New York Times, Wednesday, June 6, 2018

I would best describe the birth of this puzzle as a collision between serendipity and luck. After stumbling on this quip by Sir Ken Dodds (b. 1927 d. 2018) through happenstance, my first reaction was a hearty chuckle. But then my constructor sense began to tingle when I noticed that "I HAVE" and "FOR IT" were each 5 characters long. Could the rest of the quip be symmetrical too? As luck would have it, yes!

After quickly building a grid around the central theme of "WHEN IT GETS BAD" I choose the scrabbly OJIBWA as my anchor fill entry, and the rest of the puzzle fell into place with what Joel would later describe as "lively fill." The whole effort was completed in a 24-hour window. Quite a change in experience from the years I spent crafting a different puzzle which was published last year.

Overall, I was pleased with the result, with the junk mildly limited to OSIS, ANS, and OSA. My assessment was confirmed several months after submission when the puzzle was accepted at face value and without my need to make any revisions (another first for me!).

Many thanks to Will and Joel for opting to go with a quip puzzle despite some views that this style is passé.

And lastly, to Sir Ken Dodds "Age doesn't matter... unless you're a cheese."

Quip puzzle, riffing on taking something for kleptomania. Amusing one-liner.

With entries of length 14 13 14, you can only really place them in rows 4, 8, 12. (You could put them in 3, 8, 13 to give yourself better spacing, but that produces unsightly black bars like in yesterday's grid.) Sometimes as a constructor, you find a single option that fortuitously works, and you count your lucky stars!

I found it a bit odd that the 5-letter entries bracketing the quote — I HAVE and FOR IT — were in row 2, not more elegantly in row 1. But I imagine it facilitated better fill, so I'm perfectly fine with that trade-off.

With quip puzzles, it's so important to add in zazz through strong long bonuses. Otherwise, the puzzle can feel thin if the solver doesn't find the one-liner that funny. I loved WHOVILLE, OJIBWA, SUBURBIA, IDITAROD, even COIN-OP, US NAVY. Wow, that's a lot!

I didn't love ROBO, ELL, OSIS, OSA, OTRO, ANS, SPYS. Yikes, that's a lot!

Usually, I'd heavily lean toward cleaning up the puzzle at the price of taking away some of the good long fill. But 1.) there's not a lot Richard could have done, as he's already at 78 words, 2.) the themer lengths are SO constraining, and 3.) quip puzzles really, really, really need bonuses.

Perhaps a couple of minor fixups could have helped — cheater squares at the S of YAMS and first S of SPYS could have stricken out ROBO, ELL, OSA, SPYS. Or maybe at the Y of YAMS and last S of SPYS.

It takes an amazing one-liner to carry a puzzle. This one wasn't there for me, but I did appreciate some of the bonuses.