And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft

by Mike Sacks

  The last installment of A Series of Unfortunate Events, appropriately titled The End, was published in 2006. Since then, Lemony Snicket has gone into semi-retirement, perhaps hiding out on the outskirts of Olaf-Land, or perhaps making his way down to Florida, in disguise as an elderly East Coaster. Handler, on the other hand, has been working under his own name again, writing mostly for adults, although his stories have the same tone of unapologetic and pervasive darkness as found in his stories for children.

  What writers do you find funny?

  I'm trying to think of someone to say other than David Sedaris — everyone must be invoking his name, but I do like him.

  What do you like about his writing?

  He seems to have a mastery — in his best pieces, anyway — of a bona fide form. His essays aren't merely one joke stacked upon another; they tend to go somewhere.

  Most of my favorite writers do use humor, but you wouldn't really call them “humor writers.” I really like Tom Drury [Hunts in Dreams] and Mary Robison [Believe Them] and Lorrie Moore [Birds of America: Stories], but these are writers who occasionally use very funny sentences — they're not just comic writers. It would almost seem like an insult to say that my favorite humorist is Lorrie Moore. It would be an insult to both Lorrie Moore and to humorists.

  That was a distinction I had a difficult time making for myself while writing this book. Lorrie Moore is one of my favorite authors — she's brilliantly funny — but would she be considered a humor writer?

  I would say no. To me, humor is just part of a larger equation of what these authors are trying to accomplish. In a Mary Robison novel, there's room for the humor, and then there's room for other material that you might not be able to work into a humor piece.

  I find short humor pieces, like a “Shouts & Murmurs,” in The New Yorker, so limiting anyway.

  Why?

  Most short pieces remind me of buddies sitting around a table popping out jokes. It's a great thing to do in a bar, but it's often embarrassingly protracted on the page. There are so few people who are consistently good at that.

  Lots of writers are capable of writing a couple of hilarious sentences, but for a short piece you have to have a lot of those in a row. And sometimes that begins to feel stale. For instance, I love The Onion — it's a lot of fun to read — but sometimes the headlines are the funniest part of an entire piece. I often think that Onion articles don't need to be half as long as they are.

  I wonder if the next generation of humor writers — those who grew up with the Internet — will be inspired to write shorter humor pieces?

  Even classic humor writers are only intermittently funny, so I think the format was maybe doomed long, long before we had the Internet.

  Who knows what will even be considered funny in the future? I find Ring Lardner, S. J. Perelman, even James Thurber and Dorothy Parker to often be funny, but there will be occasions when you can't even trace what's supposed to be funny, let alone laugh at it.

  To me, the funniest books tend to be ones that are just told in a funny way — the stories themselves aren't necessarily comedies. Have you ever read an author named Stephen Leacock?

  Only in preparation for this interview. I had never heard of him before starting the research, but I fell in love with his writing.

  Stephen Leacock was a Canadian economist — perhaps the funniest economist ever — who wrote what he called “nonsense novels.” These were amazingly funny stories and parodies of every genre imaginable: detective stories, adventure stories, ghost stories, rags-to-riches stories, and so on. In the early 20th century, he was supposedly one of the most popular humorists in the English-speaking world. He's mostly been forgotten, but he's still revered in Canada.

  You're not Canadian. How did you come across his work?

  My undergraduate thesis at Wesleyan University was on the novels of Nabokov and the films of the Marx Brothers. And Groucho was a huge fan of Stephen Leacock.

  Before we continue with Stephen Leacock, what was the connection between Nabokov and the Marx Brothers?

  It was about the creation of their own individual worlds. Both the Marx Brothers' work and Nabokov's stories exist in a universe that is separate from our reality — and yet both have enough bearing that they link to ours.

  In a standard form of comedy, you might have a character who screws up in a minor way and then things grow progressively worse. The Marx Brothers were the opposite. These aren't characters with stiff upper lips who gradually go to pieces — they begin in pieces. With the Marx Brothers, from the minute they're first on the screen, they're just stomping over anyone and everything in their path. From the moment they check into a hotel, they're chasing women and hitting people and making fun of everyone.

  The chaos is evident, as is the manic energy and the wandering eye. But it's all within a solid framework, and it never leaps too far from our own world. The same thing would hold true for works by Nabokov, especially Pale Fire. And it also kinds of reminds me of Mr. Show.

  How so?

  I'm a big fan of Mr. Show. I just love how Bob Odenkirk and David Cross would take off in these directions — even if a sketch stopped being funny you just couldn't believe where you were. One of the powerful things about each episode was that it began and ended with both Bob and Dave playing themselves onstage. So, there was always a structure. You can't have it just be complete madness.

  Back to Stephen Leacock: When I was writing my thesis, I read a magazine interview with Groucho, in which he said that he had never considered himself funny, but that he did find Stephen Leacock hilarious. Groucho had first heard about Leacock while on the vaudeville-circuit tour with Jack Benny in the thirties. Groucho heard laughter coming from Benny's train's compartment, so he stuck his head in and asked what Benny was reading.

  Stephen Leacock's writing — as opposed to most early — 20th century humor — has aged extraordinarily well.

  I agree. He wrote more than the “nonsense novels,” but those, in particular, are not dated at all. They might just be the literary equivalent of YouTube videos. He brainstorms on a joke, and then he gets out of town.

  It almost seems as if he was ahead of his time.

  I guess so, although I'm loath to call various techniques “ahead of their time.” The loop of humor is so short, and people tend to forget that nothing is truly new.

  I read Don Quixote not so long ago, and I was really blown away by how darkly violent the humor was — at least in the first half, which was published in 1605. The second half — published ten years later — was very metafictional in an almost self-conscious, Charlie Kaufman sort of way.

  What happened to Cervantes in those intervening years? Why such different styles between the first and second halves of Don Quixote?

  The first half, which was released as a book, became enormously popular, and at least one sequel was published — this was before we had copyright laws, obviously. In the second volume, Cervantes wrote a sequel not only to his own book but an answer to this parody. It was a very self-conscious, goofy thing to do.

  How far back do your influences go?

  At least a few generations. I was a huge Edward Gorey fan; he constantly rode the line between humor and misery. I loved the fact that terrible events happened over and over to his characters, and that the more this happened the funnier it became.

  There was also something gothic and mysterious about his work. It was filled with wordplay. It was very clever.

  Wordplay, such as puns?

  Actually, no. I can't think of a single pun in Gorey's work.

  You know, I've never understood why puns are considered the lowest form of humor. Clearly, we can think of lower forms of humor than a pun, right? Slapstick isn't lower? Falling into a puddle of shit? To write a pun at least takes some form of brainpower. You have to have a bit of a crossword-puzzle mind to create those things.

  Edward Gorey pulled off a rare feat: he appealed not only to adults but also to children.

  True
, but I wouldn't necessarily think of him as someone with universal appeal. One of his books, The Gashlycrumb Tinies [Simon and Schuster, 1963], was about the deaths of twenty-six kids, in alphabetical order: “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears ….”

  It's a specific type of audience, and not necessarily shaped by age. I found the same thing with my Lemony Snicket books. I think readers need a basic grasp of irony, no matter how old they are. There are 8-year-olds who have that sense of irony, whereas some 48-year-olds do not. Just because you're an adult doesn't mean you're going to have an above-average sense of humor. Quite frankly, many adults don't have as good a sense of humor as children.

  Another thing Gorey accomplished was creating this very closed system — this strange, timeless universe, similar to the worlds of Nabokov and the Marx Brothers — that felt like Victorian England, but could also be today's world. The funny thing is I don't think Gorey ever visited England — he never traveled.

  Whenever I look at Gorey's work, I have to remind myself that it wasn't created in the early part of the 20th century.

  I tried to capture the same sense in the Snicket books. It's a universe that is both unfamiliar and familiar — a fantastical world that hearkens to something real.

  Did you ever hear from Gorey about A Series of Unfortunate Events? Was he a fan?

  I sent the first volume [The Bad Beginning], as well as the second volume [The Reptile Room] to Gorey in 1999. I enclosed a letter telling him how much I admired his work and how much I hoped he forgave me for the sheer volume I stole from him. A short time later, he died. [Laughs] I always like to think that I killed him.

  Were you a fan of his when you were a child?

  Actually, the first book I ever bought with my own money — if you can call it my own — was Gorey's The Blue Aspic [Meredith Press, 1968]. I hated overly happy books that were geared to kids; I thought they were boring and stupid. When I became an adult, it upset me even more. I'd stumble across these books I read as a kid, and I'd think, I can't believe the moral pedagogy that's the impetus behind this book!

  That's so distant from the way I operate. When I write, I don't think: I am going to write seven important lessons I wish everyone who's twelve and older would learn. How can I cram these lessons into a book? Besides, is it correct to teach children that just because you are a good person then good things will happen to you? That's a common theme in children's books, but life doesn't always work that way.

  Do you think children's books have changed since A Series of Unfortunate Events was first published in 1999? Have publishers accepted the idea that a children's book can be funny without being preachy?

  In terms of straight percentages, I don't actually know if that's happening. There seem to be just as many syrupy books for kids as always, but I do think the good books aren't slipping below the radar like they might have in the past. More attention is being paid to children's literature.

  Recently, I re-read The Chronicles of Narnia, and I found it to be more treacly than I remembered.

  I've always hated certain aspects of that series, such as the scene in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which Father Christmas comes up over a hill and presents gifts to the children. He then says something like, “Here's all this stuff that you'll need later.”

  It's a strange combination of too much help and not enough. It's like saying:“I'm going to give you everything you need, but you still have to do all of this terrible fighting. So, good luck!”

  That's my problem with The Wizard of Oz. Glinda, the Good Witch of the South should have been a little more forthcoming with the “clicking the heels three times” trick.

  I never could read or watch The Wizard of Oz for that reason. The story just pissed me off constantly when I was a child. In fact, I was never a fan of fantasy books where you had this great, powerful figure who would say, “You poor stable boy. I'm going to give you a little bit of help to fight this unbelievably evil warlord, but that's where I'll stop.”

  I always think, Hey, jerk! Why don't you do it? You've been studying for this situation for more than eight — hundred years!

  You know what also bothered me about The Wizard of Oz — at least the movie version?

  That everyone in Oz spoke with a Brooklyn accent?

  No, although that didn't help, either.

  I was very much into narrative, and the musical interludes stressed me out. Dorothy would be crying something like, “I'm desperate for help! I need to get home because there's a witch after me!” I always thought, Then just keep going! Don't stop and sing “If I Only Had a Brain” and “If I Only Had a Heart”!

  Once you get to the Emerald City — once everything is resolved and worked out — then you can have your little karaoke party and sing all your songs.

  Were you a fan of Roald Dahl's?

  I was. Even Dahl's lesser works for children have a kind of wondrous quality about them. I always loved The Magic Finger, which is about a girl with magical powers, but I'm not even sure that's still in print.

  All of Dahl's stories have this chaos and menace where the readers are encouraged to smack their lips over the downfall of nasty people. To me, that has a delicious, yet unsavory, vibe.

  Dahl's stories also never seemed to have a real tight arc, which I always appreciated. In James and the Giant Peach, a huge peach grows in James's yard. Inside the peach, he finds giant insects. His parents have died, and off he goes with these bugs on adventures. But there's never a sense that James is learning something about himself. It's just a pure, crazy journey.

  The older I get, and the fewer tight arcs I've experienced in which I learned something about my life that enabled me to go forward, the more I appreciate these books.

  Have you re-read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? I had forgotten that the Oompa Loompas are pygmies from “the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle.” A far cry from the happy-go-lucky orange cuties who appear in the original film version.

  I do remember that, and it seemed unsettling even when I was a kid. There was a very menacing quality to Dahl's writing. Beyond the pygmies, there was this bizarre candy in the original book capable of doing all these strange things. They cut this out of the movie, but there's an extended joke in the book about square candy that looks round. The kids look through the window of a lab, and they say the candy is square. Wonka then opens the door and the square candies turn “round” to look at them.

  Wonka says, “There's no argument about it. They are square candies that look round.”

  There's something about Dahl's books that incorporates the fear and the sadness and the chaos that exists in life while also managing to be funny. He doesn't make the world a funny place where only funny things happen. His tragedy is honest, and it doesn't always have redeeming qualities about it.

  You don't feel that kids are too young to learn the truth about life?

  They already know it. Even if you have an extremely happy childhood, you're going to learn about chaos and heartbreak and all the rest of it on the playground.

  You made it very clear at the start of The Bad Beginning that things weren't going to turn out happily for the characters. You wrote: “If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.”

  The books for kids that have stood the test of time — like Grimm's Fairy Tales or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — have been strange and chaotic and bizarre. The treacly crap has drifted away. I mean, you can still find Bobbsey Twins books, but they seem to be only for adult collectors and other fetishists. No honest-to-goodness child would ever read that sort of thing.

  Was your publisher concerned that some of the scenes were too graphic for kids? In the first volume of A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Bad Beginning, the 14-year-old character, Violet, is nearly married against her will. In The
Vile Village, Volume Seven, the character of Jacques is murdered before being burned at the stake. And, reminiscent of 9/11, a large building — in this case a hotel — burns in The Penultimate Peril, the second-to-last volume.

  Before I wrote A Series of Unfortunate Events, I thought that only kids with happy childhoods would enjoy the books. I thought it would be a safe way for them to explore other, not-so-nice worlds. But I found the opposite to be true. It surprised me, especially considering how tragic certain parts of those books are.

  It wasn't so much the publisher who was worried, as much as my agent. She was certain that no publisher would ever want to buy books like this, whereas I never saw these books as representing anything that was really all-too new.

  How did you see them?

  I saw them as being part of the long tradition of orphans getting into dire trouble. I also saw it as creating a worldview that was just as much about hilarity as it was about heartbreak. Funny and ghastly at the same time. The tragedy becomes exaggerated, and then the exaggeration becomes funny.

  Do you enjoy being around children? It seems that many children's authors, including Roald Dahl, weren't too fond of their own audience.

  The truth of the matter is that I'm always disturbed by someone who says they like or dislike children. To me, that's like saying you either like or dislike adults. There are so many different types.

  Yes, but some adults feel that all children are exactly the same.

  True. It seems that children are one of the last minorities about whom you can make huge sweeping generalizations and no one will care.

  I see this everywhere. I recently read an interview with a woman who was writing about pre-teen culture, and she said that girls love to be pretty and want to grow up to be princesses and want to be rescued by boys, and so on. And I thought, If you were to substitute any other another minority for “girls,” you'd never work in publishing again. I knew plenty of 12-year-old girls who didn't want to dress up like princesses.