Getting Serious About Humor: Where Comic Writing Comes From

I am a fan of Zarna Garg's on-line videos and the clips of her stand-up I've seen. So, I jumped at the chance to buy her memoir, This American Woman, when the e-book edition was on sale. (I like ebooks, because I'm a minimalist and control the number of things around me. I like them even more when they're cheap.) I was talking about it all the time I was reading it.

Interesting point: I often force a family member to watch Garg's videos, some of which include her family, because everyone wants to share funny stuff, right? For the most part, he just does not get them. I find this fascinating, because I believe Garg's work is incongruity humor, my favorite kind. She describes herself as "America's first Indian immigrant mom comedian" and does a lot of Indian culture clashing with American culture humor, which often ends up being commentary. She grew up in India, moving here in her late teens. She definitely gets America. 

Oh, and she also has some feminist stuff going on, describing what life was like for a girl in India, even a girl from a family with money. The family with money part ended rather abruptly when she was fourteen and her mother died. She was the youngest child, and her father wanted her to accept an arranged marriage. Our Zarna would have none of that, which meant pretty much living on the street for a year and a half. She continued to go to school during the day, while hustling her friends for places to stay at night. She ended up going back home to her father. What saved her from marriage was the paperwork coming through that enabled her to move to the United States to live with her sister and brother-in-law.

So that's an interesting backstory for anybody, but particularly a comedian.

I'm always fearful of giving away too much of another writer's story, particularly a personal story. So I will just offer up some of the fascinating stuff about how Garg got into comedy. She grew up in a business family. Her father was a businessman. Her brother was. After graduating from law school in this country, she married a man going to graduate school in business. She got permission to audit his courses. She wanted to do his homework, though he said no, because, it seems, he liked doing homework, too.

Her big interest, after she finished up her years as a New York City mom, was business. She wanted to start a business and made a few attempts.

They didn't go well.

And then someone suggested she try comedy. Which she treated like a business. She went about becoming a comedian in a very business-like manner. And it worked for her. It seems to be not only a business, but a family business.

If you read her book, watch her videos, read what she says about herself and her life on-line, you'll see how much this woman works.

• Of course, there is the stand-up appearances. 
• But she has also written an award-winning screenplay. Read the book. She'll explain why awards for screenplays are important. She's made me rethink submitting short-story manuscripts for awards.
• She won a Webby in 2025 after seven years of making videos.
• She does a podcast with her family. 
• She's an actress.
• She's all over the place. There's an article about her in The New Yorker! I read the New Yorker! How did I miss that?

I don't know that I would say that there is a lot in This American Woman about humor as a subject. But if you read this book, you can see how Garg's life experience is woven into her comedy persona. At the same time, you can see how that comedy persona is not necessarily the real Zarna Garg.

And that has something to say about where comic writing comes from. 

 

Getting Serious About Humor: Hyperbole, the Risky Literary Device

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 "I have a nagging fear that children's literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole...maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids' books are crud." Mac Barnett, National Ambassador for Young People's Literature in Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children

If you are unfamiliar with what I think someone called crudgate earlier this month, congratulations! While you missed out on some serious discussions of how the above quote passed around on social media offended writers some of whom feared its impact on children's literature, you also missed out on seeing the following types of personal responses directed toward the author who wrote it: 

• I never cared for the guy.
• He's a snob. (Unclear why. Maybe because he namedrops people like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George Saunders in his book?)
• What a dick. (I saw more than one dick-related comment.)
• It's mainly white women defending him. 
• He is not part of our community.  (I saw a number of community-type comments and couldn't help reading the word "community" as "club." Now I will always wonder how a community is different from a club.)
• He should resign. He should be impeached. 
• Asshole.
• His publisher should pull his book. (The person who said this on an email digest also said she discussed with a librarian having a copy of Make Believe pulled from circulation. The librarian had to point out that that would be censorship.)

This was all coming very soon after Make Believe, a short book made up of three rambling, somewhat didactic essays romanticizing children and children's literature, was released in this country. Many of the people making these comments said they hadn't read it. Many said they wouldn't read it. 

In a statement to School Library Journal, Barnett said the following: 

"Thank you for the opportunity to respond. First of all, I want to acknowledge the passage I wrote is hurtful, especially to people who work hard making books for kids. I understand why people are upset and feel betrayed. In trying to make a point, I got hyperbolic and glib. I was wrong. I'm truly sorry."

Spoiler alert: Many people did not accept that apology and the controversy raged on. It is still raging on. People may write books about this someday. I would watch the movie.

But you know what? In all that was said about this issue, I didn't see anything about hyperbole, even though it comes up in Barnett's apology and is the literary device that got this ball rolling. So let's fix that. 

Let's talk hyperbole. 

Definition

Definitions are a clichéd addition to an essay, but here we go, anyway.

Hyperbole--The use of exaggeration, which the author does not expect to be believed, to create an effect, often involving humor. Gauthier Law of Hyperbole

When hyperbole is used for comedy, it is related to the incongruity theory of humor, which states that the clash of unrelated ideas is funny. What is exaggerated clashes with something, if only what it is exaggerating. Aristotle is supposed to have recognized incongruity as a type of humor. Corollary to the Gauthier Law of Hyperbole

I mention Aristotle in the corollary not to namedrop, since I haven't read him, myself, but to point out that I'm not making this crud up. Aristotle did. Blame him.

Personal Experience

Yes, personal experience is another cliché of essays these days, but that's not stopping me.

Back before 2008, when I still had a nice little mid-list, middle grade author thing going, a Booklist reviewer said of my book, A Year with Butch and Spike, "Gauthier demonstrates a real talent here for humorous hyperbole and episodic classroom comedy."

They made hyperbole sound like a good thing. At least, I thought so at the time.

Maybe thirty years later, I wrote a very hyperbolic piece called What We All Want to Say to That One Out-of-Touch Grandfather at the Playground that was published at Frazzled, a parent humor site on the Medium platform. The humor was developed around the idea that older men spent much of their adult lives in work situations that did not prepare them for the rigors of taking their grandchildren to the playground. Among the personal responses directed toward me in response to it:

• I was a bigoted anti-male feminist and should mind my "f***ing business." I believe this was the first comment I got.
• I was a sanctimonious shit sack.
• I sounded like an ass.
• I was smug, dumb, superior. 

It went on for days!

Hyperbole is risky. 

Barnett Also Has a History with Hyperbole

I've seen Mac Barnett described on BlueSky by fans of Make Believe as being funny or at least wry, which is like funny but tends to be more of an attitude. It's a form of humor that applies a twist to something for a subtle, comic effect. Having now read a few of his picture books and a middle grade novel he co-wrote with Jory John (I hadn't heard of Barnett before all this started), I would place him in the wry category.

The picture books were lost on me, but I am not a picture book person and can't address them in any meaningful way. Or at all. The middle grade novel, however, The Terrible Two, is definitely hyperbolic, filled with stuff about kids pulling over-the-top and unbelievable pranks. Reviewers found it funny and it was successful enough to lead to a sequel.

At that point, Barnett may have thought, like me in my middle-grade writer days, that hyperbole is a good thing.

The Major Problem with Hyperbole

Hyperbole is a form of situational humor. It is not your classic one-liner, which, by the way, would probably work very well as a pull quote. Instead, hyperbole comes out of a situation. You have to understand the situation--what is being exaggerated--to understand the exaggeration.

Sometimes what is being exaggerated will be understood by the audience because of the audience members' cultural knowledge. For instance, in The Terrible Two Barnett and Jory could assume their audience would understand the hyperbole behind an elementary school principal finding his car on the steps in front of the school, because child readers know that kids don't drive and wouldn't be able to get a car up steps, if they could. (The authors explain how it was done at the end of the story.)

But sometimes the exaggeration used with hyperbole requires a lot more build-up, which was the case with "I have a nagging fear that children's literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole...maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids' books are crud." That line got a lot of build-up in the book, but not in the pull quote. What's more, not only does the pull quote not include the build-up, it eliminated a section that would have tipped readers off that there was missing build-up.

What Barnett actually said was not

"I have a nagging fear that children's literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole...maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids' books are crud."

but 

"I have a nagging fear that children's literature suffers from a slightly higher crud percentage than literature as a whole. So I now offer Barnett's Addendum to Sturgeon's Law: Maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids' books are crud."

This is still not funny as a pull quote. Readers still won't get the hyperbole Barnett was trying for. But they would have realized something was going on here. If they hadn't heard of it, they would have wondered what the hell is Sturgeon's Law?

What the Hell is Sturgeon's Law?

Anyone who read Make Believe would have had access to the page before the one the pull quote appears on. On it was an account of how science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon dealt with complaints about the quality of his genre back in the 1950s. Among the complaints? "...ninety percent of sf is crud." Sturgeon's response, "Ninety percent of everything is crud." 

That became Sturgeon's Law. It is so well-known in some circles that you can find it on memes and t-shirts. Usually on t-shirts "crud" is replaced with "crap."

After addressing Sturgeon's Law, Barnett begins his very next paragraph with a transitional sentence. "It's tempting, when explaining the abundance of bad kids' books, to just shout "Sturgeon's Law!" and move on." 

And then he goes on to what became the now infamous pull quote.

A Sort-of-Joke That Didn't Land

Some people who knew Barnett was referring to Sturgeon's Law questioned where Sturgeon got his ninety percent figure when he said "Ninety percent of everything is crud." Where's his evidence? I can't speak for the man, of course, but my wild guess is he was using hyperbole. 

Other readers wondered why, if Barnett was referring to Sturgeon's Law, he said ninety-four percent of children's lit is crud when Sturgeon said only ninety percent of everything is crud. Upping the number looks like hyperbole to me. More exaggeration. If ninety percent of everything is crud is funny, ninety-four percent will be even funnier!

Does knowing the build-up for this hyperbole now make this quote a knee-slapper? No. The best this was ever going to be was wry. It appears in an essay that argues that "lots of children's books are bad..." and ends with "...we'd better do our best to make some good kids' books." The twist on Sturgeon's Law may have been an attempt to lighten that message. Instead, it made it worse.

Hyperbole is Risky

Both Barnett and I had better luck using hyperbole in writing for children than for adults. Does that mean that children enjoy hyperbole and adults don't? Or do the adults who control every aspect of what children read (see Barnett on this) believe they do, so it gets into children's books and is well received  by the adults who review them no matter what kids think of it? 

Unlike child readers, adults do control every aspect of what we read. Additionally, we get to respond to what we read in a more direct way, on social media and in comments. As noted above, not all adults responded well to our use of hyperbole in writing for them.

For me, that didn't matter a whole lot. The main purpose of a humor piece is to be a humor piece. If there is some underlying idea being conveyed, it’s secondary to the humor, it supports the humor. Readers don't spend a lot of time on humor, whether they like it or not. "Ha-ha" or "boo," and then they move on.

For Barnett, his use of hyperbole mattered. The main purpose of an expository or persuasive essay is to explain or persuade, to make a point, as Barnett said himself in his apology, and not to be funny. If there’s humor, it’s secondary to the point, it supports the point. In an essay, everything needs to support the point.

I, myself, dropped the line "And they say serious literary criticism is dead!" in this essay that I originally used after the list of types of comments I saw Barnett receiving. I decided it didn't support what I wanted to be a meditation on hyperbole. The literary criticism line was about how we address those we don't agree with, and that's a totally different thing. Stay on task, Gail! 

Whether or not Barnett should have used Sturgeon's Law in his essay depends on what he was trying to do with it, how it supported the point he was trying to make. If he'd dropped it before publication, his argument that "lots of children's books are bad" might not have raised the same kind of ire that "94.7 percent of kids' books are crud" did. 

It probably wouldn't have made as attention-grabbing a pull-quote, either. 

Getting Serious About Humor: More Humor With Mystery

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I picked up The Mystery of the Crooked Man by Tom Spencer while browsing at a library, and I'm blogging about it now because I really need to get it back there. One of the book's blurbs described it as "riotously funny," and while I wouldn't go that far, main character Agatha Dorn is extremely drole in a bitter way that I enjoyed very much. 

In my inept study of humor writing I have found very few truly funny works of fiction. They tend to involve wry point-of-view characters and how they perceive what is happening in the story. Perhaps what I should learn from this is that humor in fiction is usually about character, not situation or plot.

Of another humorous mystery, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson, I said, among other things, that the narrator's inner life contributed to the humor. The same is true of the main character in The Mystery of the Crooked Man. Agatha might argue that she doesn't have much of an inner life or much of a life at all, which ends up being far funnier than you'd think it should be.

Of course, any readers of mysteries, or at least any readers of a certain age who have been reading mysteries for a long time, are going to raise their brows at a main character named Agatha in a mystery novel. Agatha Christie has become as famous for being Agatha Christie, Mystery Author, as she is for being Agatha Christie the author of mysteries, if you follow my thought there. She's sort of transcended her work. 

Now that I think of it, you probably don't need to be a reader of mysteries to know who Agatha Christie is and to note the use of that unusual first name in a book. 

Here is an interesting bit from the The Mystery of the Crooked Man that casual readers may not get and is not a spoiler: Agatha Dorn is a museum archivist who is a specialist on an author from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction named Gladden Green. Gladden Green had a real mystery in her life, because she disappeared for a few days while at the height of her career and later turned up in a hotel. This all right out of the real life of Agatha Christie. In case I haven't been clear, Agatha Dorn is a specialist on a character modeled on Agatha Christie. And get this...Gladden Green's husband's name is Archie. Agatha Christie's husband at the time she disappeared was also named Archie. She got another one later.

Now, of course, none of this is particularly funny, but it is fun. Also, is it metafiction? I've never been one hundred percent clear on what that is. 

I'm obsessing.

I must say that I felt this book dragged a little in the middle in terms of plot and mystery. But then it came roaring back with one of the best mystery endings I can recall. I didn't see it coming, but it made perfect sense.

I don't know how Agatha Dorn can come back for another mystery, but I'm definitely onboard if she does.

 

Getting Serious About Humor: A Truly Funny Novel

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While reading humor books, I haven't come across a lot of fiction I found truly funny. Until I read A Most Agreeable Murder by Julia Seales. The book's publisher calls it a "cozy mystery," but I think it's a parody. And not a parody of cozy mysteries, though I don't read a lot of those so I can't be sure. I think it's more a parody of the couple-historical-detective series I'm fond of and Pride and Prejudice. There's also a nod to the classic/horror mash-ups that were popular fifteen or twenty years ago. (Side note: My husband, son, and daughter-in-law all agreed to see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with me, even though none of them had read Pride and Prejudice. We all liked the movie.) 

A Most Agreeable Murder is such a good parody, I wonder if people unfamiliar with what is being parodied will get it. Must be they do, or enough do, anyway, because a sequel is coming in June.

A Note About the Pride and Prejudice References in A Most Agreeable Murder

Many years ago, I read an essay in which the author noted that while Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is portrayed as shallow and foolish and only interested in finding husbands for her daughters, she is also entirely correct. Without husbands, her daughters will be in dire straits when their father dies. They will have no income, they won't even have a home. While Mrs. Bennet is going all over the neighborhood frantically trying to find men to take care of her daughters, because in the world they live in they need men, her husband is portrayed as this intelligent, benign soul, disappointed by his choice of wife and burdened with her. Yet he is doing nothing, absolutely nothing, to save his children, leaving all the work to their mother.

Yeah, well the Steele family in A Most Agreeable Murder are clearly the Bennets from Pride and Prejudice, and Mr. Bennet/Steele here gets the treatment he deserves. While Mrs. Bennet/Steele gets a little respect.

A Note About the Couple-Mystery-Detective Series References in A Most Agreeable Murder

The couple-historical-detective series I'm familiar with have all involved heterosexual couples, so I don't know how this would play out with same sex couples. But with the heterosexual couples, the woman is usually (but not always) the main character. The male may or may not have some kind of connection, amateur or professional, to solving crime. The two of them meet in the stereotypical hate-to- love/Pride and Prejudice manner, end up working together, and, at some point in the series, become romantically involved.

The male characters fall into a particular predictable pattern. While manly and intelligent and superior in some way, either through achievement or family status, they are always damaged. They had a bad war experience. (As if there are good ones.) They have daddy issues. They had a bad war experience and have daddy issues. They have migraines. They have migraines and daddy issues. They've had bad experiences with women. They've had bad experiences with women, and they have daddy issues.

They are damaged while the female character is not. Other than being female, of course.

I'm recovering from a couple of mild illnesses, so I'm not going to try to unravel what's going on with that situation. But, certainly, something is.

What I'm getting to here is that Inspector Drake in A Most Agreeable Murder plays to the damage business in a very obvious manner, if you're aware of the damage trope/cliche. And another less obvious manner, which I won't mention because I don't want to give it away.

Some Other Random Thoughts

The unsavory cousin who is set to inherit the Steele daughters' house out from under them and is a variation on the same character in Pride and Prejudice was terrific, though I might have found him over-the-top, if I didn't know the parody business going on with him. 

The multiple murderer possibilities were well done. 

The fart joke was excellent, in large part because it was so incongruous.

This is a funny book that also has quite a decent mystery. I definitely look forward to the next book in what may end up being a series.

Getting Serious About Humor: A Humor Question

You have probably heard about some national security folks in the U.S. accidentally including a journalist in a group chat in which they were discussing military strikes. I heard about it the night before last and ended up sitting in bed scrolling on BlueSky, which I don't usually do. But there was some hysterically funny stuff turning up there about this situation. 

"To stop receiving security material from the White House, hit UNSUBSCRIBE."

I laughed out loud at that one, though it doesn't seem that funny now. Maybe you had to be in bed to get it.

Or how about the skeets with something like "Me listening to White House war plans" with a clip from some movie of an actor playing a bored military guy with a telephone held to his ear? I've seen that one twice.

There was also a Maxwell Smart joke I liked, though I can't remember how it went now. And a really good one with a photo of Putin looking at a cell phone and saying, Hold it, guys. P. Hegseth is typing.

I got up yesterday morning, and I thought, You know, Gail, this is kind of frightening. We have no protection. We have no one to protect us at all.

Then I went back on BlueSky to look for more laughs on the subject.

Why Are We Laughing About This?

Now, I must say, I don't find BlueSky a particularly funny place. I'm slowly working on creating my bubble of writers and publications there both of which I'd expect to stay on topic. My experience on Twitter was that if you can get a big enough bubble, you don't get a lot of other material. But I don't have a big BlueSky bubble at this point. I see a lot of stuff there, and there's not much in the way of humor coming through. Mostly outrage.

Over the last couple of months, there's been a lot of truly...ah...fascinating...stuff going on in the world. But I haven't seen many people cracking jokes about it. Not what you might call creative vs trolling "people humor" coming from the general public. The professional humor writers on, say, The Daily Show, are working these things, but people on the Internet are too busy keeping track of how much money Elon Musk is losing and writing about how happy that makes them to have any time and energy left to think of funny things to say about anything. They may believe that the situation is so dire that there's nothing funny to say.

Until that group chat. Oh, now, we have something funny to say.

My theory about what's going on:

• Accidentally adding someone to a military planning group chat rises (or descends) to the level of farce--a ridiculous situation and buffoonery--in ways that saber-rattling and risking healthcare do not. The group chat thing could easily be in a movie. It will almost certainly be a SNL sketch this weekend unless, God help us, something bigger comes up first.  
• It's okay to enjoy farce, but it's not okay to enjoy being the bad guy threatening countries whose citizens never saw us coming for them. 

Come On, Guys. We Can Do More with This.

The mere fact that there is a military planning group chat is funny. It's incongruity humor--planning a military attack on a group chat the way a bunch of kids might plan, you know, kids' stuff. Except kids would know how to do it.

Group chats could inspire more humor for a day or two before they become overdone:

The Health and Human Services Group Chat: This would include RFKJR being RFKJR as well as Dr. Oz trying to be doctorish.

The Kennedy Center Group Chat: In which Donald Trump organizes entertainment for the performing arts center.

The Department of Education Group Chat: This one would include professional wrestlers being the voices of reason in discussions of student loans and staffing shortages

Getting Serious About Humor: I'm Done With Wurst For A Long Time

The Thurber Prize folks have announced their semi-finalists for this year's, yes, Thurber Prize for American Humor. It turns out that I've already read one of them, Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson, which I liked, and admired, a great deal. Now I've read another one, Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs by Jamie Loftus. The book combines two of my interests...humor and eating nonprestige food. I've been a little bit obsessed with it.

Raw dog. An expression with a number of meanings, related to some of kind of risk. Doing something unprepared. I didn't look it up until after I finished reading the book (actually, just now), and now I'm thinking the title...Wow. This could be profound. 

I've read a number of Thurber Prize finalists over the last couple of years, and I'm sure that I've mentioned here before that I find them witty, certainly, but not hugely, wildly funny. I guess this makes a lot of sense, because, as I probably have also mentioned before, I have actually read James Thurber, and, you know, he wasn't hugely, wildly funny. I like the Thurber Prize finalists I've read, which I can't say for a lot of prize books (I'm thinking of you, Booker Prize, which I now avoid). But I don't understand how funny you have to be to be a humor prize winner.

Jamie Loftus is a comedian, writer, and podcaster, and she has a distinctive sense of humor. Raw Dog definitely is a contender for the prize. But the book is a lot. Reading it was an experience.

Superficially, it is about Loftus's hot dog summer, traveling across the U.S. with a boyfriend, a dog, and, I think, a cat in rental cars as she samples hot dogs in various regions of the country. I no longer eat traditional hot dogs, because I avoid smoked meat. But I do eat the occasional bratwurst. When I started reading this book, I went into the freezer where I had a leftover grilled wurst. I heated that puppy up and found a gluten free roll to sort of wrap around it and ate it naked. By the time I was in a grocery store sometime later, while still reading Raw Dog, I just shot by the wurst counter. No, we are not doing that for some time to come. I'm done with dogs for a while.

Loftus went to so many hot dog stands, shops, and wagons and ate so very many hot dogs. This woman ate so much chili on those dogs. And described all those chilis in so much detail. I think that if chili was available, she ate it. And the onions! Good heavens! And relish. Evidently, she'll eat any kind of relish. My digestive system is fragile, and I could feel it failing just reading about what Jamie Loftus ate. It was too much for her digestive system sometimes, too. I know, because she writes about it.

Here's the thing, though, this book isn't just a food and travel story that should be one of those TV shows my husband watches. No, there is a great deal of social commentary here. Real commentary. In a New Yorker article about Loftus, Cat Zhang says that her first job out of college was at the Boston Globe (she was fired) but that she "retains a reporter's allegiance to fact." What she has to say in Raw Dog about things like how the meat industry treats both animals and human workers, gentrification, the pandemic, and Oscar Mayer Wiener Mobile drivers (no joke, they've got some worries) come across as serious and well thought out. And then she gets back to the freaking chili! 

A little digression: Loftus comes from Brockton, Massachusetts where my aunt Esther has lived all my life. I've been to cousin weddings there and a funeral. Honest to God, I had no idea about the city's reputation until another family member went to college in Waltham and tipped me off. Brockton seemed fine to us Gauthiers.

Anyway, I'm feeling about the Thurber Prize the way other people feel about the Oscars and Emmys. I hope one of the two books I've read wins.

Getting Serious About Humor: The Value of Repetition

The Madwoman in the Attic Answers Letters Pleading for Her Advice by S. M. Strand at Jane Austen's Wastebasket is a neat piece that I think illustrates how repetition can be used with humor. Do you have to be familiar with Jane Eyre to get the joke here? Because this is Jane Eyre humor we're talking about here, in case you don't know. Take my word for it. It is.

However, I don't think you need to know that because the joke is that the Madwoman in the Attic gives the same, very inappropriate, advice to everyone who writes to her. Additionally, the author doesn't just peter off at the end like a great many Saturday Night Live sketches. She ends her piece with a variation on the, very inappropriate, advice she's been repeating over and over.

Ah, there may be a lesson for me here. Repetition may be just what a humor piece I started earlier this year needs. 

I am so glad I wrote this blog post instead of going out to shovel my driveway for the third time in six hours.

Getting Serious About Humor: Humor With Mystery

I must have placed Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson on my library list, because I saw it described as "witty." Being a mystery, it is fiction. My legion of readers all know that I like to analyze witty fiction.

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone is similar to other humorous fiction I've read in that it is wry and clever but not what you'd call a knee-slapper. But I could see what contributed to the humor, which makes it a first with the humorous fiction I've, shall we say, studied.

Voice, tone, understatement, and structure all contribute to the humor of this book. You could say the narrator's inner life contributes to the humor. You could say there's some incongruity here, too, because how could someone like Ernest (the narrator) exist in that family? The structure, as I've already said, supports/contributes to the humor, and maybe you could argue there's something incongruitous going on with the structure. Ernest tells us he's a reliable narrator, that he will tell the truth. And he does, but in his time and not at the times the readers' expect him to. So we assume we know things, find out later we didn't, and are amused and amazed.

I did figure out some of the ending material with this book, but in a satisfying way. Which I will not get into, since I don't want to ruin anyone's reading pleasure.

This is a book that both people who like mysteries and people who don't care one way or the other should be able to enjoy.

Getting Serious About Humor: A Thurber Nominated Romcom

I read Ms. Demeanor by Elinor Lipman while on retreat. I'd picked it up, because it's a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize and I'm an Elinor Lipman fan. Though I've only read three of her books. Perhaps I should make reading Elinor Lipman a thing for this year. Not a goal, because I've already set my goals. Too late for that. I know! I have a Goodreads reading goal. (I surpassed last year's by the way. I didn't mention it here out of modesty and general lack of staying on blog-writing task.) 

What I've liked about the three Lipman books I've read is that she's both light and sophisticated and her basic storylines are unique. And often speak to me, since I was sure that The Inn at Lake Devine was set on a lake near where I grew up. Ms. Demeanor involves food. I like food.

The unique storyline for Ms. Demeanor? The main character is caught having sex in a semi-public place, probably more public than semi, and the legal consequences involve house arrest for multiple months. Things go on from there.

I enjoyed reading the book, but at various points I thought, aren't a number of different things going on here? What's the focus? Then I got to the end and went, Oh! This is a romantic comedy! Now I get it!

I'm not big on reading contemporary romance. Historical is another thing. Historical with mystery even better. Just last month I had to stop reading a perfectly fine contemporary romance, because people finding love all by itself isn't enough for me. Nonetheless, I would definitely recommend Ms. Demeanor to all kinds of readers. 

What About The Comedy Aspect, Gail?

I'm finding humorous fiction (remember this is a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor) different from humorous nonfiction. Humorous essays or memoirs will sometimes have humor on every page or sometimes most paragraphs. The humorous fiction I've read so far hasn't. That doesn't make humorous fiction worse or better than humorous nonfiction, particularly since trying for humor in nonfiction can sometimes be jokie or contrived. It just makes it different. 

That being said, the Polish siblings in Ms. Demeanor? Absolutely funny. The interaction between the main couple, lovely and light-hearted. The main character's sister's realtor boyfriend? Funny. The dentist has her moments, as does the nanny who started this whole mess. Hmm. There is quite a bit of humor here. 

Though I have written humorous middle grade novels and a YA, I need to read a great deal more adult humorous fiction to get a feel for how that works differently or if it does.

As a nod to the cooking in Ms. Demeanor, I am going to mention here that I plan to make two pots of soup this afternoon. 

Getting Serious About Writing Humor: Maybe Writers Of Adult Work Just Shouldn't Write For Children

Today I'm writing about another humor fail that shall remain nameless, because I just can't come up with anything good to say about it. It was written by someone who writes adult humor, and it's supposed to be a humorous middle grade novel.

• First and foremost: Humor in children's fiction is just like humor in adult fiction--it should come out of the situations you're dealing with. It should be wholistic and natural and never heavy-handed and obvious like a lesson. And don't think you don't have to really be funny, because you're writing for kids. Don't think kids love jokes and one-liners and you can just salt a novel with them. That comes off awkwardly. It stops narrative flow. Narrative flow always matters.

• Please don't try to use humor to teach kids something. Using children's fiction to teach is very common in books written by people who have been writing for adults and have little knowledge of children's books. I am repeating myself here, but teaching is a teacher's job, not a writer's. A writer's job is to create a world child readers will want to be part of for the time it takes them to read it, with a coherent story that is supported by every word they write. It's not to change these readers lives with a lesson so heavy-handed a minister wouldn't touch it. A good story may open up readers' minds to something new, but it rarely happens because a writer set out to use fiction to teach kids about climate change or not to be bullies or how to be good friends.  

Getting Serious About Humor: Using A Format While Writing Humor

I'd heard of Texts From Jane Eyre by Mallory Ortberg (Daniel M. Lavery) some time ago and was delighted to stumble upon it earlier this summer. Texts From Jane Eyre is not a memoir. It is not fiction. It is humorous interactions between known literary characters, who are not necessarily humorous in their original incarnations. 

Oh, and these interactions are also all written as texts.

How funny you find these texts will probably be determined by how familiar you are with the original books that inspired them. The Cormac McCarthy and Atlas Shrugged texts were pretty much lost on me. However, I'm not that knowledgeable about Wuthering Heights and thought those texts were hysterical. I don't even like Harry Potter and those texts were not just good but addressed some issues I have with those books. 

I think this book would be a hit in high school and college libraries where there are plenty of people reading books with the characters texting here. Also, a good gift for English majors.

My Hermit Crab Argument

I am going to argue that Texts From Jane Eyre is written using a hermit crab format. By which I mean the author borrows a form from a particular type of writing the way hermit crabs borrow shells. I will say more about this someday in the future, either here or somewhere else.

If Jane Austen Got Feedback From Some Guy In A Writing Workshop  by Shannon Reed is another humor piece I believe uses a hermit crab form.

Getting Serious About Humor: Trying Some Fiction

 I believe most of the humor books I've discussed so far have been essays or memoir or essay/memoir. Today I'm covering a couple of humorous novels I read this year.

Deacon King Kong by James McBride won The Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2021. It's an excellent book, sort of a classic story about a time (1969) and a place (a Brooklyn housing project). I didn't find it all that funny, though. Reviewers do describe it as funny, but I'm thinking maybe droll or wry in places. But that's not a failure, because the book is just plain good. It doesn't need to be gut-busting funny.

A number of reviews call To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris funny. There is humor here, particularly when you consider that the book is about religious observance. I particularly liked the main character's interactions with his employee, Betsy Convoy. They made up for all the sections on baseball I had to pass over, because I always pass over sections on baseball.

But neither of these books have the kind of humor that I'm Wearing Tunics Now and The World's Largest Man have. 

So What's Going On Here?

Well, a few things could be at work here.

1. This could just be the way humorous fiction rolls.
2. McBride and Ferris are fiction writers who happened to write some humor in these novels.
3. Wendi Aarons (Tunics) and Harrison Scott Key (Largest Man) are humorists who happened to write some memoir.

Must read more.

Getting Serious About Humor: A Memoir Or Something Else?

I'm not sure how I found Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want To Come: One Introvert's Year Of Saying Yes by Jessica Pan, but it is another funny memoir. 

Or is it? 

My college professor's explanation of memoir was essentially an account of a life experience, the significance of which isn't understood until after the fact. That describes The World's Largest Man and I'm Wearing Tunics Now. But with Sorry I'm Late, what we have is not an account of some part of someone's life, their past. What we have is an account of planned experience. There's nothing wrong with that. Other books have been written with this kind of set-up. It looks as if A. J. Jacobs has written a number of them. (Perhaps he's someone I should read. There are so many someones I should read.)

In my study of humor writing, I've learned that one way to find material is to look to life lived. Sorry I'm Late, which is definitely funny, teaches that we can also create material. Because what Pan did was spend a year saying yes to a list of experiences an introvert probably wouldn't embrace. I suspect a lot of extroverts wouldn't, either.

As a self-identifying introvert, I expected to find essays in Sorry I'm Late on, say, forcing oneself to engage with people after yoga class or to speak to people---everywhere. But what Pan did was say yes to things like performing on The Moth and taking a stand-up comedy class that culminated with another performance. I had trouble wrapping my head around her choices of activities, I guess because I found them to be things that even many extroverts wouldn't attempt to do. Personally, I won't even listen to The Moth, because I find it depressing. My comedy fantasies don't run to doing stand-up, but working in a comedy writers' room. From home. On-line. Without having to be in the same room with my colleagues.

Of course, that may be the humorous hook here--the incongruity of an introvert wanting to do these things.

A couple of days ago, I signed up for a 30 Days of Positive Thinking Challenge being run by a meditation app. I realized while working on this post and analyzing Sorry I'm Late, that I might be able to do some humor writing around that. In which case, like Jessica Pan I would be generating material with something I'm going to do, instead of finding material in something I've already done.

Getting Serious About Humor: More Memoir

The World's Largest Man  by Harrison Scott Key is another genuinely funny memoir. In many places, we're talking about humor in nearly every paragraph. A good work that won the Thurber Prize in 2016.

Now a big reason for my Getting Serious About Humor feature here at Original Content is to provide me with opportunities to study humor writing. So here are some thoughts:

• 
  The World's Largest Man reminded me of Priestdaddy, another Thurber winner, by Patricia Lockwood, in that they are both about a specific growing up experience with a specific, out-sized, over-the-top father.  Lockwood's father is a Catholic priest (yeah, read the book to see how that happened) while Key's father was a rural southern salesman. We're talking about people who are writing about the uniqueness of their young life. Arguably a lot of readers won't relate to the situation...except they are talking about fathers, and a lot of us had one whether they provided us with an unusual upbringing or not. 
• While reading The World's Largest Man, I also thought a great deal about I'm Wearing Tunics Now by Wendi Aarons, the last book I wrote about in this series. Now, Wearing Tunics, also funny, also a memoir, seems more essay-like than Largest Man.  It also seems more outer directed than Largest Man, as if the author is reaching out to the readers who will identify with her experiences. I'm thinking of Largest Man as inner directed, as if the author is pulling readers in to his experience.

Two Different Ways A Humor Writer Could Go

So these books illustrate, I think, two different ways a humor writer could go:

1. A book-length memoir about a specific, unusual experience/relationship. The uniqueness of the experience/relationship being the reason for the writing.
2. A memoir made up of essays that deal with how the writer's experiences represent what was going on with other people at the time they were living them. The relatability of the experiences being the reason for the writing. 

I didn't realize I'd be doing so much reading of and thinking about memoir when I started this. But that is the humor reading that's turned up for me.

Getting Serious About Humor: "I'm Wearing Tunics Now" Is Funny And Thought Provoking

I stumbled upon author Wendi Aarons at McSweeney's where an excerpt from her book I'm Wearing Tunics Now was published last fall. I enjoyed the excerpt so much that I sought out the book. (Lesson learned--excerpts work.) I'm Wearing Tunics Now is what might be called a women's memoir, about middle class women's life stages. Aarons is genuinely funny and has quite a bit of experience writing humor. (Lesson learned--experience is good.) I often think of her reference to her primary care physician, google.com, because I, myself, keep Dr. Google on retainer.

She has a terrific chapter on blogging in the '00s, an experience I recognize and the only thing I've read that describes it. Aarons is far more extroverted than I am, however, and has actually met blogging buddies in the flesh and is friends friends with them. But otherwise we both enjoyed that period in a similar way.

While Aarons is funny, I do feel that her material may be a little traditional. She writes about PTO Moms and women of a certain age feeling they're invisible, for instance. Among many other woman subjects. This may be a perceptual thing on my part, because I'm a little older than she is (I could be her mother's really cool younger sister) so I've heard about these subjects before. For women Aarons' age and younger, however, her material is new and relevant to their lives.

While reading I'm Wearing Tunics Now, I kept thinking of my friend, Ellie, my neighbor's mother and thus a generation older than me. She would hear us younger women at book club going on and on and on about our kids and what was going on at the school, because it was the most important freaking thing in the world, and she'd say, "We did all that. I was PTO president. I was a room mother." I would think, You can't possibly know what you're talking about, Ellie. But she did. We were probably boring her to death. Nothing is more important than an experience while we're living it. Then we move on to things like going to vineyards with our adult children and posting George Santos memes on Facebook. Or, in Ellie's case, getting a graduate degree. In, I believe, theology.

I'm Wearing Tunics Now left me thinking about what my own humor writing material will be. Because I really need to be considering whether things like meditation and FrancoAmerican holidays are the endless source of laughs I think they are. I've been mulling over trying my own PTO piece. I was the PTO Science Fair mom, you know. And head room mother at least once. I say "at least," because like childbirth and the first 5- to 10-years of motherhood, school volunteer work ends up being run together, if not actually suppressed.

Wendi Aarons speaks about and teaches humor writing. You can learn more about her at the Freelance Writing Direct podcast Humor Writing and Wearing Tunics with Wendi Aarons.

And, yes, Aarons has a middle grade book out, Ginger Mancino, Kid Comedian, that I hope to get to in the next couple of months.

Getting Serious About Humor: A Humor Fail

This is the first in a planned series on learning about humor writing from reading it. I even have a logo, custom-made by my computer guy.

Today's book will remain nameless, because I couldn't finish it. I skipped to the end, thinking I would at least see what happened, but I couldn't bring myself to read even that. I feel very bad about this, because it was a Netgalley arc, and I hate not to be able to give those books and their authors some support. In this case, while I can't support it, I won't attack it, either.

However, I think there's a lot to be learned from books we don't like, and I did have some thoughts about this one.

This was a YA book involving two girls looking to get in with the popular crowd, the popular crowd being an unpleasant bunch of people. Not a new situation/setting by any means. It did make me think a little bit of women pairs in TV humor, such as Patsy and Edina of Absolutely Fabulous. But only a little. I kept wishing Georgia Nicholson from Angus, Thongs, and Full-frontal Snogging was running things in the book.

Since I'm trying to learn something from my humor reading, here is my takeaway from what I was able to read of this book:

• Characters should be well defined, anyway, but it really is a necessity for humor. Read anything by Louise Rennison, Georgia Nicholson's creator. The humor in Rennison's books comes out of her very strong characters.
• Weak characters struggle to pull off hyperbole/outrageousness. That goes back to character. 
• Don't rely on variations of the same shock joke for a big portion of your book. Shock has a place in humor. Shock can be funny. But once the shock is over, so is a lot of the humor. Have something else up your sleeve.

So while I didn't enjoy this book, I came away with something I hope to apply to my own work.