This spring, I took my first poetry class. One of my favorite memories from that class is a quote. My poetry teacher passed on some advice that a professor gave her during her master’s program. “He told me,” she said, “that a mature writer can write comedy as well as drama.” That statement struck me between the eyes. Although I was familiar with the concept, I had never had it so bluntly stated to me.
Writing comedy makes you a mature writer because it shows that you can appreciate real life’s wide range of moods and reflect that realistically in your writing. Comedy also provides necessary levity for readers. Something that makes a reader laugh will leave them with just as rich a memory as something that makes them cry.
You can apply comedy to your work in multiple ways. Charles Dickens most notably uses irony and comical personalities to delight his audiences and to relieve them from touching death scenes. Shakespeare, too, injects comedy into his darkest and most tragic plays, including Hamlet.
As always, our comedy will be strongest when it patterns itself after real life. Its presence, rather than ruining the drama of a moment, often heightens and deepens it by sheer contrast. If it does nothing else, humor increases the reader’s investment in and sympathy toward the story, sharpening their reception and lengthening their memory.
Yet how would you even go about adding comedy to your work? I will address at least three distinct types of humor here. These types are by no means an exhaustive list, but they will hopefully spark some inspiration.
Situational humor refers to humor that occurs in normal situations with normal characters in everyday circumstances. The humor arises from the people themselves and their reactions to comical or exaggerated events. Even the situation’s everydayness heightens the comedy by contrasting with its abnormality. For instance, you could have a perfectly normal family of six living in a tiny apartment, and the humor arises from their intrigues, laughter, and general lives spent with each other and with friends who frequently visit. The key to situational humor is that it happens in one ordinary place and involves funny situations that could and do happen in everyday life.
Thus, situational humor is easy because we can use a memory from real life. And, maybe, if we cannot recall anything funny enough, we still know the “rules” by which our present day works and can easily create within those rules. For instance, you know that it is possible for someone to mail a letter and for that letter to be delivered to the wrong house. Perhaps this has happened to you before (or maybe the equivalent with texts). Now imagine that the letter contained an aggravated rant from one friend to another, but is now being read by the wrong person who is so insulted by the contents that they immediately sit down and write a scathing reply. This reply leads the original letter writer to think their friend hates them, and you have just created a humorous, confusing situation for you and the reader to sort out together.
Situational humor is effective for scene changes, especially in longer plots. In fact, because situational humor is tied to a particular setting or situation, changing scenes to the situation in which the humor usually takes place will act as a signal to readers. They may immediately grow excited to see what else occurs in this setting and read on eagerly because the material gives them a break and rewards their expectations.
Personality humor refers to the humor of the characters themselves. These characters have a way of speaking or certain mannerisms that distinguish them as clownish, air-headed, or naturally witty. Often, their hilarity appears in conversations or in physical actions.
Charles Dickens is a master of this type of humor. He often provides a comic-relief character with a hilarious appearance or mannerisms. Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield is an example of this type of humor. Although he is incredibly poor and heavily in debt, Mr. Micawber always talks about waiting for some job to appear rather than looking for one himself. And, despite his social degradation, he attempts to speak and dress like a wealthy gentleman by overdoing his clothing and making speeches out of statements that could be one sentence or less. Again, Mr. Mantalini from Nicholas Nickleby pretends to die whenever his wife explodes at him for spending all her money. To soothe her, he frequently speaks to her in the third person, calling her “my life and soul” and asking whether “his life and soul will vex itself."
Dickens’ works are full of characters who express their opinions with quaint phrases or who overreact to situations, thus making the reader laugh. You may know individuals in real life who are naturally funny to watch and to interact with. Draw on this experience or feel free to invent characters.
As mentioned above, personality humor can be expressed through dialogue. This use makes personality humor harder than situational humor because it is more detailed and requires more stamina. However, personality humor can be woven throughout a heavier plot easily without having to change scenes or elongate the plot. Thus, this type of humor provides instant and continuous relief to the reader, like a stream of cool water in a desert.
Irony is defined in multiple ways. For our purposes, we will define ironic humor as humor that arises when the opposite of what is expected occurs or when reality does not match the character’s expectations or actions.
A specific type of irony is dramatic irony, which occurs when the reader knows something that some of the characters do not. An example of this occurs in Anne of Green Gables when Anne accidentally leaves the cream cheese uncovered, leading to a mouse drowning in the mixture. She alone knows this occurred. And this difference between reality and the other characters’ expectations leads to a hilarious dinner scene where she screams out suddenly that no one should eat the cheesecake.
Again, irony can be used in dialogue when a person says something that does not seem to match the situation. For instance, two soldiers could be standing in a trench with mud and stench, and one soldier observes that he always wanted to vacation in France, where the earth is so rich and muddy and doesn’t grow any plants. Such an example is closer to sarcasm than to irony. Another example of conversational irony might be a corporal who insists on a clean appearance in his soldiers but condemns their bad behavior while wearing an unbuttoned coat, unbrushed hair, and unpolished boots.
Irony is perhaps the hardest of the three types of humor because it demands careful thought to create hidden meanings while still landing a worthy joke that the reader will appreciate.
A healthy writing lifestyle includes being able to appreciate and incorporate humor into our writing. If badly done, that humor comes across as out of place and garish and leaves a bad taste in our mouths. But if the attempt is successful, it results in a robust, whole body of work that pleases and delights simply because it is multi-dimensional. Too much of one mood in a story could make it insufferable to a reader without some hilarity to lighten the mood.
About the author
Alaina Suttles is a senior at Pensacola Christian College where she is studying for a bachelor's degree in professional writing. When she was still in high school, Alaina discovered Write the World and fell in love with its welcoming community. She won runner-up for a Write the World fantasy competition and later won first place for her college's creative fiction competition. As a young writer, Alaina was grateful to discover Write the World's community of fellow writers, where she could share her work and experience constructive and kind criticism that helped her grow her writing skills. Now, as a summer intern, she hopes to build that same confidence in other young writers and to encourage them to put their talents to the best use.