Book Review: How to Write Funny Edited by John B. Kachuba
How to Write Funny is a Writer’s Digest book that is a collection of essays and interviews like many of their other how-to books. The essays each cover various aspects of humorous writing, but the last third of the book starts sounding repetitive. In general, I liked the book and learned a lot, but I do have a few complaints.
The beginning essays were probably the most interesting and beneficial. They covered various tools for writing humor like exaggeration, understatement, irony, repetition, surprise, and the pairing of odd ideas. The writers talked about how they craft the humor because written humor must be different than spoken humor for multiple reasons. I also found the section dealing with humor in fiction useful because the author explained how you can’t have just endless jokes for 100,000 words. A humorous novel needs downtime and serious moments. I also found some of the writing habits and procedures of the various authors fascinating.
Once you enter the last third of the book, all the articles start sounding the same: I was born funny, everyone says I’m funny, if you aren’t funny then you should give up writing humor. I was bored by the autobiographical discussions of the personal influence in these author’s lives who made them funny and how humor is just instinctual for them. There is probably a good reason I have never heard of these people before.
One of the humblest articles was an interview with Dave Barry who I think is hilarious. He spoke of wrestling with a piece of writing until it because funny. He saw humorous writing as an offspring of good writing. He also didn’t think of himself as super funny outside of writing.
The funniest essays were the roundtable discussion and “The Comfortable Chair: Using Humor in Creative Nonfiction” by Dinty Moore. Most of the other articles weren’t funny at all, but I didn’t mind as long as they could give me real reasons why their advice works.
The best advice that was repeating in a couple of articles, was that in fiction, your humor should come from your characters and be a natural part of the book. If your jokes stick out oddly, then you aren’t doing it right.
Overall, I would recommend this book, or at least the first two-thirds of it.
