Writing Words for Nerds #AtoZChallenge--H is for Humor (and how to create it)

If you want to write or create anything funny, this just might be the most important blog post you’ll read this year.

I have a universal formula for creating humor, and I’m going to try to relate it to you in a single post that you should be able to read in under five minutes, ten if you're a slow reader.

So pay attention, and take notes if you have to. There WILL be a test, and I’m not the one who will be grading it. That privilege belongs to your audience.  You will either pass or fail. As Yoda says, “Do, or do not. There is no try.” You’re going to want a laugh, or, at the very least, a smile or a smirk.

Are you ready? Here it is.

The Quest

When I was a teenager, I used to sit with a spiral notebook and a pen in front of the TV while I watched shows like Soap and Taxi. (Yes, I am that old. Shut up.) I took apart and analyzed these shows, trying to figure out their formula. Why were they funny? I had to know.

In college, I studied English Literature and Theater. One of my Theater professors taught a class on Comedy, while another taught a class on clowning. Both turned out to be cases of “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” The Comedy class taught the classic formula, which is pain+distance=comedy.

Now give that a little bit of thought. First take something painful and add distance to it to see if that makes it funny. Then take everything you know that’s funny and see if you can find the pain and the distance in it. You’ll discover, as I did, that this formula DOESN’T WORK.  It only explains SOME comedy, but not all comedy. You can’t take something painful, add some distance to it, and then expect it to be funny. Is the Lincoln assassination funny just because it happened about 150 years ago? No. And what about the other way around? Is there any pain and distance in “Why did the chicken cross the road?” No.

So I knew I had to keep looking.

The Discovery

About a year and a half after I graduated from college and earned a teacher’s certificate, I started to work as an editorial cartoonist, a job I held for seven years. During that time, I came up with about a thousand cartoons. That’s when I discovered my universal humor formula. I reduced it to just three S-words, and for reasons that will soon be apparent, I called it the House of Funny formula.

Here it is, everything you need to know about creating any kind of comedy:

Setup+Surprise+Sense=Laughter!

This formula works for all kinds of comedy and humor. All kinds. I have yet to find any joke or comedy or funny cartoon or comic strip that didn’t utilize this formula. A humorist, cartoonist, comedian, or comedy writer might say, “Well, I don’t,” but when pressed, he probably wouldn’t be able to tell you how he comes up with funny stuff. Most funny people use it‑‑they just aren’t aware that they do.

So how does this formula break down?

Setup

The Setup part is easy. That’s whatever your funny thing is about. If you’re a comedian, your setup is probably either your life or a character or characters you’ve created. Then again, maybe your comedy is more like an editorial cartoonist, and your setup is the news. If you’re writing a comedy or humorous fiction, your setup is the plot and your characters. Your setup can be anything, really. That’s one of the beautiful things about humor. It can be about anything.

Surprise!

Surprise, and in a way Sense, are the parts that make this the House of Funny formula.

Like a House of Fun, the House of Funny is made up of mirrors and lenses that show you something in surprising ways.

To turn your setup into something funny, just look at it through a House of Funny mirror or lens.

In a House of Fun, there’s a wavy mirror that makes you look like something you’re not. It can stretch your neck to make you look like a giraffe, or it can shorten your neck and legs to make you look like a penguin. In the House of Funny, there are also microscope lenses that take something small and make it big, and there are lenses that take something big and make it small. There’s a rosy lens that makes things that shouldn’t be happy happy, and a blue lens that makes things that shouldn’t be sad sad. There are all kinds of character lenses that simply take things and show them to the audience through the filter that is the character. There are regular mirrors that flip things from left to right and concave mirrors that turn things on their head. There’s that strange mirror that puts something in a surprising place or puts together two things that don’t go together, like that mirror in Disney’s Haunted House that puts a ghost in the seat next to you. And finally, there are those cool mirrors that show you things exactly as they are, which is surprising since standard mirrors always flip things from left to right. In some ways, this is the ultimate House of Funny mirror. There’s nothing more impressive that showing people a truth that’s always been there but that they’ve never really seen. This is the mirror of wit.

Sense

Many of these mirrors come with their own sense. For example, if I take something and exaggerate it, it’s still the thing, so it makes sense. Or if I take something and show it through a character lens, both the character and the thing are still the same, so they make sense. Or if I’m showing you a similarity between disparate things, like how you look in a House of Fun wavy mirror and a giraffe or a penguin, you can see that makes sense with your own eyes. It’s mostly when you use the mirror that puts together two things that don’t belong together or something in a surprising place that sense is something you need to create. It doesn’t have to be something that makes sense in the real world. It can, but it doesn’t have to. It just has to make sense in some kind of context. For example, the sense of a pun is a linguistic one. Puns make sense because this word or these words are like that word or those words that make sense in another context. For example, “Why do cows wear bells? Because their horns don’t work!” Cows have bells and horns, and so do bicycles. By taking something that make sense in the context of bicycle bells and horns and applying them to cowbells and cow horns, you have a pun. Pain, however, generally doesn’t make sense to the person feeling the pain, no matter the distance. Causing your audience pain is something you want to avoid if you want your joke to make sense.

It’s all about the Audience

Each part of the House of Funny formula only works if it applies to the Audience.

The Setup has to be known to the audience. Sometimes you need to explain it in advance, and sometimes you don’t. For example, if I did a joke today in America about Donald Trump, I can assume the audience already knows the setup: that Donald Trump was on a show called The Apprentice, that he likes to put his name on buildings and water and pretty much anything else, and that he’s currently running for president. If I were doing the same joke in, oh, France, I might have to explain the setup. I might also have to explain it in America in ten years. But in America today, I don’t.

The Surprise only works if it’s surprising to the audience. For example, if you’ve heard the joke before, it won’t be surprising, so you won’t laugh.

And, finally, the joke has to make sense to the audience. There has to be a moment of “oh, I get it!” in the audience’s mind. If the audience doesn’t get it, it won’t be funny. Duh!

So that’s the House of Funny in a nutshell. Now all you have to do is take whatever setup you’re using, look at it through a House of Funny mirror or lens, and find the sense in it. As long as you do all these things within the context of your intended audience, you’ll be able to pass the test.

Two other things to keep in mind:

 Brevity really is the soul of wit. In general, keep is as short as you can to keep it funny. I can’t tell you how many times something that should have been funny lost me because it took just enough time for me to figure out the punch line seconds before it came. If your audience can figure out where you’re going before you got there, you’ve lost that all important element of surprise.  

Take it as far as it can go, all the way to the edge of the cliff . . . and then push.  If you’re using a microscope to make something small big, make it as big as you possibly can. As I’ve told members of my critique group, “Don’t do anything half-assed. It’s full-assed or nothing.”

If all of this seems too overwhelming, I suggest you start by taking something you find funny and breaking it down to its parts. What’s the Setup? What’s the Surprise? What mirror or lens was used? What’s the sense? Be teenage me sitting in front of a TV set with a notebook and a pen, and analyze everything that makes you laugh. It’s a great place to start.   

Good luck! I hope this will help you bring more laughter into this world. We certainly need it. 

Me Write Funny Someday—how to add humor to your writing (part 2)

I have a surprise for you, and it’s a doozy. Are you ready? Here it is:
You’re a comic genius.

Okay, did I see some eyes rolling? Well, it's true. You ARE a comic genius, and that’s because you know how to create the kind of unique surprises that create laughs. Um . . . at least you will after you read this post.

In my last post, I told you that when I was a political cartoonist I invented a very simple formula for creating humor, and it is

Setup+Surprise+Sense=Humor

I call this formula the House of Funny, and the reason why is that it works like a house of fun.

Look in a house-of-fun mirror, and you will see things in a surprising new way. Likewise, the House of Funny creates surprise by changing your perspective and giving you a new way to look at things. And also like a house of fun, it does this with a variety of mirrors and lenses.

As I said in the previous post, your setup creates an expectation, and you create surprise by taking the setup in an unexpected direction. Which direction? That depends on the mirror or lens you decide to use.


The Mirrors and Lenses of the House of Funny

·        A regular mirror

·        A closed-circuit camera

·        A magnifying glass

·        A reverse magnifying glass

·        Blue, pink, yellow and other colored lenses

·        A wiggly mirror

The regular mirror

A regular, household mirror flips right to left and left to right. We don’t usually laugh at this, because we’re used to it. In fact, when we don’t see this--for example, in the monitor of a closed-circuit camera--we might actually find it funny. You move off to your left, and you see yourself move off to the right on the screen. It takes some getting used to.

The regular, household mirror in the House of Funny, though, goes against our expectations. It flips it. Right becomes left, and left becomes right. While we're used to this when we peer at ourselves over the bathroom sink, we're not used to it in the stories we read.

For example, in so many fairy tales, the handsome prince comes to the princess’s rescue. So what’s the flipside? Well, the flipside of a handsome prince is an ugly ogre, and that gives you the plot of Shrek.

In fact, that’s just one of many flips in Shrek. The charming prince who wants the princess is actually a less-than-charming lord. The princess is . . . . well, I wouldn’t want to give any spoilers. In the second movie, the Fairy Godmother is not the kindly lady from Cinderella. The Shrek series is all about flipping fairy tales from left to right. But that’s not the only possible flipside for the standard princess fairy tale. You could write a story about a brave princess who rescues a prince, or a prince who gets a princess in trouble instead of rescuing her, or a princess who prefers not to be rescued, or . . . the possibilities are endless.


A closed-circuit camera monitor

This shows us things exactly as they are, and this is surprising because we’re used to see things--particularly ourselves--differently. Like I said, every time you look in your bathroom mirror, you see yourself flipped from right to left. It's interesting to note that the only person incapable of seeing you the way the rest of the world does . . . is you.

I think that the humor that comes from exposing the truth behind false assumptions is the greatest humor of all. It shows us what we’ve been missing . . . or maybe something we once noticed but ignored because someone told us it was wrong. It's the little kid from the story of the Emperor's new clothes, the one who points out that the king is naked.

I also think that this is one of the hardest kinds of humor to create, because it requires that you first recognize that a generally held assumption is untrue. The other problem is that some people hold very tightly to their false beliefs. They need them. It gives them a steady footing on reality, and anything else throws them off balance. In medieval times, people were often ostracized or worse for exposing false assumptions. The sun turned around the earth, and people didn’t want to hear otherwise. The Dark Ages didn’t have a sense of humor.  

But there are those who think this is the only kind of standup comedy that’s worth something, the kind that tells the truth. It can also be a fun way to look at fairy tales. While we know they aren’t true, there are some things about them that are just plain out absurd. Like who wears glass slippers? And who has such a weird shoe size that her shoes won’t fit anyone else? And where did Cinderella get her shoes before her Fairy Godmother showed up with the only pair of shoes that precisely fit her very weird feet? And why was the prince so obsessed with her feet anyway?

Looking beyond assumptions can lead to some pretty funny results.  


The magnifying glass

Take anything small and blow it up way out of proportion. In fiction, don’t write small when you can write big. Characters shouldn’t like each other but be madly in love. A nemesis shouldn’t be mildly annoying but outright evil. It makes readers care more, love more, worry more, hate more, feel more, and laugh more. Of course, if you want it to be funny, it has to be surprising, too, not something that has been magnified in that way many times before. And it can’t be viewed as too painful to the audience.

The obvious example from a children’s book of a magnifying glass being used to create humor? Clifford the Big Red Dog, of course!

The reverse magnifying glass

British humor is often about understatement. It’s Monty Python calling a severed leg, “just a scratch.” Take something huge and treat it as if it’s something tiny. This is the reverse magnifying glass, and it’s great for satire. When something huge and outrageous—like nuclear war—is treated as no big deal, you have all the ingredients for satire or black comedy.


Blue, pink, yellow, and other colored lenses

 

My all-time favorite humorous fiction series is The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, and one of my favorite characters in it is Marvin the paranoid android. Marvin’s comedy comes from the blue lens in the House of Funny. For him, everything is depressing. Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh is another funny, blue-lens character.

In my stories, Amber from Why My Love Life Sucks: The Legend of Gilbert the Fixer generally dances through life (and un-death) with rose-colored glasses. That’s the pink lens of the House of Funny, and it works because it contrasts nicely with Amber’s less-than-rosy circumstance.

Colored lenses are all about seeing the world with one very specific attitude, one that’s often at odds with the setup or the character’s situation.  Many standup comedians use colored lenses to give their onstage personas a focused, unified character. Steven Wright, for example, is deadpan. He’s the Eeyore of stand up, and his lens would be blue. Kate Micucci is always perky. Her onstage persona definitely wears rose-colored glasses.  The next time you see a great standup act, ask yourself, “Does the persona the comedian plays see things through a colored lens? And if so, which color?”

The wiggly mirror

As I wrote in an article on my website, the wiggly mirror is great for writing fiction, because the humor in it comes from conflict. Look in a wiggly house-of-fun mirror, and you’ll see a too long neck with too short legs, or a too thin body with a too wide head. This mirror is all about putting together things that don’t belong together--and that’s what conflict is all about. Since conflict is a necessary element in fiction, this mirror is the perfect mirror for creating fiction.  Put a character with another character who doesn't fit him, in a place or situation that doesn't fit him, or have him want or be or believe two things that are mutually exclusive, and you have both a story and the potential for humor. (Click here to read more.) 

One thing I didn’t mention in that article is that the wiggly mirror can be used in another--almost opposite--in the House of Funny. While this mirror puts unlikely things together, it also shows us how something is like something else. People who look in these mirrors in a house of fun often say, “I look like a giraffe!” or “I look like a penguin!” By changing certain parts of your appearance, you end up looking like something else.

This aspect of the wiggly mirror is great for adapting stories, whether in funny or dramatic ways. I could use it to adapt the news of the day when I was a political cartoonist. If someone reminded me of a captain of a sinking ship, I could draw him as a captain of a sinking ship. This aspect is also the one used for creating puns, because puns are based on things that are different but sound alike. It can also be used in parodies, like the movie Airplane!

And when it comes to writing fiction, this aspect of the wiggly mirror can let you use anything--from your life, to the news, to old classics--as a springboard for creating new stories.

For example, when I wrote Dan Quixote: Boy of Nuevo Jersey, I looked at the classic story of Don Quixote and asked myself what it might be like in today’s world. Don Quixote, with his love of reading and his desire to become a storybook hero, reminded me of a kid who wants to be Harry Potter or Prince Charming. Don Quixote’s trusty servant, Sancho Panza, reminded me of a faithful friend. So I turned Don Quixote into 13-year-old Dan Tyler; and I turned Sancho Panza into his best friend Sandy.  I went through the rest of Don Quixote asking what in Dan and Sandy’s lives could be like the elements of Don Quixote’s story. And that's how Dan Quixote: Boy of Nuevo Jersey came about. 

In conclusion

If you want to write something funny or add humor to something you’ve already written, try to look at your setup through the various House of Funny mirrors and lenses.


Ask yourself the following questions:

1.       What is the expectation your set up creates?

2.       What is the opposite of that expectation?

3.       Is your setup about an assumption, and is that assumption false or plain out absurd? If so, what’s the unrevealed truth about that assumption?

4.        If your setup is something small, what happens when you magnify it?

5.       If your setup is something huge, what happens when you understate it?

6.       What is the expected attitude people have about your setup, and which colored lens might create a surprisingly different perspective?

7.       What conflicting thing can you put together with your setup in a surprising way that makes sense? (In fiction, this can be a conflicting character, a conflicting external situation, or a conflict a character has with himself or herself.)

8.       If your setup is something that’s been done to death (variations on Cinderella, for example), what does the setup remind you of? Is there something similar but very different that’s never been done before?  

Brainstorm this out on paper. In the center, write down the setup you intend to use. Put a circle around it. Now write or draw (when I was a political cartoonist, I often drew) the answers to these questions. Sometimes one question will have several promising answers, and sometimes a question will not lead to any answers at all. When you find an answer you like, put a circle around it. If you like, you can even rewrite your answer at the center of another piece of paper and use that to brainstorm the next part of your story.
                                                               
Not only will this method help you add humor to your writing, it can help you come up with an infinite number of story ideas, or brainstorm solutions to all sorts of problems by giving you new ways to look at them. After all, anything can be a setup.

So now you know how to add humor to your writing in ways no one else has thought of before. See, I told you you were a comic genius!

~~*~~

I hope this was helpful, and if so I hope you'll use it to create humor wherever and whenever you find a need for it. As always, I welcome your questions and comments.  As the tagline for Dan Quixote goes, life and laughter are better with friends.

Humor: Does It Have to Hurt?

I've been studying comedy since I was a little kid, collecting jokes I found on TV so I could tell them later and make my family and friends laugh. I've read many books on creative humor, and I've even taken a couple of courses in college on the subject. The teachers of the courses and most of the books say the same thing, and that is pain is a part of comedy. But is it really?

I was a political cartoonist for seven years, and in that time I came up with my own pain-free formula for creating humor, a formula that helped me write over 1,000 cartoons, and add humor to over 100 articles, 40 picture books, and seven novels. It's also helped me get jobs, make friends, get laughs when I had to speak as a member of a forum on humor, and deal better with stress. This formula is called the House of Funny, and this video is the first in a series I'm creating to explain what the House of Funny is and what it can do for you.      

I hope you enjoy it, and if you do I hope you'll subscribe to my YouTube channel, because I have a lot more fun planned.