One more one-liner example of Misplaced Focus is this one, which came from Annie Goodson, one of my students at The Second City:
“Mother of dead teen has no one to update her to the new iOS.”
It’s textbook Misplaced Focus, because it focuses on the Mother’s need to update her phone instead of on the much more important matter of the death of her son.
MISPLACED FOCUS SUMMARY:
WHAT IT IS: A pretend lack of awareness of an obvious fact, brought to light by focusing on the wrong thing.
HOW TO USE IT: Think of something related to your Subtext but far less important. Then draw readers’ attention to it, indirectly causing readers to think of your Subtext. It’s like saying, “Don’t think of a Pink Elephant.”
FUNNY FILTER 11: METAHUMOR
Metahumor makes fun of other humor or the idea of humor, either by describing the effect of humor, using humor itself as a subject in a joke, or targeting a humor medium or specific attempt at humor.
Metahumor can have a tendency to appeal only to comedy nerds or insiders. So, an effort must be made to make it accessible to a wider audience if it’s going to succeed.
If you’ve ever criticized a comedy performance, or wanted to mock a professional comedian or comedy writer or comedy production’s attempt to be funny, or if you’ve ever wondered what humor is, and why people express it, you have the makings of Subtext for a Metahumor joke.
There are several levels of difficulty and sophistication in Metahumor:
The most sophisticated Metahumor (type A) mocks the concept of humor itself, finding absurdity in the fact that humans laugh at things. Type-A Metahumor is rare, and has a tendency to be a little esoteric for most readers, but if it can be made accessible, it can be revelatory. The humor most people encounter in popular entertainment is Character, Hyperbole, and a maybe a little bit of Wordplay. So, an extra layer of surprise awaits the average reader who’s unaccustomed to this kind of high-level humor.
The next most sophisticated kind of Metahumor (type B) intellectually deconstructs comedy with no emotion or laughter. To plainly state the effect of humor without any razzle-dazzle can be very amusing to people. It evokes the Robot Archetype, or Straight Man. This is a character who reacts with far less emotion than situations warrant. (The Blues Brothers are a perfect example.) When a writer deconstructs humor in this way—like I’m doing in this book, for example—can, at times, come off as funny, especially when the humor being analyzed is outrageously silly or shocking, like when I broke down the effect of farting and pooping jokes.
Slightly less sophisticated is type-C Metahumor, which openly derides well-respected comedy media, products, personalities, or clichés (or soon-to-be clichés) still in wide use, even by the comedically savvy. Targeting other people’s perfectly respectable humor effort might be as simple as holding up a reputable comedic performance or piece of writing to some justifiable ridicule. When attempting this type of Metahumor, it’s important that Humor-Writing Tip #9 (“Comfort the Afflicted, Afflict the Comfortable”) be observed. You want to be careful not to mock an earnest beginner, or someone who might likely be crushed by such criticism. That’s an undeserving target.
Writers embarking on type-C Metahumor need to be supremely confident in their own comedic ability before they can make a joke that involves tearing down someone else’s legitimate attempt at humor. So, this takes some experience and some guts. It has to be done well or it will fall on its face.
The least sophisticated kind of Metahumor (type D) mocks comedy that’s generally considered unsophisticated, or humor clichés that are no longer in vogue. These are the easy targets, like bad sitcoms, lowest-common-denominator Kid Stuff, and the like. Writers of type-D Metahumor might be getting easy laughs, but they’re not making any kind of particularly daring statement.
(These different types, by the way, are just a description the different ways this Funny Filter can be used. They’re not a quality rating. The higher the “grade” letter, the more sophisticated the joke and the higher the level of difficulty in creating it. But that doesn’t mean perfectly funny jokes can’t be written using any and all of these different types of Metahumor.)
Metahumor happens frequently in casual conversation. When we comment on a poor joke we’ve made, or someone else’s poor joke, we do this to try to salvage a laugh from a failed attempt at humor. Late-night talk-show hosts do the same thing. If a monologue joke bombs, the comedian/host has a second chance to wring a laugh from the situation by becoming aware of the joke’s failure, and commenting on it. Audiences love self-depreciating Metahumor (the shared fear response of the entertainer’s flop sweat is a strong motivator), so they’re usually poised to be entertained by just about any reaction to a failed joke.
Steve Martin used a lot of Metahumor in his stand-up performances, mockingly referring to his act as “hilarious comedy jokes.” In Cruel Shoes he used Metahumor in his piece, “Comedy Events You Can Do.”
Humor-Writing Tip #14: There’s Only One Rule in Comedy
Once you try your hand at humor writing, you realize it’s extremely difficult to do well. We can sometimes feel overwhelming when we take to heart what our peers, be they other comedy writers or well-meaning critics, tell us about what we’re doing, what we should be doing or how we could be doing it better. I realize books like this one can contribute to this kind of anxiety. Comedy writers hear a lot of dos and don’ts, which can stir up a lot of doubts. How do we stay focused on creating good comedy?
Just remember that there’s only one rule: If they laugh, it’s funny.
It doesn’t help anyone to get overwhelmed. If you ever feel that way, and have trouble coming up with funny ideas as a result, step away from the keyboard and forget about it for a while. Do something fun. When you come back to writing, remember that the goal there is the same. Readers just want to have fun. They want to laugh. If you can make them laugh—no matter how you’re doing it—you’re doing it right.
Metahumor in a simpler form can be added to other jokes or scenes. For example, not being able to tell a joke well is a funny trait to give a character. This was done with Marlin, Nemo’s dad in Finding Nemo. This was also ironic because he’s a Clown Fish, so you (and the other fish) might expect that he’d be great at telling a joke. There’s an additional layer of both Irony and Metahumor in this trait because he’s voiced by Albert Brooks, a comic mastermind of the highest order.
A subset of Metahumor is Antihumor, in which the absence of humor becomes funny. If the context is right, and readers are expecting something funny, but the opposite—something unfunny or the lack of anything funny—happens instead, this can also be very funny.
Antihumor is not for everyone. It can actually anger as many people as it entertains, so it’s a tool best used with caution. When an audience expects humor but gets an overt lack of humor, they can sometimes feel betrayed. However, for those who appreciate Antihumor, it’s an incredibly powerful tactic, and has the makings of cult appeal.
Andy Kaufman was well known for using anti-humor in his stand-up performances, like when he read The Great Gatsby on stage instead of telling jokes. I myself employed anti-humor in my daily comic strip “Jim’s Journal.”
Here are more examples of Metahumor, in the form of short one-liners:
“Viagra Giving Hope To Thousands Of Struggling Stand-Up Comedians” —The Onion
“My body has no sexual meaning anymore, but if I can make people laugh with it, at least it’s being used.”
—Louis C.K.
“My email was hacked but the guy was funnier so I left it alone.”
—Albert Brooks
METAHUMOR SUMMARY:
WHAT IT IS: Stepping back and making humor itself the subject or target of the joke.
HOW TO USE IT: Metahumor works best with Subtexts having to do with humor, but can also be used as a garnish as part of another joke.
CHAPTER 6 ACTION STEP:
Every Day for 10 days, write 10 f
unny one-liners, jokes, or funny titles for stories using each of the 11 Funny Filters. On the first day, try to write 10 ironic jokes, on the second, 10 Character jokes, and so on. Put yourself in Clown mode so you can produce your ideas quickly and easily. They may not be good, but that’s okay. This is just practice.
7: USING THE FUNNY FILTERS
I don’t like to work alone. It’s much easier to riff off ideas with a partner or a group or writers. The comedy bubbles up beautifully when heads come together, and the end result is usually far better than when I laboriously crank out material on my own. Besides, it’s a lot of fun to sit around with other funny people and make each other laugh.
Before you can succeed in a group, however, it’s a good idea to be a top performer in your own right. If you’re not, you may be using a partner or group as a crutch. It’s easy to rely on the energy of others to make up for your weaknesses as a comedy writer. And this isn’t really fair to the others. When you become a solid joke creator in your own right, you become a more valuable contributor to a writing team. That’s why I recommend focusing first on sharpening your own saw, so you can produce great work when you’re sitting alone with your pad and pen. Then, and only then, jump into a comedy-writing team.
When you’re at your personal best, you’ll raise the bar for everyone else. A group of individuals who are each operating at a heightened skill level is exponentially better at generating funny satirical writing than a group of mediocre writers using each other as a crutch.
There are a lot of other nuances and best practices for leveraging the power of a writer’s room, but that will have to wait for another book. The intent here is to focus on your own performance.
In this chapter I’m going to illustrate three methods you can use to write funny lines on your own. Once you have writing partners or a group, there are other methods available. For now, there are three methods:
Method 1: Filtering. This is when you start with Subtext, then filter it through one or more Funny Filters to make a joke. This is the most mechanical, reverse-engineered method.
Method 2: Finessing. This is starting with a joke, or something resembling a joke, like a funny idea that came to you in a flash of inspiration, then refining and finessing it using your awareness of the importance of Subtext, and how the Funny Filters work.
Method 3: Divining. With no ideas and no notes, this is using the Funny Filters by themselves to drum up something funny out of nothing.
In all these methods, the core formula is the same. We are looking for Subtext reinterpreted through one or more Funny Filters. That’s what creates a joke.
These methods may seem clunky and mechanical at first, if you don’t have much experience writing humor. You may have thought writing humor would be fun, filled with inspiration and laughs.
The media often portrays comedy writing, and other kinds of creative work, as a fun and easy process, but that’s not how it works. Writing comedy is a slog. I’ve never encountered any comedy writer who didn’t recognize this unfortunate fact of the profession. If it were easy, we’d all be Tina Fey.
In time, and with practice, these methods will feel less mechanical. If practiced enough, they’ll start to feel like instinct, or at least a well-honed skill.
I’m going to go through the thought process of these three methods, exploring various ideas in order to demonstrate how a comedy writer thinks while crafting a joke. We’re “live” here. I didn’t prepare or vet any ideas for this chapter to make sure they were funny beforehand. I’m going to work off the cuff to give you a more honest portrayal of how this looks.
By demonstrating these processes this way, I hope to also show you Humor-Writing Tip #2 (“Quantity is the Key to Quality”) in action. Not all of my ideas are going to be good. In fact, I may not even have a winner when this chapter is over. There might only be a couple of potential ideas to come of it—if that— ones that I’ll have to revisit later to see if I can punch them up. But that’s all anyone can reasonably expect. No one spews comedy gold—there’s a lot of junk that comes out. The trick is to keep spewing junk, and try to recognize the things that look less like junk and more like gold.
I’ve known and worked with a lot of comedy writers, and one thing I know is that while everyone’s brain works differently, there are certain fundamental things we all have to do. Everyone has their own way they like to work, whether based on superstition or proven results, but all comedy writers, regardless of their work preferences, ultimately have to put words down, and these three methods are very basic ways to approach this central task of writing humor.
METHOD 1: FILTERING
Turning your Subtext into an idea that’s going to make people laugh will take some trial and error and experimentation. Let’s go through an example of how this might look.
If you’ve been carrying your notebook around for a few days, like I have, you probably have a few random thoughts written down. Or maybe you feel like sifting back through some Morning Pages you remember being especially fruitful. Either way, in that pile of chaff let’s say you find the observation, “Meeting an alien from another planet would be great and all that, but it probably wouldn’t be very smart. In fact, it’s probably just a dumb germ,” which I just found in my notebook. Could this make for the Subtext of a joke? Let’s see.
It has a clear subject-verb-object structure, and expresses a simple opinion. So, yes, this can work as Subtext. It’s not pointing out any human folly or universal injustice (except maybe the injustice of a dumb alien being a let-down after all the anticipation the human race has shown for meeting the first outer-space alien), but that’s okay. For now, we only let amusement be our guide, and I find this thought somewhat amusing.
First, let’s make sure we have our Clown hat on. We’re trying to drum up some funny ideas here, so this is no place for the Editor.
Humor-Writing Tip #15: One Impossible Thing at a Time
When you create a joke, you create a comedy universe in which something is either a little askew from reality, or you create a heightened reality in which one key idea is highlighted. In either case, with any joke, you can only have one “crazy” idea, or one impossible thing, per joke. If you try to give them two, your readers will end up confused. If we’re going to laugh easily and freely, one comedic concept at a time is all we can handle.
We could try filtering the idea through the Character Funny Filter. The way the Character Funny Filter works is that we create a character with 1–3 simple traits, then have that character act on those traits, and this creates a joke. So, we can invent an alien character who’s really stupid. Every time this character does something dumb, it will be funny. This tack happens to make use of the classic comedic Archetype, the Dummy.
If we try the Irony Funny Filter we’ll write the opposite of the Subtext, in this case, “aliens are super smart.” This is nothing new. So, Irony probably won’t work with this idea.
See how my Editor brain jumped in there? I don’t want it to do that. As soon as I start judging my ideas negatively, I’m limiting my creativity. So, I’m going to continue exploring Irony.
Heightening contrast is essential in Irony, so simply writing about how an alien microbe is “very smart” isn’t going to be enough. We want to heighten it as much as possible. Alien microbes should be educated, given the right to vote, or run for office. They’re taking over Mensa. (Here we’re also employing Hyperbole, continuing to exaggerate the alien’s smarts to beyond the point of reason.) Perhaps there’s a Flowers for Algernon story to be told about an alien germ who becomes a beloved super-genius. Now it’s reminding me of E.T.
There’s my Editor brain again. I want to compare my ideas to things that have come before, but not at this stage. At this stage I just want a free flow of creativity. I want to stay focused, pour out ideas, and worry about whether they’re good later, and if they’re too similar to something that’s already been done, they can be axed later. For now it’s grist for the mill, and will all get
worked out when it comes time to assess these jokes.
We could try Parody, and use a knowing reference to E.T. to make this idea funnier. A boy could meet and become friends with a super-smart microbe. And realize, too, that any time you’re dealing with a talking animal or smart inanimate object (like a microbe), you’re also using the Madcap Funny Filter.
When a lot of Funny Filters start piling up like that, it usually means something good might be happening. You’ll want to continue in this vein.
The essential guideline for Parody is that you want to mimic the form you’re parodying as faithfully as possible, without winking at the reader. So, we’re going to write about a very touching love story between a boy and his pet microbe from outer space.
In a real-life version of E.T., a local boy bonded with an empathic microbe from outer space, then died.
The smart-alien angle was feeling too far afield from my original Subtext, which I liked, so I went back to the alien being dumb and just acting in accordance with how a microbe would act (using the Character Funny Filter). I also added the Shock humor of the boy dying, which made sense given that’s what would probably happen in this case.
Can we do anything to make this idea more relevant? How about any Reference humor? What do people know about aliens or, more specifically, alien microbes? They probably don’t know much. I think they know what people would do if such an alien were discovered: they’d plaster its picture on the cover of Time Magazine and it might he toasted as a celebrity. This could work, because it might be funny to see that happen to something that’s really dumb.
How to Write Funny: Your Serious, Step-By-Step Blueprint For Creating Incredibly, Irresistibly, Successfully Hilarious Writing Page 9