Vague
and Imprecise Guidelines For Writing Humor
by gloria good
GUIDELINE #1
Have a ridiculous life.This comes easily for some people. Poor judgment,
a refusal to changecourse when things go awry, an inability to admit
wrong-doing orblame...these are all excellent qualities for the aspiring
humorist. Afteryears of sickening situations, you should have a wealth
of promisingmaterial on your hands. Lucky you!
GUIDELINE #2
Make yourself look really bad.Congratulations. The hard part is over.
Youve made an enormous fool ofyourself. Now is not the time to
try to ameliorate the situation in anyway. My God, how did you get into
this terrible mess? Write it all down:the illogical thought processes,
the lame rationalizations, and theirresulting bad behavior. Its
all grist for the comedy mill!
Perfection doesnt make people laugh (unless one can be self-deprecatingabout
it.) Mother Theresa may have had a lot of wonderful qualities. Shewas,
after all, a saint. But I think we can all agree that she wasnt
veryfunny.
GUIDELINE #3
Lie a lot.In real life, to exaggerate is, basically, to lie. However,
in humor, oneocassionally tweaks scenarios or dialogue.
Your loved ones may notrealize that youre using them as materialthe
fools!and they thereforemay not yell at you in just the right,
side-splitting way. You can turntheir vicious diatribes against you
into comedic art, which they wereclearly too lazy or inconsiderate to
do.
Just be sure that you make yourself look worse than you do them. As
long as youre the obvious villain by a hair, they wont even
notice the embarrassing words youve put in their mouths. Trust
me! Theyll thank you for it later. Its all part of the marvelous
generosity of being a humorist.
GUIDELINE #4
Be honest. Yeah, yeah, I know. First, I told you to make yourself look
really bad.Then I told you to misrepresent the truth. And now I am telling
you to bescrupulously honest. Humor is truly a vortex of paradox!
Funniness must be grounded in reality, or it isnt believableand
justisnt funny. Maybe, on another planet, they enjoy humor that
has nothing to do with life in the Pleiades. But here, on earth, we
like our humor to make sly, illuminating comments about our wacky, irrepressible
species. And we do this by sticking as close to the truth as possible.
(Of course, people can take only so much reality. Its this charmingcognitive
dissonance that gets us into all these disasters in the firstplace.
Savor the irony! If we didnt ruin everything with our pathologicalavoidance
of the truth, then we wouldnt even need humor. And what a gray
world that would be!)
GUIDELINE
#5
Look
for the absurd, smack dab in the middle of the ordinary.The guy at the
office who deleted your computers operating system, your adolescents
eccentric behavior at the family reunion, ourPresident....Human nature
is entertaining. It doesnt need a tremendousamount of dressing
up. You probably picked up several good examples of human foibles at
last weeks garage sale, alone. Develop an eye for the hilarious,
in the middle of the seemingly mundane. (Unless you decide to go the
Guideline #1 route, and make lots of mambo mistakes. Well, its
your life. Take your pick.)
GUIDELINE #6
Use offbeat words judiciously.The thesaurus is your best comrade. See?
I used the thesaurus to replace the word friend. Ok, so
it didnt really work out very well. But thats all right.
Dont be afraid to experiment and to make errors. Hey, wait a second,
thats a good one!
GUIDELINE#7
Dont be afraid to experiment and to make errors.
GUIDELINE #8
Be funny.Read humor. Lots of it. Take it apart and see what m+akes it
tick. Humoris a language, and the best method for learning it is immersion.
After awhile, youll absorb some of the rhythms of funniness and
make them your own. And eventually you may find that being yourself
can be quite amusing.
On
the other hand, sometimes being yourself can be a very bad idea. Try
to learn how to tell when its hilarious, and when its wrong--all
wrong, horrifyingly and humiliatingly wrong.
And then just stop doing whatever it is youre doing that everybody
hates. Its that simple.
GUIDELINE#9
Steal from others.I dont think theres a single sentence
fragment in this entire piece thatisnt somehow reminiscent of
the essays I read back in 1979, when I wasextremely impressionable.
My life is a seamless lie of stolen lines. Sodont be afraid of
plagiarism. Its yet another part of the magic of beinghuman. (And
special kudos to Mad magazine and The National Lampoon:
thank you for shaping me into the caring and all-around splendid individual
that I am today!)
GUIDELINE #10
Give to others.Writing humor and being able to make people laugh are
some of lifes teeny pinnacles. And I say this as a person who
has once run with the bulls in Spain, and who participates professionally
in the extreme sport ofcompetitive ironing.
Ok, Im lying there. Good for you for noticing. See how lying totallyundermines
ones credibility? Yet another teachable moment in the world of
humor!
But, seriously. Making people laugh creates joy. And, as John Templetonsaid,
To get joy, we must give it, and to keep joy, we must scatter
it.Im all for providing joy for others, so I can hoard joy
for myself. Lockthat joy up in a box, and throw away the key, is what
I always say! And youcan quote me on that. Speaking of quotations, that
brings us to our lastguideline....
GUIDELINE #11
When struggling to end a piece, reach for Bartletts Quotations
and stand on the shoulders of geniuses:
There is a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased
thisline. Oscar LevantEvery man of genius is considerably
helped by being dead. Robert LyndI dont want to achieve
immortality through my work. I want to achieveimmortality through not
dying. Woody AllenNot only is there no God, but try getting
a plumber on weekends. Woody Allen
GUIDELINE #11 ½
Do not undercut this finale with any poorly-realized jokes of your own.Just
creep away slowly, with a minimum of fuss, and without making anysudden
moves. (Thank you, youve been a wonderful audience.)
Gloria Good lives in Oteen and can be reached
at [email protected]
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