Description:
You don’t have to be a comedian to learn how to add some funny to your book. Do yourself a favor by learning these five tips to help you find where to mine for humor in your story.
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Script:
Hi, Story Nerds. I’m Claire Taylor with FFS Media. Want to sprinkle an extra dash of humor into your books but not sure how or where to add it?
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Authors often ask me how they can make their books funnier. I’m sure early on, I probably said something snarky like “make yourself funnier,” because I’d never taken the time to break it down into bite-size pieces. To me, humor was more of a knee-jerk reaction than a learned skill.
Well, I was wrong. Humor is always a learned skill, and taking a peek into why we humans learn it unlocks the single biggest key to pinpointing opportunities to make your story funnier.
To find where to sprinkle in comedy, first locate the moments of high tension in your story.
Obviously, the point of highest tension will be your climax. Unless you want the entire story to be viewed as a comedy, this isn’t the best place to inject humor. The climax is a time to resolve all the emotional, philosophical, and physical conflicts of the story. If you make a joke out of it, you’re actually undermining all of that and draining the sense of meaning right out of your book.
For example, imagine if you were writing a gritty mystery about a serial killer and the climax is Detective InnerDemons coming face-to-face with the notorious Baby Strangler. If this climax is humorous, first of all, that’s really fucked up, but also, all that tension, AKA gravity, you created throughout is dispersed by the laughter, and the climax will fall flat. You don’t want that, I assure you.
So skip the climax and locate two or three moments of high tension prior to it. These will be your main veins for accessing the comedy motherlode.
Think of your story as a deflated balloon. You have to breathe tension into it with your writing. A strong story inflates slowly until you’ve stretched the balloon to the maximum it can go. At the moment of the story’s climax, your protagonist makes the big, important decision, and that’s like you letting go of the balloon so that it buzzes around the room, deflating rapidly.
All that tension can become exhausting for your readers and characters if there’s no temporary relief. When your readers laugh, it’s like letting a little bit of air out of that deflated balloon. Not all of it, but just a little. And that feels really good.
Stand-up comedians who do their job right are basically blowing up a tension balloon and letting the air out of it over and over again.
Humor is a social tool. We employ it during life’s inevitable awkward situations by deflating tension to maintain peace and harmony in the group. Someone call someone by the wrong name? Make a joke about it. Your coworker just get chewed out by the boss? Crack a joke about the boss once they leave the room.
Keeping the purpose of humor in mind, look back at those two or three points of high tension that you located in your story. That’s where you should home in to mine the humor because that’s where the most can be found for the smallest amount of effort. The tenser the reader, the less you have to let up the end of the balloon to release a whole lot of high-pressure laughs.
The reverse of this is to look at the points of lowest tension in your story. Getting a laugh out of those moments will be markedly more difficult, so if humor isn’t your strong suit yet (and I hope you’ll be real with yourself on this), your attempts are likely to leave the reader feeling impatient with the comedic diversions rather than delighted by them. If you release your grip on the end of a deflated balloon, you’re not getting any air from it.
One of the most common fails I see at generating humor comes when authors try to create false tension solely for the purpose of making a joke. Unless readers are there for jokes, jokes, and more jokes, they sense that this tension is synthetic, not an organic part of the story you’re trying to tell, and it can make the story feel meandering.
Don’t reach too far for the joke.
Make it easy on yourself and pick the low-hanging fruit that grow around the fertile points of tension.
One more important tip: the very best placement for a joke is immediately before or immediately after the crest of tension in a scene, not during the crest itself.
When you build toward a point of tension — a confrontation, a major decision, etc. — you’re making a promise to the readers that there will be a moment of fruition and they’ll receive a satisfying resolution to the build. If you subvert that important moment by adding humor in the midst of it, you’re breaking your promise.
However, if you place the humor directly before that moment of tension with, say, a false alarm, or directly after to help their nerves settle from the conflict, you’re actually doing your readers a huge favor. If they laugh right before the difficult moment, they’ll feel slightly more prepared to take it on. If they laugh right after, they’ll feel more resilient to whatever hardships they just witnessed. And they’ll love you for providing either of those opportunities.
To sum up, stick to these five tips to add humor into the right places in your story:
1. Unless you’re writing satire, avoid making the conflict too funny.
2. Moments of high tension bear the low-hanging fruit for comedy. Don’t be shy — pick that fruit!
3. Avoid making the precise moment of highest tension in a scene too comedic; instead, use a false start before or a recovery moment after to help readers cope with the uncomfortable tension.
4. Scenes of low tension are the hardest from which to mine humor, so don’t search for it there unless you’re getting really good at this comedy stuff.
5. Don’t reach too far for the joke. Going out of your way to create false tension for the sake of a laugh is likely to annoy readers who want to get on with the story.
I’m aware that these tips focus on where to put humor rather than how to create the humor itself. That second part is a much more complicated topic that depends heavily on your genre, characters, preferred humor style, and setting. It can’t be covered in a single blog post. But if you take another look at your story through the lens of these tips, you’ll be off a great start.
That’s it for now. Happy writing.