Kris Neri shared some of her secrets with us at the Tony Hillerman Conference. Here are a few tricks of the trade.
Teaching humor is hard, Kris says. To teach, you must analyze and explain, and the more you analyze humor, the less humorous it becomes!
Humor is semi-verbal, semi-visual, and semi-visceral. It is often a leveling device, sometimes a more acceptable way of expressing anger or coping with other emotions.
Humor can show aspects of your characters that you can’t show otherwise. It provides an emotional break for your readers. It softens tough ideas (the “candy-coated pill” approach). It also provides a great writing voice.
Here are some tools of humor:
- Expectation and reversal – taking an unexpected reversal to an expected outcome
- Incongruity – pairing concepts in an unconventional or illogical way
- Hyperbole – stretching the truth to a level that becomes comic
- Understatement – downplaying, or a droll presentation (the opposite of hyperbole)
- Absurdity – exaggeration pushed to a ridiculous level, often for a satirical effect
- Contrast and proximity – pairing contrasting elements that become absurd when coupled together
- Miscommunication and misunderstanding – cross-purpose communications that cause comic confusion
Some additional guidelines:
- Simple is almost always better than complex; short is better than long
- Determine the purpose of your scene and always factor your humor to non-humor ratio into that purpose
- Humor must come from the character for – for the character to point out the absurdity of a situation, he has to see things a little differently from a non-humorous character
- Abandon logic – humor thrives in chaos, not order
- Don’t over-analyze
- Be willing to surprise yourself – to write someone ho sees the humor in a situation, you’ll have to open those pockets within yourself
- Abandon your dignity – you can’t be funny if you’re afraid of embarrassing yourself – you also can’t write serious prose if you’re afraid to take emotional risks!
- Let your voice and attitudes, as well as those of your characters, flow
- Trust your own humor; don’t try too hard to be funny
- Don’t sacrifice truth for a funny effect – good humor always contains a grain of truth
- Don’t let your characters laugh at their own jokes – that’s the prose equivalent of a sitcom laugh track
- Handling taboos: the more absurd your material and the farther its set from reality, the more sacred cows you can make fun of