twenty minutes, then filtered into the shuttle bus waiting patiently out front in the loading zone,…