Not-so-great first sentences

My principle objection to the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is that the finalist entries are always so formulaic and predictable (not to mention the fact that no one remembers why anyone would make fun of B-W's prose anyway):

For years, the winners of the "official" Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have usually written a long, long, self-consciously tedious sentence, with a sudden reversal in the last five words as if the writer simply popped a blood vessel at the wrong moment. They telegraph the joke like a bad prizefighter.

Once you get the gimmick--and it's pretty hard to miss--they stop being amusing, or even interesting.

So while we're on the subject of opening lines that telegraph their joke:

Sometimes you can identify an individual creative voice from nothing more than an opening phrase. A few notes: Ah yes, Beethoven. A well-balanced line: Dickens. Obviously Dickens. A compound, stream of consciousness sentence bristling with obscure-but-not-too-obscure hipster-ironic cultural references: Oh. It's Dennis Miller.*

Consider this recent sample:

Hey, folks. Tonight, we're going to talk about Nancy Pelosi, because the mere thought of the nosy neighbor from Bewitched as third in line to be the leader of the free world has stoked me into a Rain Man-like panic attack.

It's all there: The long sentence rushing to a breathless conclusion; the carefully modulated irony of the references (simply mentioning "Bewitched" would have been too trite, but mentioning the neighbor is clever and arch); the adding of a middle-brow I-paid-more-attention-in-college-than-you references ("third in line to be leader of the free world") to remind you that this is intellectual humor--the works. The familiarity can be as painful as hearing Robin Williams ad-lib "Lo, the moon hangs low like a testicle" again.

And I write this as someone who thought that Dennis Miller was the smartest, funniest thing to come along in quite awhile--back in 1988.

Alas, Miller is one of the unburied casualties of 9/11, the horror of which led him to give up satire for smug playground jeering.

*Acknowledgement to the late lamented Spy Magazine, from whose regular "Review of Reviewers" the general shape of this paragraph is stolen. If they'd wanted to be around to defend their intellectual property rights, they shoulda not gone under.