5 Tips for Incorporating Humor Into Your Poetry
(Content warning: Mention of sexual assault)
Humor in poetry dates back millennia. Even Homer’s Iliad includes physical comedy, flippant quips, and sick burns (“You spellbinder! You sack of wind!”). The silliness and whimsy that saturate the verses of Shel Silverstein is a huge part of his appeal, and it’s one reason many young writers gravitate to poetry in the first place. Even the lighthearted levity of a rollicking limerick appeals to people who wouldn’t describe themselves as particularly fond aficionados of formal lyric verse.
(Plotters vs. Pantsers in Poetry.)
While not every poem needs to be funny, it can be helpful to consider opportunities to inject levity, or undercut solemnity, or balance a weighty subject. It can also be useful to think about methods for mimicking the structure of a joke, regardless of tone, style, or substance. As poet and professor Michael Theune describes in his influential textbook, Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns, successful poems rely on a variety of “turns,” so that lyrics unfold in ways that are both unexpected, and yet perfectly fitting. In this way, we can think of poems as including a number of “punchlines,” regardless of affective intent.
Jokes and their underlying structures feature prominently in my debut book of poems, Yaguareté White. While I hope readers find some of the poems amusing, I’m also interested in the ways humor can mask underlying pain, deception, discomfort, and secrets. In that spirit, here are five ways to play with humor, whether simply for laughs, or as part of a nuanced approach to broadening your poetic purview.
1. Give it character
Poets are quick to differentiate between the speaker of a poem and the writer who composed the piece. (“The speaker isn’t the poet! Except when she is! But even then…”) And while we often refer to speakers and personae, we don’t always think of the other people in poems as characters, per se. But poets can learn from fiction writers in that regard, by creating a foil or mouthpiece or Mary Sue (a stand-in for the author) who can voice ideas or opinions that might not be quite right for the speaker of a poem.
One example occurs in Deaf Republic, the second book by Ukrainian-born poet Ilya Kaminsky, who invents the town of Vasenka. When a deaf child is killed by enemy soldiers, the townspeople also go deaf, and Kaminsky uses the character of Momma Galya to rile up readers. In the poem, “When Momma Galya First Protested,” we get an immediate sense for the kind of character she is:
Later, Momma Galya cajoles:
Deafness isn’t an illness! It’s a sexual position!
Momma Galya’s outspoken confrontations serve as a stark counterpoint to the book’s predominant tone of careful solemnity and unpredictable timeliness. It would be a different book entirely had Kalinsky chosen to write exclusively from the first-person perspective. Writing a memorable character can add new dimensions to a poem and expand a poet’s repertoire of tools.
2. Call out the small moments
When sketching ideas for a new poem, I can be quick to dismiss small moments or passing interactions that I (wrongly) believe don’t rise to the high standard of lyric. But there’s no occasion too mundane or everyday that poetry can’t liven it up with amusing commentary on the human condition. Certainly, amid the never-ending onslaught of emojis and notifications, poets must be well-equipped to remark on today’s fluid technoscape.
A standout example occurs in Tracy Fuad’s “Body of Water 2,” which finds a speaker trapped in that quintessentially post-COVID conundrum of fumbling Zoom etiquette:
I silenced my phone
I willed myself ill
I unmuted myself on the call, but when the goldenrod box appeared around my face
I found I couldn’t speak
And finally someone else piped in to tell the speaker she was muted
Here, a shrugging sense of bemusement strikes twice: once, in the all too relatable dilemmas so many of us face in navigating technical difficulties, and again with a clever reference to a speaker who is muted. Like Fuad, you should take advantage of minor incidents and silly snafus by highlighting the absurdity (or stupidity! or serendipity!) of otherwise unremarkable events.
Check out Diego Báez’s Yaguareté White here:
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3. Go meta
Poets have an especially high tolerance for winks, elbow nudges, and nods to the reader. Some people find that obnoxious. We call it art. Even so, poets should take care when approaching the fourth wall before busting it down, as too much cutesy self-consciousness can exhaust even the most tolerant readers among us.
One way to acknowledge the audience without annoying them is to layer in multiple forms of humor before piercing the proverbial veil. A poem by Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, “small talk or in my hand galaxies,” achieves this balance in its opening lines, which depict the aftermath of a vehicle break-in:
it looks like the thief rocketed
their whole self through
the bull’s eye of my driver’s side door
and you’re not wrong to expect
the old joke about there being
nothing in my car worth the thieving
or maybe i’ve caught you eye rolling
please god not another
poem about windows
Here, the humor works in a few ways. First, the image of a vandal throwing themselves entirely through the car door is visually amusing. Secondly, Kingsley evokes the “old joke” about items in the car not worth the effort of stealing, but rather than simply deliver it, he places it in the imagined expectations of the reader, a first nod our way. Lastly, Kingsley playfully accuses the reader of rolling their eyes in anticipation of “another / poem about windows.” The multiple layers of humor amplify the direct address.
Don’t get too cute with meta-commentary, but don’t shy away from it either.
4. Don’t be afraid of the dark
By definition, dark humor makes light of uncomfortable, taboo, and despicable subjects. For that reason, it won’t be for everybody. But when employed with careful intention, dark humor can function as an entry point into topics a poet might be unwilling to write about in other ways. A recent example occurs in Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s “Dreaming of You,” in which the speaker admits:
My biggest fear is getting raped and murdered
then getting ripped
to shreds on the internet
To be clear, the speaker’s fear of sexual assault and death isn’t funny. Nor do I believe the poet intends to make light of such violent threats. Of course not. But by pairing a legitimate fear of horrific violence with an equally legitimate, if arguably less severe, fallout from online bullying, the poem juxtaposes traumas of categorically different magnitudes in a way that undercuts the “insult” added to “injury.” It’s not funny or humorous or really even amusing, but the ironic distance of its darkness lends the poem another dimension for us to consider.
Another well-known example is Patricia Lockwood’s courageous and devastating “Rape Joke,” which processes a sexual assault by ascribing the characteristics of the perpetrator to the joke itself: “the rape joke is that he worshiped The Rock.” It’s unspeakably powerful for a poet to unpack such a heavily freighted experience as this. And it can be liberating to harness the power of humor to re-frame, reclaim, or diffuse traumatic events. And, as Lockwood concluded after her poem went viral online, how you approach seriously painful topics is up to you: “You don’t ever have to write about it. But if you do, you can write about it any way you want.”
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5. Tease the sacred, embrace the profane
Ages before English Johns (Milton and Donne) set late Renaissance literature alight with bawdy provocations and metaphysical reconsiderations, poets had long become comfortable pirouetting atop the line that demarcates the sacred and profane. Today, readers of poetry have become accustomed to crossing the line between taboo and off-color topics, to the extent that we’ve almost been conditioned to expect it.
One way to titillate readers is to take an otherwise revered object or “thing” (as in the example below) and desecrate it. A clever, delightfully irreverent instance of this plays out in “The Pope’s Penis” by Sharon Olds, which depicts the papal member as hanging “deep in his robes, a delicate / clapper at the center of a bell.” Olds adds to the apropos imagery by further describing it as “a ghostly fish in a / halo of silver seaweed.” Finally, at night:
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.
It’s an undeniably funny image, one readers perhaps never expected to imagine. And yet, here we are: kindly considering an old man’s erection.
Another way to thread an edge of profanity into your poetry is through well-timed, intentional use of good old-fashioned swear words. These can be terribly effective, whether used in careful measure, as in the singular uses of “fuck” and “bullshit” in Allen Ginsberg’s seminal “Howl” (a poem downright drowning in provocative content), or deployed in copious abundance, as in Ariel Francisco’s “They Built a Margaritaville on Hollywood Beach Which Was Once My Favorite Place in the World and Now I Can’t Go Back Because It’s Unrecognizable So Fuck Jimmy Buffett”: “Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you.”
Don’t fear curse words. Recite them! Dance wildly around the cauldron of poetic incantation! Hex your readers with humor!