Humor

I absolutely try to incorporate humor into my writing. How, I do that is a little difficult to explain. While writing a scene, randomly my brain will say, “Wouldn’t it be funny if X happened.” Then if it fits the plot I’ll add it, if not I disregard it as my mind wondering.

If you are looking for advice on how to add humor to your own writing, start with the scene that you think needs a bit of lightheartedness. From there, use your character’s personality to drive. If a character is known to be sarcastic, use sarcasm. If they are clumsy, make them trip or cause a scene. The possibilities are endless if they come from the core of your character.

I'm not sure if wit differs from humour, but I like to read banter (and try, with varying degrees of success, to incorporate it).

I don't think you should add something if it's not your thing, though. It's helpful to have a bit of everything but there's not space and anyway probably better to not force it. Forced humour is awful.

I try to put humor in, but it really does depend on the character's personality and behavior patterns. Forced humor shows.

I'm with Harlequin on this one, banter is the best place to start.

Also keep in mind that humor has many different flavors. Not everything has to be a great joke, or a witty bon mot. Dry humor, insightful sarcasm, or even a humorous attempt that falls under the "so bad it's good" category all qualify. Banter is popular these days because Joss Whedon proved just how fantastic funny dialog can be, but there's also the type of random, non-sequitur humor exemplified by Monty Python, or even the brilliant humor of a logical conclusion taken to its illogical extreme, such as Douglas Adams frequently did in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You and your writing can be funny without a joke, or a devastating one-liner from a character's mouth.

Bah! Banter is surely older than joss whedon for popularity I don't think I've seen anything of his except firefly.

The trial of Socrates has excellent banter and is fairly old.

Coen bros are the kings of banter for me, plus a general (high) watermark for making comedy work in a dark story.

EDIT- Oh, yeah, wanted to mention the Expanse books as a SF example of snappy repartee without getting too cute about it

I don't try to add humor. I hope it slips in when I have an amusing thought, but I never go for it. Mostly because, as others have mentioned, forced humor is noticeable and painful. That said, I do think even "serious" work needs the occasional smile. I think of those moments as tools that allow the author to back off the tension for a moment, allowing the tension to step upwards gradually instead angling at a continuous rate. Tension, breathe, tension, breathe, tension, smile, tension, etc., as opposed to tension, tension, tension, tension, tension, please stop I can't take the tension anymore!

Banter is great, I agree with that. It not only allows for humor, it also builds character and helps with immersion. A lot of birds flocking around that stone.

I think it helps to take note of things that strike you as funny throughout the week. It might be a good exercise to find about a half dozen of those moments and see if you can capture them in scenes. Practice what it takes to find the timing and beat of it all. When is the punchline revealed, was it delivered dry, did it impact the social standing of anyone in the room, etc.?

Harlequin said:

Bah! Banter is surely older than joss whedon for popularity I don't think I've seen anything of his except firefly.

The trial of Socrates has excellent banter and is fairly old.

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To be fair, you're right. I just pulled Joss Whedon out of the hat because most people equate snarky, witty exchanges in urban fantasy with Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and that's been extremely influential to many writers since then.

I do try to include humour, but if it doesn't feel like it's coming naturally to you, don't put it in. There are lots of good books that do not try to add laughs and work very well. Your book should be whatever your book should be; you don't need to borrow other people's techniques if they're not a good fit for you.

I find my characters are funnier than I am. (I am, to be clear, not sure how that works, but it does.) That being said, the humor in my books tends to be dry humor. And, you can have lighter scenes without having to be funny - if you find that funny is difficult for you. I have at least one book that is not funny much, but does have lighter moments where the characters are focused on more ordinary things.

Banter comes naturally to me when I'm writing. By that, I don't mean necessarily that I'm really good at it (I have no idea if I am), but I can't help but include it to some extent, even when I'm going for a more serious tone. I certainly don't use it in every scene or anything, but pretty much everything I write is going to have some levity in it. I blame growing up with Joss Whedon as my primary writing influence.

What I write is mostly serious, and many of the characters are serious too, but some individual personalities can have more humor in them than others. I find that if a story has a lot of dark and grim parts, adding some levity in the form of humor can make the not-so-bad parts better and help the reader relax. So I try to do that, and most of the humor is through dialogue rather than situations.

There are plenty of great SFF books with humor; there are also plenty without. If it's not your thing, then don't try and force it. If you do want to add some, try checking out some comedic SFF novels (I can't think of many off the top of my head, except maybe Xanth) or comedies in general.

I think David and Leigh Eddings were huge influences on me when it comes to banter, too. It just strikes me as closer to how people actually talk...at least, the people I hang out with. And why would I write protagonists with whom I didn't want to spend a lot of time? I'm certainly going to be stuck with them for awhile.

MonsterTamer said:

Alright. Thanks for the advice.

I just searched back through my current MS and found that I do banter naturally to some degree, so I will start there and try to expand what I'm already doing. And as some of you said, it is character dependent.

I wish I could easily write humor. I'm a bit disgruntled about it, to be honest. I laugh freely and often, but I cannot generate a single funny scene.

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I think, when trying to inject humour into a story that is otherwise fairly serious, you need to look at your characters. More specifically, the personalities of your characters. For example, I wrote a story for the sisyfus last year that had a main character who was outgoing, energetic, a bottomless appetite, optimistic, and willing to believe the best of everyone. Opportunities for humour arose when he attempted to steal a bit of his more serious flatmate's breakfast, and when conversing with the dragon - e.g. where the MC says 'Zutara and I understand each other..' and the dragon says 'If you insist.'

In the current story I'm working on, I've got an assassin and a prince - the assassin has an extremely potty mouth, but he is reduced to sputtering indignance when it comes to his king. So the prince pokes fun at his weak swearing when referring to the king.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you may be funnier than you think with your writing. I have sent stories to my crit partner, thinking they weren't funny at all, and she found them hilarious.

Banter is an awesome way to inject a bit of levity and relieve some of the tension.

I just use a bottle of Joe Miller's Banter-Grade Social Lubricant. $5.99 a bottle, spray it on the manuscript, and you're good to go.
You order it from this P.O. Box in Schenectady.

I don't think you can analyse humour successfully its far too subjective and organic. I do believe that the most successful humour is unintentional so on that basis can't be planned, it occurs. Don't try and write funny people. write sober people who have the freedom to be amusing. Try and avoid overthinking it.

As an exercise, do a bit of people watching. People are funny, especially when they don't realise they are being funny. Children and toddlers are a gold mine, undersized half educated people trying to wear big shoes. A grown up adult is a rare beast, we are children all our lives and long may it be so.

The only other thing I can think of is wait until you are in a good mood, positive, upbeat or all of the above. Humour will come, have faith. If it doesn't que cera. As has already been said, you may find you've unintenionally succeeded. If that happens embrace the funny bone you didn't know you had.

Hope this helps

I think the best thing to do is to study the great SF/F humorists and see how they succeed at it. Not just read, but actually study it. How do Terry Pratchett, Tom Holt, Christopher Moore, Jasper Fforde, and others pull it off?

There are some books on writing humor, such as How to Write Funny, edited by John Kachuba.

I don't think you need to be in any particularly good mood to successfully pull off humor in your writing. Indeed, if you become known as a humorous writer, you will need to be able to write even when you're pissed off about how everyone expects you to write funny.

If you don't naturally write funny things I'd avoid it.

I suppose if your character says a humorous thing and a reader doesn't find it funny, they could assume the character tried to be funny but wasn't, rather than you the writer.

You don't need to be in a good mood to write funny. You might find it hard to write warm-funny, but bitter and sarcastic humour comes easily when in a bad mood. Odder humour comes to me best when feeling "up" and even a bit distracted.

I do think that including some humor if you are writing something serious is important. No one can read a dark and depressing story without needing some levity from time to time. I think the ability to add humor is a sign of a competent writer.

I am aware of two different ways to add humor to a story (there may be more).

The first is by creating a character with low skills. If you think of the 007 movies the Bond character has a high set of skills and is usually not funny because he has so many abilities (intelligence, looks, charm, fighting ability, etc.) In other words, tons of skills. If you look at characters who are humorous they usually are lacking in skills (stupid, clumsy, ugly, etc.) but they don't realize their inadequacies and so they keep trying to succeed in life but they never are never really able to. They aren't trying to be funny, they just are because they are lacking in skills. I am thinking of an example from the Lord of the Rings movie where the dwarf Gimli was racing after and trying to keep up with the elf Legolas and future King Aragorn. Part of the humor was the fact that he had shorter legs than they did and so he was gasping and tumbling trying to keep up. But he was also making excuses and talking about his fighting ability to cover up his insecurities with the situation. It was his very human tendency to try and cover up his own perceived insecurities and his pride that added to the humor of the moment. So what we laugh at is our flaws, our imperfections. One thing you can do to create humor is have very real flaws in some of your characters and the humor should naturally come out in different situations. You can shift from humor to drama back to humor again by adjusting how competent your characters are acting.

The other way I am aware of creating humor is by inappropriate situations. Think of When Harry Met Sally with the famous scene where she is acting like she is having an orgasm in a diner. Highly inappropriate given the situation and therefore funny.

I am sure there are more ways but those are two solid ones.

Jimmy Carr the comedian talks about 2 stories colliding to create humour. You follow story 1 and then story 2 interacts with it and hilarity ensues.

eg:
Story 1: Hero has to do something.
Story 2: Hero has flaw/feature.
Result: Everything keeps going wrong for hero. eg A superman type hero who's scared off heights and can't fly more than 2 metres off the ground. A Roman leader who can't pronounce the letter "R". (Monty Python)

Story 1: Person one is talking about a thing.
Story 2: Person two is thinking about a different thing.
Result: Confusion/verbal or visual pun. eg My dog has no nose. How does he smell? Terrible.

Story 1: You think it's as bad as it can get.
Story 2: It gets worse.
Result: "Gross out" humour. eg Putting a stake through the heart of a vampire and blood squirting out. Followed by a quite ridiculous amount of blood. (Mel Brooks)

And so on. I suggest watching a comedy film and when it gets to a funny bit, really try to understand why it's funny. Analyse the poop out of it. The last humorous story I wrote was a short one re-telling the 3 Billy Goats Gruff. To make it funny I did it from the troll's point of view, where the troll was kind and gentle. I had the goats interrupting him when he was settling down on a bean bag listening to a relaxing birdsong CD. Story one was people know the traditional tale where it's a grumpy troll. Story two was that he was the opposite.