Writing Funny Part 2

In the previous post, I outlined some advantages that novelists have over comedians when it comes to being funny. Now it's time to put the shoe on the other foot and explore some of the advantages that comedians have over novelists.

Let's start with another clip of Dwayne at work. In this clip, he is doing the "win-or-go-home" material that you may have seen in the longer clip from the previous post:



In this clip, we see a few of the tools that Dwayne can bring to the table that are not in the novelist's repertoire.

The first tool, of course, is comic timing. When delivering his material, Dwayne controls how the material is delivered. In the clip above, you can see how he makes the audience wait at certain points before delivering the next line. This has the effect of heightening the tension in the room and creating anticipation about what he's going to say next.

When Dwayne says, "This is the playoffs, Baby," and then repeats the line, he stretches out the pause between "playoffs" and "Baby" to such a degree that it has one of two effects: Some of the audience members don't see it coming, and the surprise of hearing "Baby" again makes them laugh. Other audience members see it coming, and the anticipation makes them laugh as a form of release when he finally says the word.

Another tool Dwayne has at his disposal is his vocal inflection and facial expressions. His impersonation of the win-or-go-home football player is dead-on funny (we've all seen these guys on TV), and his use of eye contact with the audience raises the comic tension further.

Dwayne has one other tool in the box that might not be obvious: The group dynamic within the audience itself. Not all the audience members are likely to get all the jokes in exactly the same way. But if half the audience is laughing, the laughter has the effect of cuing the other half that something funny has just been said. This helps the "slow half" find the comedy that they might not have found on their own.

Novelists don't get these tools, obviously. Our books are usually read as a solitary activity, which eliminates the group dynamic, and the reader, not the writer, brings their own inflections and imagery to the process of reading from the printed page.

But even though Dwayne has some tools at his disposal that we as novelists can never use in our own work, there are certain techniques he does use that are equally applicable to the printed page, and we will explore some of them in our next post.