A funny thing about writing funny things

During my university PR/marketing career, I got to work with many talented people, including one of the funniest writers I’ve ever read. But the work being what it was — writing mostly about academics and their research, all very serious stuff — this writer didn’t have many opportunities to let his humor shine through. That is, until we decided to start a blog to highlight an annual tradition that brought hundreds of alumni back to our campus every month. We put this guy in charge of it and turned him loose.

The results were hilarious. This writer had a knack for capturing the zeitgeist of pop culture during that era. His casual, conversational writing style and witty references to music and movies from those times resonated with the blog’s target audience of students and younger alumni.

But as the stream of time flowed past, there came a point when those references no longer clicked with newer audiences. This writer’s style ran into one of the roadblocks to making humor stick: timeliness. Or timelessness.

Humor is hard …

I write this post in the wake of learning, just last week, that a poem I entered into a humorous writing contest did not win, place, show, or make honorable mention. (Congratulations to all the winners.) I was disappointed by the news, but not crestfallen. My life will go on.

But if I learned anything from that experience, it was a reinforcement of a couple of lessons we should all heed before we try to tickle another’s funny bone with our writing:

• Writing humor is hard to do, and
• Humor is subjective

This is why I don’t often intentionally try to write funny stuff. It seems the harder I try to write humor, the greater the chance that it falls flat. I agree with Allison Raymond‘s thoughts from a post on the website Story Embers: “Humor offers a lot of creative freedom because the form it takes will differ from story to story. However, jokes aren’t immune to falling flat and neither are comic relief characters to acting corny.”

… but humor is necessary

So, while you won’t find much intentional (read: forced) attempts at humor in my writing, you might find some turns of phrase that make you chortle or grin every once in a while. That’s because I agree with much of what author Steve Almond says about “the comic impulse” in his recent book on writing, which I wrote about here earlier.

Comedy is an essential part of humanity. It “is rooted in this capacity to face painful truths and to offer, by means of laughter, a dividend of forgiveness,” Almond writes.

“The comic impulse,” he continues, “is simultaneously an expression of helplessness, of surrender to the world’s absurd cruelty, and our own foibles and fuckups, and, at the same time, the acquisition of power by means of acknowledging that bad data.”

This impulse is hard-wired into us. It “isn’t a literary device at all,” Almond writes. “It’s a bio-evolutionary adaptation. It’s the survival tool human beings developed to content with the burdens of self-consciousness and moral awareness, as well as the horrible outcomes they needed to imagine to survive as a prey species roaming the Serengeti, or the Neander Valley.”

But is it funny?

As I wrote earlier, humor is subjective. My idea of what makes a story funny may differ from yours. And that’s OK. When I first read A Confederacy of Dunces — still, in my opinion, the greatest comedic novel of all time, even if it didn’t make last spring’s list from The New York Times — I could not stop laughing at the antics of the novel’s bumbling anti-hero, Ignatius P. Reilly, and the cast of characters he encounters in his battle against modernity. In the many times I’ve re-read the novel, I experience the same joy and marvel at the author’s talents. Yet my wife, who read the book only at my urging, read it only once, dutifully, and pronounced it merely “OK.” (We have managed to overcome this stark difference of opinion, thankfully.)

There are so many types of humor to choose from, and so many ways to approach comedic writing. Here’s a list of 14 different types of comedy, with examples. If you’re looking for inspiration, you might want to read Jerry Seinfeld’s five-step process for writing great comedy.

Much of it comes down to your intent as a writer, I think. Are you trying to elicit guffaws? Keep the reader in stitches? Delight them? Surprise them? Connect with them? Provide a temporary reprieve from the tedium and pain of life with a bit of escapism or a fantabulous tale? Any or all of these purposes are legitimate. It’s up to us to decide our own path.

Meanwhile, I have this poem I wrote. The one I entered into that contest. Even though it didn’t make the cut, I still think the it’s funny enough to find a home somewhere. So now that the contest is over, I plan to shop it around a bit. Maybe it’ll find a home somewhere. And maybe then I’ll get the last laugh.

AI-generated image.