Make 'Em Smile: The Art of Using Humour

Use humour on the page, especially in situations that aren’t funny and in genres that don’t seem to lend themselves to it at all.

You’ll heighten all emotions. You’ll enable the receiver to see the world afresh. Humour comes in the release of tension. When you set up an incongruity between expectation and reality, when – simultaneously – the reader experiences a violation of ‘the norm’ and a realisation that the context is benign and safe; it’s then that they laugh.

Last month in the online group we took a whirlwind tour around humour. Whirlwind, because there are many different types of humour (pun, word-play, irony, satire etc). Whirlwind, as well, because there are many different techniques for setting up humour (rhyme, rhythm, use of a refrain and hyperbole) and many different forms that are associated with humorous content (the epigram, the epitaph, the quatrain and the limerick).

Humour is invaluable for giving the reader or listener an access point to experience what is beyond words. See this beautiful sacred poem by 8th-century Muslim/ Sufi poet Rabia Al Basri,

Would you come if someone called you by the wrong name?

I wept, because for years He did not enter my arms;

then one night I was told a

secret:

Perhaps the name you call God is

not really His,

maybe it

is just an alias.

I thought about it, and came up with a pet name

for my Beloved I never mention

to others.

All I can say is–

it works.

Equally, humour allows the reader to touch an emotion or a situation that might otherwise cause them to shut down due to overwhelm – where they face terror or the unknown. The screenplay of the film Life Is Beautiful is a good example of this: who would have ever thought we could laugh at life in a concentration camp? The humour enables us to feel, more fully, the horror of the situation. That’s also a fine example of the role of writing in standing witness – being the consciousness and memory of society. Humour is often used to undermine the rhetoric of those in power. When any person or group want to persuade others of their worldview, their message tends towards a serious tone, and it repeats. Humour challenges in an indirect way. Undermined, the propaganda cannot stand and very often crumbles.

Much, of course, is in the timing. If you want to know how to set up humour, first watch your favourite stand-up comedian work a crowd.

And still more is in the tone. It never ceases to amaze me how we get irony. The words on the page may say one thing, but we hear the writer’s tone in our head and we know they meant the opposite. Fabulous! Try John Donne’s masterful 16th Century poem The Flea.

As human beings, we tend to relax when we feel superior, and therefore we laugh at human foibles and weaknesses. As a writer, we can learn to soften and make fun of ourselves; then we are able to put our all-too-human quirks on the page or transpose them onto a fictional character.

For the full article on this subject, as well as examples of the technique in action, sign up on the homepage for the new-look free Wild Words Monthly Newsletter.

Image courtesy of Wild Words photographer Peter Reid.