On Writing Humor

allenparker said:

So, why did the chicken cross the road?

awp

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To prove to the possum that it could be done.

What's your best source of humor? Do you have to sit and think about how to make something funny - or do you find humor in everything around you? Does it come naturally to us all, or do you think we humorists have a particular bent toward the absurd that other people enjoy, but don't know how to emulate?

Or do you think other writers just fear our funny shoes?

I find ideas for humor catch me unexpected, usually from conversations with friends where one thing leads to another and suddenly I find myself going "Wait a minute. That's an idea." Having silly, intelligent, and irreverent friends helps.

Ditto on the friends. It helps, too, if they have a cynical, twisted world view.

I think having a twisted world view helps a lot with humor. You need to see things differently from everybody else and you have to be able to see something funny in it. The world is a scary place but humor makes it easier to live in.

I have two autisic boys (5 and 2) and a sick wife. In the car, coming home one day, all kinds of things went wrong and my wife looked at me and said is this a conspiracy? I told her it was, that the boys get together at night and plot against us.

I think my wife said it best, you have to laugh or you will go crazy. This applies to the world at large as well. If we don't see the humor in everyday things then we will go crazy at all the things that are wrong.

Allen, you think writing humor is hard, try writing horror with humor in it. Not easily done.

Humor doesn't have a genre. It's like saying drama is a genre. Humor is sometimes guffaw, sometimes wit, sometimes a light take on the human condition--ah, and also sometimes a heavy take on the human condition. It's the loud or subtle buzz that has more nuances than our minds can calculate. It's that release that makes us cope.

I agree - I find the only way I can keep from complete, flippin' insanity is to find the humor in everything around me. Even when I'm trying to be serious, or trying to offer serious advice, I can't help but sprinkle it with humor because that's how I see everything around me. I think that's what makes 'our kind' so unique, if you will.

Whenever crap happens, even if it hits an emotional cord at first, I'm always able to look back at it and find the absurdity.

I have been known to brainstorm ideas to come up with the silliest, most outrageous jokes to include. Mostly, I just steal from everyday life.

Very few things in this world are universally funny. What makes anything funny is how we perceive it. I need to switch to my "funny" mindset to see the humour in things. Once I have that, I can find humour in just about anything.

Unfortunately, if I'm in a grumpy mood then nothing is funny to me. So I don't write anything funny, which makes me even grumpier, and the whole thing just keeps spiralling into something that can be quite depressing. Bill.

My family hates it when I make them laugh. I find humour in everything. They feel guilty when they burst into peals of laughter at a funeral or some sombre occasion when they are trying to be dead serious. I just can't help myself. I am the one they don't want to be with if they are stopped by the police for speeding. But I'm also the one to get them out of the ticket...it's the sweating they do between realizing I'm sitting beside them in the passenger seat and the cop walking away from the car with a smile on his face and his ticket book unopened that they can't take. I am relentless...and I guess that's what they hate about me the most.

Number one rule in my humour writing>>> NOTHING IS SACRED. If it made them blush or feel bad or feel guilty or humiliated...If it made them cry...if it made them experience any emotion whatsoever, it's something I will use for my humour writing.

I wrote a humour essay for CBC Radio...that I later recorded...it was played on the air. It was about me lying about throwing a rock that split my older brother's head wide open. There was nothing humurous in the moment the rock landed on his skull. Nothing humourous about me lying about who was at fault and continuing to lie for twenty years about the incident. But I made it funny. My brother phoned me after he heard it on the air. Call display told me it was him...he was laughing too hard to say anything.

For what it’s worth, here is my theory on humour (Writing or standup, I suppose.)


I have this “100 People in a Room” Theory.

Here’s the breakdown:

You have 100 people in the room.

12 are going to laugh at anything. They will laugh either because they’re afraid others will think they’re stupid if they don’t, or because they can always feign superiority over others if nobody else laughs.

8 are not going to laugh, no matter what you say. They are either miserable or far too superior to have fun.

The other 80? This is where COMMONALITY comes into play. The TIES THAT BIND. You have to figure out what that is.

You see Jimmy the mechanic in the front row. You have a carburetor joke that will split his spleen…but besides Jimmy, only 12 other people will be laughing. That’s just dead air, really.

All these people have mothers. They have all fallen down once in their lives. They have all come through rough relationship problems. They have all had some kind of experiences IN a car. Most of them have siblings. These 80 people are the nuts you have to crack. Don’t tell them about carburetors. Tell them about the frustrations of mothers. Tell them about losing your mind in a checkout counter. Tell them about families. You find that common ground where experience will intersect with the most of your readers/listeners…that’s where you will get the biggest laughs.

I think there is also something to be said for levels of commonality. Of your 80 who will find humor in what you have to say, 30 are going to find one part funny, while the other 50 see something completely different but equally humorous.

I have an unfortunately true story I was just retelling the other day, wherein I was forced by an old boss (in my past profession) to bathe a dead, frozen dog so he could lie to the owner about time of death. A percentage of people are going to be furious, because they've recently lost a pet - but they can relate to being forced to do something absurd by a ridiculous employer, which is technically the moral of the story. If such a thing can possibly have a moral.

I actually use that story and a few others to convince people as to why they should avoid entering into my past profession. All it accomplishes is a few belly laughs and shakes of the head, though.

I've often wondered if telling the same story via the written word as opposed to just telling it, would have the same effect.

Is there a difference between a stand up comic and a humorist? Could Mark Twain be a stand-up comic-probably in the sense say of a Lenny Bruce.

Not being any of the above I suppose I am stating the obvious but what the hey-first in my not so sought after opinion-ya gotta be a good writer!

So now it is time for me the less knowledgable to just shut-up and listen and enjoy this thread which is a terrific idea-thanks-Dave

Great thread and I agree with much of what's already been said.

Perspective is important. I think we need to see things as most see them and also have the ability to see them from other (skewed) angles. I'll sometimes lie on the floor in the kitchen or turn my chair around to face a wall or walk backwards from one room to another - all serving to change my perspective. (Although they didn't begin that way. They began as usually-futile attempts to alter some bad mojo when my universe wasn't unfolding as I thought it should.)

I used to wonder at comics insisting that humour was born of pain. I get it now. I believe to truly understand something, you need to know its flip side - without knowing darkness you can't really appreciate light.

I can't say I really understand the process of being funny though. I suspect it's innate. Some folks have it, some don't.

Surely the talent of a real comic is to make the painful and obscene seem funny to as wide an audience as possible.

Along those lines - do you think humor can be taught? I don't mean stand-up comic type humor, but the ability to see humor and then convey it well through writing? I tend to believe it's an innate ability. A lot of people can find humor in many situations, but the ability to convey, or share that humor in a way that gives a wide audience a good chuckle can't really be taught.

Sure, maybe that's my ego talking, but I like to think people like us really ARE special. And not just because we're so goodlooking.

I don't think it can be taught. Most people don't see the world the way we do and there isn't a way for you to teach them on how to make a bad situation funny. They can't see the thread that connects the two. Most people see the world as black or white, it's people like us that can mix the two and make gray.

I'm telling you, the way my life has been going lately if I didn't see the world in this way I would have landed in an asylum where the only thing sharp I could play with was myself. If I couldn't make my wife laugh I fear she would have long ago been there as well, saving a room for me and making sure I take the pretty blue pills each night.

To be a funny person I think you might have to be a bit insane. You have to be able to see this side of the world in order to see the flip side of the coin as Allan put it.

Life can be bad, really bad at times and if you can't see the humor in it then this life is pointless. Laughter is the best medicine and it can keep you young, well it will leave you with wrinkles.

I agree I was born on April Fool's Day, so I just tell people I was born that way. But I think we were all born this way -- either that or we were dropped on our heads as children -- because we CAN see things the way we do.

It's what keeps us sane, and if we find a way to share that with others, maybe we keep them sane, too.

I love telling stories, and I love being able to make people laugh. To combine the two, and write interesting and unique stories that make people laugh is an unbelievable rush. Laugh-lines are the solid evidence of a life well spent.

MidnightMuse said:

Sure, maybe that's my ego talking, but I like to think people like us really ARE special. And not just because we're so goodlooking.

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Why, thank you - soooo good of you to say so!

No, I don't think humor can be taught. I believe it's a perspective on life. What Kevin says is spot on in my book.

I don't think humour can be taught. If it can be, I wouldn't know how to go about doing it. I think you either have it or you don't. And humour writing is very different than stand up, yes. I was just using the 100 people in the room theory to explain how I felt about target audience. I think target audience works about the same for humour writing and stand up. To put it another way, you're in a doctor's office. There are humour magazines on the table. You pick one up and start reading a humorous essay on carburetors. You become bored and go to put it down, but then see Jimmy, your mechanic, sitting beside you. You say, "HEY! I think you would enjoy the humor of this article." But Jimmy puts his hand up. "Hold up! Sounds great, but I'm reading this essay on how this guy's mother drives him nuts on a daily basis!" And Jimmy laughs and continues to read the article. You will catch more bees with honey. Only five or six bees are going to taste Matzah balls and think, "Hmmm! I like the way that tastes!"

And yes, great writing, as with any genre, always comes first.

Just for the humour writers among you, here is a contest I plan on entering. It was in my signature, but I'm too lazy to reinstall it.

The Writing Fairy's 1st Annual Humor Writing Contest
Entry Fee: $10CDN
PRIZES: 500, 250, 125

They are accepting various types of writing: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, personal essays, scripts, whatever...792 word limit

Full details:
http://www.wsws.ca/thewritingfairy/contestrules.shtml

Hmmm, that's tempting. I do need to start entering contests . . .

Well, there always has to be one person on a message board who disagrees with the group, so I'm volunteering to be that one.

Can humor be taught? Yes. How do I know? Because I teach it.

I teach an online course in humor called "Get Funny" (this isn't an ad, so no links) and it's in over 1100 schools worldwide. I've had countless students take the class who, in their introduction, tell me they don't understand humor, haven't a clue how to be funny, and feel very inadequate as a result. (This supports the idea that the funny person in the room is envied, and therefore all who inately have that gift are indeed special). By the end of the class, many of these same students tell me about how their lives have changed because they now 'get it' and know how to see the humor everywhere.

I think that as human beings, we're hard-wired for humor. It's just that some people never have that side of them nurtured, or they don't make the connections. Any number of things can interfere with it. There are also plenty of people who laugh readily, enjoy humor in many forms, but are mystified as to how one actually makes it happen. And then there are the fortunate few who are simply born understanding what it takes to make people laugh. What I do in my class is simply spill some of the secrets.

It wasn't an easy course to write, because I've always been instinctual. So I had to do a lot of thinking about what makes things funny, what are some of the formulas, and how could a not-so-funny person become more humorous.

So can it be taught? Yes. Is someone born with the gift special? Yes. Can others join this club later in life? Yes. Humor belongs to us all.

-- Joanna

I'm interested, Joanna, if you're teaching people to see humor or to write it.