Know What You're Doing When You Write Humor

All humor arises out of the basic absurdity of life. Let’s look at life. We’re born. We flourish. Or … we don’t flourish. Then we die. It’s an absurd concept. We’re given this beautiful gift called life, and then it’s taken away from us. For no reason. Even if we’re really good and never kill a fly. Eventually, we die. It all ends.

It’s absurd.

How do we deal with it? Some people turn to religion and see it as just the first step toward a better life. Some people get drunk and speed up the process. Some people smoke and really speed up the process. Some people try not to think about it. Some people take a philosophical view and say, “It forces me to value every moment of my life … because the moments will end.”

Some people recognize the absurdity of the whole thing and laugh at it. That’s us. We’re the ones who laugh at it. And we’re the ones who want to make others laugh at it.

What Is Humor?

“Humor is the product of a surprise ending applied to a normal situation, and the more unusual the surprise ending, the more intense will be the humor.” Jim Foreman in “How to Write Humor”

“You take a woman walking down the sidewalk . Show the audience a banana peel in front of her. Everyone knows that she is going step on the banana peel and do a pratfall. At the last instant, she sees the banana peel, steps over it and falls into an open manhole that neither she nor the audience knew was there.” Charlie Chaplin

My Definition of Humor

Humor is that which lifts the spirit. If you can make someone let go of the basic absurdity of life, make him or her forget about bills, work, the dishes piling in the sink, a pulled muscle―all the basic heaviness of living life day-by-day― then you’ve created humor.

You don’t have to make them laugh until they puke. All you have to do is lift their spirits. Make them laugh to themselves, make them smile, make them forget about the mundane for an instant―give them a bit of breathing space.

In a nutshell: Humor is anything that lifts the spirit in such a way as to say, “Yeah, it’s all so very serious…but not right now.”

NOTE: Comedy is a whole different animal. In comedy, you need to make a live audience laugh and keep them laughing.

Seeing Humor All Around Us

The potential for humor is all around us. It lies just under the surface of everything we see in the way we see it. One of the best ways to explore this is to go through pictures and look for alternate realities to what you see.

The trick is to let your imagination run wild and not be constricted by what you see. Very little in life is what it appears to be. You can see a photo of two people embracing for a picture and they look like the happiest couple on earth. But she might be thinking, “Right after this, I’m going to tell him about John.” He might be thinking, “Right after this, I’m going to tell her about Marsha.” The situation under the surface of appearance is humorous and ironic.

Writing Captions

A great way to develop a sense of drawing the humor out of everyday things is to write humorous captions for pictures you find in magazines, newspapers, and advertisements. If you really want to get into it…go to the family photo albums.

You could even write an entire scenario based on a photograph, taking the people in the image an absurd world of your making.

Try This

Go through a magazine or newspaper and cut out pictures of people interacting with each other. Create thought or dialogue balloons with words that show the exact opposite of what's going one. For instance, a picture of four executives standing for a formal portraits and three of them are thinking, "Who farted?" And one of them is thinking, "Smile folks, smile for the camera."

Exaggeration and the Absurd

Exaggeration and the absurd are the most common forms of humor and are sometimes impossible to tell apart. You take something mundane like a sign on the road with a picture of a deer. The deer almost looks like it’s dancing. Up the road, you see an actual deer―and it’s dancing. Not only that, it’s wearing a ballet dress and tights. Further up the road, you see several deer dancing. Some are doing ballet, some are doing the tango. Still further along, you see dozens of deer dancing, then hundreds―ballet, rumba, flamenco, tango, twist, 2-stop. They’re in the woods, on the roadside and on the road. You have to stop your car and watch while they dance. After a while, they dance away into the woods and everything is quiet. As you start to drive forward, you see a sign that shows a moose. It looks like the moose has a grenade launcher.

The whole point with exaggeration and the absurd is to let yourself go―no restraints. Forget about what’s possible and what’s not possible. Make it possible, without any explanation. People will suspend their credibility gaps for a laugh. Don’t say, “This is stupid. I’m not doing it.” Instead, do it because it’s stupid. While you’re in the first draft writing phase of exaggeration, nobody will see how stupid you are. You can edit later to hide the true nature of your stupidity. Remember, nobody has ever gone to jail, lost their job, lost their marriage, or been laughed at for something they’ve written. Unless they were caught.

Try This

Write down a word or sentence and then start exaggerating it, going from mundane to increasingly absurd things. Keep in mind the deer sign on the road and the steady progression of impossible things, each more absurd than the previous.

It Builds Over Time

Do these exercises whenever you get a chance. The more you do them over time, the better you’ll get. And then, when you’re writing, you’ll be more likely to identify places in your stories where humor is appropriate and you’ll be ready to write that humor.


Try This

Do the same as in the exercise above. Start with the sentence: She had big blue eyes.