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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. You’ve 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. It’s all grist for the comedy mill!

Perfection doesn’t 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 wasn’t 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 you’re using them as material—the 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 you’re the obvious villain by a hair, they won’t even notice the embarrassing words you’ve put in their mouths. Trust me! They’ll thank you for it later. It’s 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 isn’t believable—and justisn’t 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. It’s this charmingcognitive dissonance that gets us into all these disasters in the firstplace. Savor the irony! If we didn’t ruin everything with our pathologicalavoidance of the truth, then we wouldn’t 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 computer’s operating system, your adolescent’s eccentric behavior at the family reunion, ourPresident....Human nature is entertaining. It doesn’t need a tremendousamount of dressing up. You probably picked up several good examples of human foibles at last week’s 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, it’s 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 didn’t really work out very well. But that’s all right. Don’t be afraid to experiment and to make errors. Hey, wait a second, that’s a good one!

GUIDELINE
#7
Don’t 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, you’ll 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 it’s hilarious, and when it’s wrong--all wrong, horrifyingly and humiliatingly wrong.
And then just stop doing whatever it is you’re doing that everybody hates. It’s that simple.

GUIDELINE
#9
Steal from others.I don’t think there’s a single sentence fragment in this entire piece thatisn’t somehow reminiscent of the essays I read back in 1979, when I wasextremely impressionable. My life is a seamless lie of stolen lines. Sodon’t be afraid of plagiarism. It’s 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 life’s 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, I’m lying there. Good for you for noticing. See how lying totallyundermines one’s 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.”I’m 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 Bartlett’s Quotations and stand on the shoulders of geniuses:
“There is a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased thisline.” Oscar Levant“Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead.” Robert Lynd“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieveimmortality through not dying.” Woody Allen“Not 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, you’ve been a wonderful audience.)

Gloria Good lives in Oteen and can be reached at [email protected]


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