How to Humor

When I started writing this, I was halfway through Kill the Farm Boy by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne. Yes, Kevin Hearne wrote The Iron Druid Chronicles and I’m not too fond of that, but I thought since he is now writing a serious book series, and because of this one being written with a co-author, that maybe I’d like this one better.

It’s not encouraging though, what I’ve gone through so far. It inspired this essay.

But on the bright(ish) side, I started my re-read of Wheel of Time and I’m halfway through The Eye of the World and enjoying it immensely. Hopefully I’ll get through the whole series this time.

---

How to Humor

Humor is surprisingly difficult to get down correctly for some people.

A book being funny is not the same thing as a book having jokes. This is painfully clear to me as I read Kill the Farm Boy. The novel is meant to be a parody of fantasy and fairy tale, yet it hits you with the blunt force of a brick and feels just as pleasant. There are jokes, yes, and some of them are even funny; but this humor is overthrown by the constant barrage of jokes being thrown at you. Everyone is constantly throwing quips, and characters are constantly doing things that don’t make sense.

“But wait, isn’t Terry Pratchett like that? And you love Terry Pratchett!” Well no, dear reader, he’s not like that. Because there are a lot of jokes, yes, but the entire text isn’t made up of jokes. Almost all of it is humorous, but it’s not about jokes. Much of what makes Pratchett’s Discworld hilarious is by drawing parallels to our world. 

The people in those books do weird things all the time, but they make sense. They’re not out of nowhere. They’re exaggerations of real-world people, the kinds we meet every day. So yeah, you’re not likely to meet Stanley, a guy obsessed with pins, like Moist does in Going Postal; but chances are you’ve met someone who is just as obsessed with collecting something or another, and discovered that there’s a whole world of collecting this one thing that you never knew about, nor did you ever want to know about.

And to be fair, Kill the Farm Boy does have some moments like that. There’s a scene with a troll writer who is basically the stereotype of the pretentious writer guy, who is so convinced of his literary genius (think the Guy In Your MFA Twitter account and you’re on the right track), but these moments are fleeting under a hail of really stupid jokes. There are pop culture jokes, there are parody jokes, there are constant streams of dialogue that seemingly never end, and there’s a lot of weird crude humor. And worse, there are characters arcs that go nowhere and there are plots that are wholesale dropped without fanfare.

[It’s also a bit infuriating, because the author’s note at the end was like, “We decided to do this book because the fantasy genre is such this weird white male power fantasy!” as if this book has done anything great for representation in the genre. It hasn’t. Just skip it.]

This is not how you do comedy, and it’s certainly not how you do parody. If you’re going to lampoon something, you need to understand why this thing worked for a lot of people in the first place. Really good comedy isn’t just taking something you think might be a bit silly and filling with jokes; it’s making observations about how absurd it is. It’s about subverting expectations. And there are jokes, yes, but that’s not all, and it’s not as important as making characters identifiable enough that we care about what they say.

I think I’ve said something similar in talking about my issues with Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard. To be sure, that book is not made up entirely of jokes, but there are times when jokes are just thrown at the reader and they’re not very funny because, well, they don’t say anything about the characters or the world. Heimdall being obsessed with his phone and taking selfies, or Thor being obsessed with watching television on his hammer--those are jokes, but they’re not particularly funny because they’re just… there. They don’t mean anything. 

And so they’re not funny. Opening one of the chapters of Kill the Farm Boy is a bit about the Dark Lord Toby and how he’s trying to get a hedgehog to breed with a turtle to make a suitable familiar for himself. This joke then drags out through the rest of the chapter despite it being more disturbing than funny the first time. Jokes are like this in that book. 

Here’s my advice when writing comedy: run it by a test audience. And not just one or two people; go for at least five or six. Ask them if the humor matches what’s going on, or if it’s the kind of humor that won’t get stale in a week. Yeah, maybe your humor will at first seem derivative of your favorite comedic writers, but you’ll find a voice that’s at least better than just spewing half-baked jokes at the audience.

---