Just checked my Yahoo e-mail and on my mail account’s homepage I was greeted with this headline:
Jackie Chan to star in Hollywood spy comedy
I was actually convinced that there had to be some kind of a twist or play on words that I wasn’t getting. Nope. Turns out that the subject of the article “Jackie Chan to star in Hollywood spy comedy” is that Jackie Chan is set to star in a Hollywood spy comedy.
It’s kind of refreshing to see pun-less headlines. Those must get tiring to think of.
What are you expecting from the AP? Their headlines are usually straightfoward and non-punny. I will admit, however, that “Jackie Chan to star in Hollywood spy comedy” is something that’s happened before, so the headline is a bit generic. If I had written the headline, I probably would have used the title of the film: “Jackie Chan is ‘The Spy Next Door’ in new comedy.”
More descriptive and only five characters longer, or only one character longer if you drop ‘the.’ That probably would have worked. Maybe they avoided doing something like that because they thought it sounded too much like a press release.
The lack of puns is fine because this is a very short story that doesn’t give a lot of details. But it’s a dull headline. (And I pause here to note, as I always do, that you can’t tell if a headline was written by a reporter or an editor.) What makes it weird is the ‘Hollywood.’ I know he does a lot of movies that aren’t made in Hollywood, but most of them aren’t seen by English-speaking. audiences in the first place, and this story was written for that English-speaking audience. So it sort of leaves you wondering, ‘What, was he considering starring in a Weehauken spy comedy?’
Could we put it into a sticky that reporters never write headlines? Editors write headlines. Min Lee undoubtedly never saw the headline until it hit the AP wire.
But reporters do often write suggested headlines, and if that headline is even minimally satisfactory, the person designing the page may just slap it on and start working on the next task.
I liked this one ‘Mary-Kate Can Go Back to Whatever It Is She Does’