The hardest thing to write is humor. It’s such a subjective thing; what’s funny to one person might not be funny to some one else. And yet we are all conditioned to laugh at something we find funny or just plain silly and absurd. Whether it is an outright comedy or a serious, literary novel, humor can address real situations, find the absurdity in modern life or tell us something about the human experience that is universally acknowledged. It’ll also get your readers chuckling. Here are some tips you can use to bring the funny to your fiction.
Instructions
1. Take a serious situation and make it absurd. Find something in that situation that could be mined for humor. All humor arises out of serious situations. For instance, your character might be having an affair with his boss’s wife. He and the boss’s wife have a quick romp at her apartment while her husband is away at business, but while they are still in bed, the boss unexpectedly arrives home. Your character is forced to climb out of the balcony window stark naked to hide from the boss. Across the street, a neighbor sees your character shivering on the balcony ledge, thinks he’s a Peeping Tom and calls the police. While this situation might be a serious matter for your character, the situation itself can be funny because your character is put in an absurd dilemma.
2. Create characters who respond to absurd situations with humor or wit. Take a look at the movie "Tootsie." When Dustin Hoffman’s character begins dressing up in drag for a role on a soap opera, the other characters around him respond to him in funny ways. In one scene, while Hoffman’s character is rehearsing on the soap, the show’s producer asks one of the directors how far he can pull the camera back to make Hoffman look more attractive. The director responds, “How about Cleveland?” The line is funny because it plays on what the audience already knows: the reason Hoffman isn’t an attractive woman is because he’s really a man. The humor in the movie comes out of the characters’ responses to its absurd premise.
3. Even if you’re writing a serious, literary story, use humor to lighten it up. Characters can respond to serious situations with wit and humor, just as real people do. For instance, your character might be dying of cancer. Everyone else around him is glum and depressed about the situation, but your character might face his impending death with wit as a coping mechanism. Or perhaps your character is going through a bitter divorce and learns that his wife has taken up with the much younger tennis instructor at the country club. Your character might crack jokes about his wife and the tennis instructor as a way to deal with the rejection. Either way, humor can be used to not only lighten up the seriousness of your story, but also to bring up the absurdity of the situations your characters find themselves in.
4. Create a story that is a parody. A parody makes fun of another artistic work or the style of an artist for humorous effect. For instance, the "Airplane" movies were parodies of the "Airport" disaster films that were popular during the 1970s. A parody can take a serious work and highlight the absurdity or the cliches in it. Take a story or writer you enjoy and write a parody of it.
5. Satire is humor that takes a serious issue (say, war) and makes fun of the absurdity of it. Joseph Heller's "Catch-22," for instance, is a satire about war and the military. M*A*S*H, likewise, is a satire that mines the same territory. These works satirize the real issues about war and death in ways that force audiences and readers to see how absurd and ridiculous our responses to these issues can sometimes be. Take an issue that you’re interested in, such as politics, environmentalism, the health care industry or the self-help industry, look at how our society responds to these issues, and write a satire about it.
