Put another poet on the barbie.

Eat the writers.

Identify them when they’re about 7 or 8, at the first sign of interest in writing more than their names, or the earliest hint of an overheated imagination.

Raise them on a hormone-free diet for the picky Euro-market, truck them to the slaughterhouse at maturity and presto! Put another poet on the barbie.

Keep the young ones tender by forbidding them all physical exercise. (This would not be difficult in most cases, except for some sportswriters and the reflexively engage types who march in protest parades, hoisting heavy placards. But they could still be used for dog food, so long as the can was labeled “writers and writer byproducts” to prevent pathetic pensioners from mistaking the contents for pate.)

Think of the environmental benefits, such as a large supply of protein, which otherwise goes to waste and drags down the economy. College professors will attest that every institution in the land pours forth English majors and journalism students who haven’t a hope of ever making a living at writing. Most will end up in antisocial pursuits, like working for nonprofit foundations, or themselves become English teachers, compounding the glut.

The comparative few who do become writers will be responsible for the slaughter of thousands of trees, older and wiser than themselves, to provide paper pulp to feed their egos. Think how lustily the Sierra Club would applaud if they were milled into bratwurst before they could plunder a single pine.

Emaciated Third World fellaheen, confined to desert camps and a diet of tsetse flies and surplus Nebraska wheat chaff, could finally afford nutritious novelist McNuggets. Or TV writer tacos.

Some New York women writers could be marinated in white whine. The old bulls, too tough to eat, could be put out to stud. (Norman Mailer comes to mind. Indeed, Normie would probably volunteer.)

All right, all right, enough.

But are you laughing?

Well, Sam Locke said you would. Blame him either way.

This is what happens when people who write for a living are exposed to Theory.

They get socked with the Aristotelian unities, which are always a big help on deadline.

Locke referred several times to the unities--no, just don’t ask--in his lecture to the Valley chapter of the California Writers club on “How to Write Funny.”

He was somewhat ambiguous about their value.

He was less reticent about Jonathan Swift’s classic tract, “A Modest Proposal,” calling it “probably the best satire ever written.”

Swift suggested eating the Irish, in a tongue-in-cheek protest against their poverty that was politically daring for England in 1729. He made no mention of eating writers, a suggestion the old scribbler might have found less hilarious.

Locke’s ability to write funny earned him a whole page in “Who’s Who in American Theater,” a boatload of screen, stage and TV writing checks and gigs like this lecture.

It was a quiet Saturday morning in Woodland Hills, and 43 women and three men had assembled for the Writers Club meeting in a public room behind the fast-food outlets in Fallbrook Mall.

There was no explanation of why women outnumbered men so heavily. The club was founded in 1910 by Jack London and some macho buddies in Oakland back when London was the king of the hairy-chested writers, according to Mary Rubio of Chatsworth, the chapter president.

Only three of those present identified themselves as humor writers. Many said they write children’s books. Maybe after a week inventing adventures for “Wartsy the Magic Toad” they needed a laugh.

They didn’t get it. The lecture was serious stuff, even without getting into the Aristotelian unities, which of course Locke did.

The essence of humor, Locke told the group, was to carry a logical line of thought to an illogical conclusion, resulting in “a clash of customs or behavior,” and best of all, in an area of emotional sensitivity.

“Tragedy and humor are very close. Why are doctors funnier than lawyers? Because doctors, your life depends on them. Lawyers, you’re already set up to hate.

“The more potentially tragic it is, the more powerful the humor,” he said, making the point with a tale about his habitually frugal parents. When his father suffered a sudden physical attack and appeared to be dying, Locke said, his mother told him to call an ambulance. In his nervousness he dialed the wrong number.

“ ‘Here, Sam, take your pop,’ she tells me. Then she grabs the phone and calls the operator: ‘Hello operator, we dialed the wrong number, and we need credit for the following call. . . .’ ”

“From the ridiculous to the sublime,” he said, a tone of awe in his voice.

It’s also a good idea for comedy writers to visit catastrophes on beautiful, rich and successful characters, he said, “because people don’t like people who are more successful than themselves.”

He had neighbors, he recalled, who appeared to have boundless wealth and talent, a storybook romance “and a string of people in limousines visiting them every day.” When they unexpectedly divorced and their lives collapsed, the neighborhood was thrilled.

“The animal in me felt deep gratification, and it’s that animal in us that writers cater to,” he admitted.

See? Fire up the barbecue.