(This is a final post in a six-part series on being funny in novels. To start at the beginning go here.)
Stand-up comedians are not born funny. As talented and skilled at making people laugh as he is today, Dwayne Perkins would not have been a stand-out from the other babies in the delivery room when he entered the world in terms of his ability to make the nurses laugh.
Being funny is the product of both a mindset and a set of skills learned through experimentation and practice. Life experience also has a lot to do with it.
Some of it can't be learned; comedians are partly correct when they say "you either have it or you don't." And if you don't have the underlying "stuff" from which comedic sense is developed, then there's nothing to build on.
The good news, however, is that most people actually do have the initial building blocks in place.
Most people, for example, do have a sense of humor, which is an obvious prerequisite. How do we know this? We know this because people pay good money to watch Dwayne's shows. People line up at the movie theaters to watch Chris Rock, Will Ferrell, and Tina Fey. People tune in to The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men.
Comedians depend on the fact that the people in the audience have a sense of humor. Otherwise, comedy would be a pretty pointless exercise, wouldn't it?
Okay, so that's a start. What else do comedians have?
They have the highly developed ability to observe. You might be surprised to learn that the so-called "class clown" in you high school is actually not the guy most likely to grow up and become a professional comedian. Who's the more likely candidate? That guy standing quietly in the corner at the party, making astute mental observations of the other people, noticing their mannerisms, their conceits, their quirks, and their foibles.
Does that guy sound familiar to you? He should; he's also the same guy who is more likely to become a novelist, because many of the essential skills comedians must possess are the same skills that novelists need to have. After all, comedians are writers and performers, and the quality of their writing is every bit as important to what they do as their ability to perform what they write.
They have an ability to creatively combine ideas together to form new concepts. Comedians are always taking things which appear at first glance to be unrelated and connecting them together in an unexpected way. Novelists who hope to write interesting books must be able to do the same thing.
Good comedians are obsessive about wordcraft. When a comedian develops new material, there is a rigorous editing-revision process at work. The first pass at the material may be funny, but a good comedian is never satisfied with that first pass. He or she will continually tinker with it, finding ways to shorten the set-up, cram in new opportunities to laugh, experiment with the timing, replace weak words with stronger words, cut out any fat that can be trimmed. The first draft will be somewhat loose; the final version will be tight and precise. Good comedians are rigorous editors. So are good novelists.
Still sound familiar? Good. If you're a good novelist, you may have the makings of a good novelist who uses humor effectively.
Obviously, those things alone aren't going to get you booked on The Tonight Show. And that's because there is a process that comedians go through on the road to becoming funny.
When Dwayne first started doing comedy several years ago, I'm going to hazard the following guesses: (1) He already possessed the basic tools needed by any comedian, (2) He had a few ideas he wanted to try out with audiences, and (3) He experienced some hit-or-miss results at first.
As time went on, he got better. He weeded out the stuff that didn't seem to work, expanded on the stuff that did seem to work, and found other ways to get the audience response he was looking for. He also began to see patterns and techniques--nuts and bolts--that tend to help make things funnier and heighten the result with the audience.
And there are some nuts and bolts. These by themselves are not enough to make anyone a comedian, but they are essential tools that nearly all comedians use in one form or another.
To outline some of the nuts and bolts would take an entire book, not just a few blog posts. Fortunately, someone has written such a book already, so I will direct your attention to Comedy Writing Secrets by Melvin Helitzer, a book I cannot recommend highly enough.
Fair warning: This book will not make you funny. No book can ever do that. But if you already have the basic building blocks, it will help you get a leg up on what's going on under the hood.
(Side note: Although this book will attune you to some of the mechanics at play, it will not "immunize" you against them. You'll still be just as susceptible to a skilled comedian's ability to make you laugh. You will, however, become a more discriminating audience member...you'll start to see the difference between a good comic and a mediocre one. You will start to favor the comedians who are really dedicated to their craft. You'll start to become impatient with comics who aren't. You'll stop accepting easy laughs. You'll start gravitating towards the comics who make you think. So although this book exposes some of the workings, that's actually good for comedy and not bad for it. Smarter audiences make better comedy, in my opinion.)
Okay, so now you've got the book and you've read it. (Maybe that's not true, but we're pretending.) What do you do to sharpen your comedic skills as a novelist?
- Consume comedy. Lots of it. Watch stand-up comedians at work.
- Think more like a comedian as you consume the comedy. As you're enjoying the comedian at work, think more like the people at the back of the room. Notice how the nuts-and-bolts are being applied.
- Consume written comedy. Lots of it. Unless your goal is to go into stand-up, what you're really trying to do is to develop a skill-set that works on paper. So you need to read work by people who have made readers laugh. Mark Twain is an obvious choice, but there are also others, and you need to find writers who make you laugh and get to understand how they do it. A great sampler book for getting started on this path is Laughing Matters by Gene Shalit. It's out of print, but you can still snag a used copy from Amazon. Another good resource is The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said by Robert Byrne. It's a quote book, but it includes some of the wittiest things people have ever said over the years.
A few caveats:
Learn the patterns and techniques. Never copy the material. Stealing jokes is an absolute no-no, both in stand-up and in writing. The goal here is to learn how it's done so that you can do it better yourself. The goal is not to find funny things to use as your own. Don't plagiarize--it will destroy you. (Or worse, Joe Rogan will hunt you down.)
Do not mistake the ability to write funny with the ability to perform funny. If you want to pursue stand-up comedy, by all means go for it. But understand that that is a completely different pursuit with its own requirements and learning curves. If you want to become funny on the stage, you have to put in the "stage time." Years of it. You can't become a comedian from an armchair. And remember--stand-up comedians are serving up humor in highly-concentrated doses. Novelists are aiming for a far more diluted product in the service of the story.
You can, however, improve the quality of your "novelist funny" from an armchair, if you are willing to put in the "page time." But just like our friends onstage, we have to take it seriously and approach it as a craft. And as novelists, it means we have to hit the books...lots of books.
Any comedian will tell you that being funny is work. But I would argue that for a novelist, it is work well worth doing. Your characters will become more relateable, your dialogue will crackle with life, and your readers will be begging for more when they reach "The End."
This concludes our foray into the business of funny. In our next few posts, we're going to flip the script and start pushing the reader's fear buttons.
I know, I know. It's a 180-degree head rotation from Dwayne Perkins to Linda Blair. But you've been warned.
Up next: Scare me, Baby! Again and again!
No comments:
Post a Comment