Writing Funny Part 1

There's something about laughing with a person that bonds us to them, and since novelists are very much in the business of making readers bond with characters, humor can be a powerful weapon in a novelist's arsenal.

In these next few posts, I am going to outline some of my own thoughts on how humor can work in a novel. But I need to start with a critically important distinction.

I'm Hilarious But I'm Not a Comedian: Novels versus Comedy

I'm a huge fan of stand-up comedy, and I am grateful to consider Dwayne Perkins (who is both hilarious and a comedian) a friend. I've been a fan of his blog for years, and he was kind enough recently to collaborate with me on a guest blog post for I Smell Sheep, a blog for fans of paranormal fiction.

Dwayne has made me laugh out loud on numerous occasions, and I have made him laugh on a few occasions as well. But Dwayne has been doing stand-up comedy for years, he knows what it takes to master the craft, and he also knows that he won't be handing me a microphone anytime soon. And I have enough sense to leave the microphone in the hands of the professional.

But fortunately, I don't have to be a professional comedian to be funny in print. I do need to have a sense of humor, obviously, and I do need to approach it as a craft. But the game of being funny on the page versus on the stage is a very different game, and as a novelist, I have a few factors working in my favor.

Advantage #1: If I make the reader laugh once or twice in the course of a novel, I'm regarded as a comic genius. If Dwayne makes the audience laugh only once or twice in a set, he's just had a really, really bad night.*

(* Fortunately Dwayne has taken his craft to a level where I suspect this doesn't happen. His off-nights are better than many comedians' good nights.)

Advantage #2: If I do a good job of burying my jokes in the story, the ones that fail won't be noticed as failures--they'll just be viewed as part of the storytelling.

Advantage #3: I have all the time in the world to set up the joke.

Advantage #4: The set-up doesn't even look like a set-up, so the joke feels spontaneous.

The primary difference in the advantages outlined above, of course, is a simple matter of expectations. When Dwayne takes the stage, the audience expects to laugh...that's why they paid their money and bought their two drinks. So Dwayne has to deliver the funny; it's why they're there in the first place. And he has to do it consistently. Comedians measure their material in laughs per minute, just to give you an idea of the constraints they work under.

Novelists, however, do not work under any similar requirements. We're storytellers, and our job is to take the reader on a journey, bring them into our protagonist's world, and leave them with a sense of emotional and intellectual satisfaction. Humor is only one of the range of emotions we bring to the reader, and they therefore do not expect for us to keep them laughing the whole time. Indeed, they probably don't want us to. For us, humor serves the dramatic functions of comic relief and character insight rather than the main course of what we're trying to accomplish in our storytelling.

So even if you're not ready to be booked at the local Improv, you have a number of factors that allow you to be funny on paper.

However, as a performer, Dwayne has a few tools at his disposal that novelists do not have, and we'll cover those considerations in the next post. Then we'll tie it all together and try to come up with some practical advice for novelists seeking to bring the funny into their work.

Before we get to that, though, let's take a Dwayne Perkins break: