From the Heart

If you have ever tried to be funny even once in your life, you’ve probably heard the old saying “dying is easy—comedy is hard.” It’s been attributed to a long list of famous people over the years, and its enduring fame stems from its simple truth: Being funny on purpose is terribly difficult.[1] In fact, sometimes it seems like the more effort you put into being funny, the less funny you actually are.[2]

[Scroll to the bottom to see footnotes.]

In other words, humor is delicate stuff, and it’s easy to go wrong. Whether you’re trying to write a humorous story or just inject some levity into a dramatic narrative,[3] there are many, many more ways to go wrong than right. Humor is subjective, so figuring out why no one’s laughing at your jokes can be a maddening and frustrating process. But a good place to start is to ask yourself: Do you like the things you’re making fun of?

The Mel Brooks Arc

The big mistake people who are actually not very good at being funny make is to assume that humor derives from disdain—that we make fun of the things we despise. This is understandable, because a lot of humor is kind of mean-spirited or predicated on someone else’s misfortune.[4] The old cliché of someone slipping on a banana peel is the ur-example here: We laugh, at least in part, because someone else has suffered in a ridiculous way. From late-night talk show hosts mocking politicians to your old high school friends making fun of every single thing you do,[5] humor can be and very often is dark and even cruel.

But that’s really a question of execution—tone and style. The reason your old friends laugh when they see your new haircut is because they have affection for you.[6] This is because of one simple fact: Humor works better when you know your subject intimately, and that kind of knowledge requires time and dedication—in other words, affection. You have to know your subject really, really well in order to effectively make fun of it, and we usually don’t get too close to things we don’t like and enjoy on some level. That’s why self-deprecating humor works so well: We rarely know a subject better than ourselves.

To demonstrate this, let’s look at the output of a legendary comedian: Mel Brooks. It’s not a stretch to say that Brooks invented the modern film parody with films like Young Frankenstein (a parody of classic Universal horror films from the 1930s) and Blazing Saddles (a parody of classic Westerns), which respectively rock a 94 percent and 90 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.[7] Both of those films are still highly regarded and served as the template for later films like Airplane! and even the more recent Scary Movie films. Part of what makes these two films work so well is Brooks’ clear love of the material he’s poking fun at. He clearly knows old horror movies and old westerns, and as a result he has the knowledge to make fun of them effectively. He can find the tiny little details and the common tropes and exploit them for humor.

By contrast, Brooks’ later parodies like Spaceballs (57 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) or Robin Hood: Men in Tights (41 percent) aren’t nearly as successful or as highly regarded, and the reason is clear: He was making fun of things (the Star Wars films, for example) that he didn’t understand or love.[8] It’s not that his humor turned mean or mocking—mean and mocking can be very funny. It’s that he was no longer making fun of things he knew intimately.

The Inside Track

Effective humor has everything to do with your knowledge of the subject—in order to make fun of something effectively, you have to understand it on a fairly deep level. But the other aspect of effective humor is shared knowledge—your audience has to know as much about your subject as you do, or the jokes will fall flat.[9]

You can see this in operation with “inside” jokes, those shared jokes you pass back and forth with friends and family and co-workers. Often these jokes are of the “you had to be there” variety, but the point is that “being there” involves intimate knowledge of each other. These jokes are often hilarious to those in the know and completely, bizarrely not funny in any way to anyone on the outside looking in.[10] The reason they’re funny to you is because you have all the necessary information to see the humor.

If you poke fun at something in your writing that potential readers won’t be familiar with, the jokes simply won’t work. That means you have to put in a bit of side effort to ensure your humor will be effective:

Education. If the humor will be derived from a universal or widely-shared experience—say, working in an office—you can probably safely assume a large portion of your audience will at least be basically familiar with the aspects you’ll be leveraging for the funny stuff. If you’re going to make fun of something your readers might not be familiar with, though, you’ll need to lace the early going with a crash course so they can get the jokes. For example, in his classic postmodernist novel Infinite Jest,[11] David Foster Wallace gets a lot of humor out of the main setting of a tennis academy—but he takes care to give the reader a lot of information about what it’s like to play tennis at a high level and attend a program like that, to help them “get” the relatively subtle humor he uses.Escalation. Working with humor derived from a subject or circumstance that won’t be immediately familiar to your reader, like an invented organization or maybe even an entire culture in a fantasy novel, you need to warm them up a bit by starting off small and subtle.[12] This not only gives you time to familiarize your reader with the subject of your jokes, it also eases them into an instinctual understanding of your sense of humor and the aspects of the subject you’ll be poking fun at. Jumping in with a deep, complex meta-joke about a subject you introduced one paragraph ago is not going to work out the way you think it will.Permission. It’s often necessary to give your readers permission to laugh at something, to indicate clearly that some aspect of the story is, in fact, a joke. Depending on the overall tone of your book (especially in the early going) and the subject of your humor, it might not be obvious that you are, in fact, joking, so giving the reader the green light to laugh is a useful and sometimes necessary step. This can be accomplished by having a character laugh or otherwise acknowledge the joke or simply via the tone you use in that section. Once you’ve “broken the seal” on the humorous stuff in your story you probably won’t have to do this again—but you shouldn’t hesitate if you think there’s a good reason to repeat the exercise (say, if you shift the tone or style of humor you’re employing).

As a professional writer, remember that it’s your job to entertain, inform, and/or guide your readers[13]—not to simply amuse yourself.[14] Ensuring that your audience has the tools and information necessary to “get” your jokes is an absolute necessity.

[Turning the Page Into a Canvas: Helping Readers Visualize Humor]

In On It

Finally, there’s one last aspect of affection that’s required to make your humor really land when you’re making fun of something: bringing your audience inside the circle of trust. You have to make sure your audience understands that you’re not mocking them, even if you are mocking something they very much love and enjoy. Even if you are actually mocking the very people who have been kind enough to take an interest in (and possibly spend money on) your work, you still want them to feel like they’re in on it, like it’s all in good fun.

Again, this requires intimate knowledge. Humor always requires a subject, a target, and even the mildest jokes can bother people if they feel like they’re being othered or excluded. The only way you’re going to avoid insulting folks is to understand very deeply what it is they love about your target in the first place—or, if you’re going to mock them (gently or otherwise), you need to know what are the legitimate targets about them that deserve some mockery. Most of us know we are ridiculous in some ways[15]; the dividing line between laughing at ourselves and getting angry is that sense that we’re part of the joke, that we’ve been invited to make fun of ourselves.

This requires more than just an academic, or even an experiential, expertise in whatever it is you’re making fun of—it also requires a perspective shift, because people experience, use, and enjoy things in different ways. You might imagine that making fun of something that seems like an easy target—say, a genre of fiction that you find patently silly or pandering—is a slam dunk on the funny meter, but unless you’re actually a fan of that genre yourself you may be painfully and cluelessly unaware of the source of its tropes or the way its themes resonate with people dealing with trauma or angst in their lives. Suddenly what seemed like lighthearted, anodyne humor gets transmogrified into mean-spirited mockery. Not only are you not funny, but you’re actively harmful to boot.

Humor is hard to pull off. It’s easy to miscalculate and offend, irritate, or simply confuse your reader—especially if you’re turning to humor from a negative place and mocking things you dislike or don’t respect. But that kind of easy humor doesn’t always work, because it’s typically shallow and alienating. If you want your readers to be laughing with you, start from a place of knowledge and affection for your subject.[16]

[1] And as I can sadly attest that being funny by accident is not the superpower you might think it is.

[2] Something I will no doubt prove beyond a shadow of a doubt as these footnotes progress.

[3] If you ever need an example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, just look for someone who’s pretty sure they’d kill it as a standup comedian.

[4] See: Every single nickname I’ve ever been given throughout my entire life.

[5] Uh … everyone’s old friends do this, right? Oh, god.

[6] This is an entirely random example and has nothing to do with the fact that I spent six years dealing with a cowlick so legendary it was known as The Fin throughout my social circle.

[7] If you have not heard of these films, please imagine the “Matt Damon ages 50 years in Saving Private Ryan” meme here.

[8] Fun fact: Prior to 1977, no one knew what a Star Wars was.

[9] I can have entire, side-splitting conversations with my old high school friends using nothing but “Simpsons” quotes, for example, but when I try this with younger folks I am cruelly mocked. Well, mocked more.

[10] For example, every time I ask my agent about my most recent royalty statements, she just bursts into laughter until I eventually go away.

[11] Someone recently told me they have been reading this doorstopper since 2007, and I immediately and unreservedly believed them.

[12] As a man who has been hitting the same jokes about pantslessness and incompetence since 1995, I think we can all agree I know subtle humor.

[13] Or, if you’re me, occasionally confuse and alarm.

[14] Even if, like me, you are incredibly easy to amuse.

[15] I know what you’re all thinking, and it’s hurtful.

[16] That’s why I usually just make fun of myself in my writing. I’m the foremost expert on Jeff Somers in the world, and I also like myself a lot. Probably a little too much, if these footnotes are any indication.

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