I love funny stuff; I love writing funny stuff. Therefore, I feel obliged to say a few words about comedy.
First, I don’t believe that some people are born funny while other people aren’t. We learn to be funny the same way we learn anything else: through hours and hours of practice, preferably following the influence of good role models and with frequent opportunities for feedback. Therefore, some people do have an advantage when it comes to being funny—people who are born into families which already contain funny people and where a sense of humor is valued.
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Different people find different things funny. You’ll never please everyone;
all you can do is use your own sense of humor as a guide.
And do, do, do use your own sense of humor rather than someone else’s. When people try to be funny, they sometimes think they have to use tricks and gimmicks that smell like comedy: forced witticisms, contrived situations, toilet jokes, etc. Don’t use gimmicks you think ought to be funny. Use stuff that actually makes you laugh. |
I had a great-uncle who was a noted wit and raconteur, at least in the small town where he lived his entire life. My father and grandfather were also inveterate pranksters; they used to make us kids laugh with all the hilarious tricks they pulled when they were young. People in my family loved a good joke—for a while, the only books my brother owned were joke books—so naturally, I grew up wanting to be funny myself. I told jokes, I read funny books, I invented my own jokes and funny stories...and in time, I got pretty good at making my friends laugh.
In short, I dearly wanted to be funny. After ten or twenty years of practice, I succeeded. The practice included acting in stage comedies and writing for the annual musical-comedy revue at my university. (There’s no better feedback than the response from a live audience: they laugh or they don’t, and either way, you learn something.)
All of this led me to a simple conclusion: in order to be funny, you have to make a commitment to comedy. You have to keep pushing for laughs, even if you bomb. It has to be important to you—more important, for example, than dignity or looking cool. Professional comedians are seldom warm cuddly people; they often make jokes at others’ expense, because in the trade-off between humans and humor, comedians often put humor first.
So the secret of humor isn’t genetic: it’s commitment to comedy, and everything that entails. I’m not saying you have to be an antisocial boor, stomping on people’s feelings...but you have to care about laughs, you have to devote yourself, and you can’t let yourself back off when the going gets tough. (The same, of course, holds for learning to write, learning to play baseball, or learning cross-stitch embroidery. You have to set your priorities and press on.)
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Comedians don’t get no respect...or at least that’s the conventional wisdom.
There’s sometimes a feeling that comedy is a lesser achievement than “serious” work.
In recent years, for example, comic movies seldom win Oscars, nor do comic novels
win prestigious book awards (although there are exceptions).
My answer is, “So what?” The ability to make people laugh is its own reward. And history is kind to comedy-think of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Dickens, Mark Twain, and many more. I strongly suspect that more people read P.G.Wodehouse today than most of the authors who won the Nobel prize during the 1920’s. The Importance of Being Earnest is staged more often than Hedda Gabler. Laughter is a deep human need, and providing it is a noble calling. Especially fart jokes. |
Once you’ve made your commitment to comedy, you have to immerse yourself in it. You have to get the feel of what can and can’t be done. Some people think you can do anything in a comedy because it’s not “serious.” Others tell you that comedy has to adhere to a strict internal logic, more rigorous and demanding than “realistic” writing. But the wonderful thing about comedy is that it’s neither loose nor strict—it’s structured and anarchic, free from all restraint yet utterly bound by the need to engage an audience.
Engaging the audience is key. You want to keep the audience with you all the way. This means it’s not true that “anything goes”—some things simply don’t fit in some stories, even if they seem good in isolation. It’s even possible for a passage to be too funny, if it gives the audience wrong ideas about what kind of story you’re telling.
Yet it’s easy to get hung up on consistency. It’s easy to shy away from going over the top because you think it’s too much. There is such a thing as too much, but most people never come close. My own policy is to err on the side of extravagance, then tone it down later if I decide I’ve gone too far. If you want to write comedy, you can’t get in the habit of being tame; audacity first, and only rein yourself in if it improves the work as a whole.
You’ll notice that I haven’t given any specific comedy tips. That’s because I have none...nor have I ever heard anybody else offer any useful concrete advice. Mark Twain said that dissecting humor was like dissecting a frog—you can do it, but when you’re done, both the joke and the frog are dead.
My only advice is to make your commitment to comedy, then submerge yourself in it. Read comic stuff
from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Tom Jones to Dilbert
and rec.humor.funny. You don’t master comedy; you let it master you.
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Copyright © 2001, James Alan Gardner