6. The subject is too serious, too disturbing emotionally to your reader or audience.
“The most valuable sense of humor,” someone once observed, “is the kind that enables a person to see instantly what it isn’t safe to laugh at.”
When we say that a story is the record of how somebody deals with danger, we must remember that dangers fall into three major categories. The first, basis for much of melodrama, may be termed the threat to life. The second category, foundation stone of less sensational drama, is the threat to happiness. Finally, we have the threat to vanity, from which springs most comedy, most humor.
Vanity is based on ego, conceit. Our basic vanity lies in the implicit assumption we all make that the world is the way we see it, and that others view us as we ourselves do, and that what we anticipate will always come to pass; that reality will conform to our picture of it.
Humor punctures vanity, by revealing that we may not always be right in these assumptions. We laugh when, abruptly and in an unanticipated manner, it comes to our attention that it’s possible to find applicable yet ridiculous alternatives to our picture of reality.
But the moment an event moves out of the category of threat to vanity, and over into that of threat to happiness or threat to life, humor ends. A fat man slipping on a banana peel is funny—until, in the fall, he breaks his back. Drunks are amusing, but not alcoholics. Race, marital infidelity, war, crime—our view of each changes any time it’s brought into focus as a real problem.
Especially is this true when we find ourselves in the center of things. There are no good losers, only good actors, as the saying goes. Or, to quote the late Will Rogers, “Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else.”
So, we appreciate the puncturing of vanity best when it’s the other fellow’s ego that takes the beating. Step into a mudhole that fills your shoes with slime and water, and most of us register irritation. Watch someone else do the same thing, and we double over with laughter.
The man whose insecurities force him to build his feelings of self-worth on vanity rather than achievement may prove completely devoid of a sense of humor; or, he may do all his laughing at others . . . fly into a rage when anyone laughs at him.
Is it possible to make even the serious funny? To a degree, yes.
a.) Avoid the viewpoint of people too emotionally involved in the subject’s tragic aspects.
A mother whose child has just been killed by a hit-and-run driver is hardly in a position to deal with the event lightly.
b.) Limit and de-emotionalize attention devoted to the unpleasant side of things.
A flood may be a disaster. But it’s always possible to ignore the floating corpses or the heart-broken old couple whose life savings have been swept away, in favor of a man and three cats stranded high in a tree.
c.) Focus on the ridiculous side—especially the behavior of the people involved.
Observe the discovery of a body, a la Sharyn McCrumb in Bimbos of the Death Sun:
Louis Warren tried the door handle. It wasn’t locked, so he eased his way into the room, wondering whether Dungannon was present, and about to hurl a lamp at his head, or absent, or planning to have him arrested for breaking and entering. Perhaps he ought to leave a note.
The only sound in the room was the clack of the printer. Warren looked at the unmade bed, the row of bottles on the window ledge, the cowboy hat atop the computer monitor, and finally at Appin Dungannon, seated in a chair by the desk.
He looked much as usual: bulging piggy eyes, gargoyle face, unfashionably long hair. . . . The pallor was a change from his usual boozy redness, though, and the stain on his shirt was definitely not Chivas Regal. . . . Louis Warren kept staring at the body, idly wondering if he had two more wishes coming.
Finally the shock wore off of it, and he stumbled back into the hall, nearly colliding with a tall, dark-cloaked vampire. “Excuse me,” murmured Louis Warren. “I wonder if you would know anything about death?”
And so it goes. Murder isn’t funny. But, upon occasion, writers like Craig Rice and Frank Gruber and Fredric Brown have certainly made it seem so!
7. The final key to why humor may go astray is that a playful mood hasn’t been established at the beginning, which leaves the reader unprepared to laugh.
Listen to how Gillian Roberts begins Caught Dead in Philadelphia:
At 7:58 A.M. on a wet Monday morning, twenty-seven hours after giving up cigarettes and a green-eyed disc jockey, I was not in a mood to socialize. Facing myself in the bathroom mirror had exhausted my conviviality. Choosing a sweater and skirt had used up my intellectual reserve.
Here’s Robert Barnard starting off The Cherry Blossom Corpse:
“Oh look, darlings, cherry blossom,” said Amanda Fairchild, as we sped from the docks into the center of Bergen, and towards the bus station. She added, with a cat-like smile: “Especially for me.”
I didn’t tell her it was apple, and I didn’t ask why it should be thought to be especially for her. I’d already had Amanda Fairchild up to here.
Or consider the first line of Jim Stinson’s Truck Shot:
Filmmaking is always nine parts boredom, but staring for hours at a pregnant goldfish was threatening to push tedium across the threshold of pain.
The issue here, of course, is that if you propose to write humor, for heaven’s sake put your reader in a mood for it from the start. Unless you do, he may never get around to laughing at all.
In point of fact, without the right mood, humor is as likely to irritate as entertain. Remember your feelings of frustration when that banquet speaker suddenly, in mid-address, brought in an allusion which could have been intended as funny—but could, equally well, have represented pure ineptitude? You have to be in a playful frame of mind to enjoy being tickled; and humor is a mental tickle!
The solution, obviously, is to follow the trail broken by past experts. From your first line, show by selection and exaggeration, incongruity and irony, metaphor and situation, that you intend to amuse as well as excite. You can begin, “The hair Elsa twisted about her finger had all the sheen and life of a tangle of wet fishline.” Or you can start out, “Elsa’s hair hung limp and lustreless.” But the smile for which the first prepares your reader can very well pay off in heartier laughter later on . . . and the lack of that same smile in the second may prove the reason why your best efforts at achieving a light twist failed to touch the reader at the climax.
HOW TO COAX SMILES
It’s one thing to analyze the other fellow’s humor, another to coax smiles from readers with your own.
How best to start? Cultivate a sense of the ridiculous. Hunt for chances to laugh. Open your eyes to incongruity and contradiction. Twist. Distort. Exaggerate. Draw absurd parallels.
Then, write.
Any don’ts?
1. Don’t try to get by with a weak story.
Would-be humorists tend to think that laughter alone will carry the ball. They’re wrong. Start, always, with a yarn strong enough to stand alone if written with no attempt at the amusing.
2. Don’t fail to establish your humor as humor.
If you’re writing a funny story, let your reader know it by using humorous metaphors and phrasings from the beginning—and that means right from the very first line.
As part of this, it won’t hurt a bit if you give the humorous character amusing traits in keeping with his personality, dynamics, and background. Is he the kind of person who’d get out of the pool into which he’d fallen with a remark about “those goldfish being too darned fast,” or at a dinner party would he observe that his host or hostess must be subsidized by a diet clinic?
The thing to remember, always, is that attitude (yours and Character’s) and content determine whether a line is straight or light. Whatever goes on, it’s important that you focus on the way Character sees things and what he says or thinks about them, whether he views what’s happening as dead serious or amusing.
Thus, Hero discovers that his ex-
con contact, conditioned by years in prison, keeps cockroaches as pets. His comment: “Lively little devils, aren’t they? Though I really prefer the big ones you get down in Panama.”
Contrast this with a “straight” handling: “Edwards’ stomach turned. The insects’ movements had the slowly roiling quality of water just beginning to boil. ‘You mean, you can eat with these things on the same table?’ he choked.”
Or again: “Linda asked, ‘Don’t you ever get lonely?’ ‘Not unless I’m with people,’ Carl answered wryly,” as contrasted with “Carl looked away. He didn’t answer.”
In other words, if it’s amusing, present it in amusing terms. Like everything else in humor, this means to work with the assumption/alternative pattern, in terms of both a character’s thinking and speech. In each of the cited examples, you tend to expect one thing, but you get another.
(What if your handling is third-person objective, not entering Character’s mind? Then you describe what goes on in objective terms, of course, setting forth what happens as if you were a camera that focuses on details that you feel likely to prove amusing to your readers.)
If a scene or incident in a serious story is supposed to be humorous, set the tone at once, the same way you’d prepare your readers for a change in time or place or circumstance or viewpoint.
If the issue is a comic relief character, paint her in amusing terms from the moment of her introduction. And it won’t hurt a bit if, in that introduction, she is caught up in an amusing situation or behaves in an amusing manner.
Finally,
3. Don’t play gag-writer.
Gags tend to dominate a story. They’re great for stand-up comics, but there’s little place for them in fiction.
Humor is, instead, a tone, a mood. It should be indigenous to a story or scene or character—not something extraneous, stuck on after the fact like a corn-plaster.
And beyond this?
You can plough through Bergson, Eastman, and Freud, of course . . . master long lists of sure-fire humor formulae and topics . . . argue at length as to whether drive to superiority ranks higher than embarrassment as a source of mirth.
But in all honesty, intellectualization is not the answer. No approach, no system, no formulation can claim to stand as definitive; and that includes the things I’ve said here. Ever and always, humor is subjective. The secret in coaxing smiles lies less in study and methodology than it does in avoiding them. Once you understand the basic laugh mechanism, the principle of the unanticipated alternative, be content to let your subconscious do the work. Believe me, it may surprise you.
Stay aware, always, that a story is the record of how somebody deals with danger. In humor, the danger is primarily a threat to vanity, an assault on man’s conviction that he knows all the answers.
Your problems, if any, will tend to revolve around your search for apt alternatives—unanticipated deviations from the norm that you can shape into smiles.
Your starting point in attacking this problem quite possibly will be a list of the assumptions your readers normally would make about your subject—the shoulds from which you propose to deviate, whether your topic be horseflies or society matrons or bowling alleys or ways to describe a ball-point pen.
There follows focused free association. If your subject is a person, then you know that he or she may be considered in terms of appearance, speech, behavior, and habit of thought, multiplied by past and future and then extended a dozen steps beyond infinity via similarity, contrast, and contiguity. Exaggeration enters, and so does incongruity. Soon you find yourself with a retired speech professor who stutters or a millionaire given to haggling over a penny sales tax.
And if your hero glances apprehensively at the huge armchair to which he’s been directed, because “It had a hungry look about it,” some unwary reader just may break down enough to smile.
All this is extraneous to another issue, however—one that calls for immediate attention. It’s the vital importance of the words with which you portray your characters as they move through your story.
We’ll take it up in the next chapter.
12
THE RIGHT WORDS
How do you describe a character effectively?
You build the character with significant specifics that lead readers to feel the way you want them to feel.
The thing I remember about the old woman is the big, hairy mole that grew on her right cheek midway between nose and chin. Her name, her face, her body—those are details long forgotten. I have a vague residual impression that she was one of my mother’s friends; that’s all. But I still remember the mole.
Then there was Gwen, younger sister of one of my boyhood buddies. She was pale and blonde and slender, I recall. But what really struck you about her was the fact that her lips were a vivid blue, consequence of some sort of heart ailment that, in those days, was beyond treatment.
Or consider Sam, who stuttered, or Mack, who drank, or Enos, the little banty rooster of a man who fought and refought the World War II battle for Leyte till friends would walk around the block to avoid another repetition of the story.
Why do I open this chapter on words and character description with such recollections? For one simple reason: Your goal, when you write a story, is to create or evoke feeling in your reader, because he reads in order to experience feeling. If you don’t touch him on the feeling level, sooner or later—sooner, in all likelihood—he’ll stop reading.
Further, feelings about virtually everything already exist within your reader. Your task is merely to devise ways to bring them forth. Therefore, most often, you write about characters, because as people ourselves we’re naturally curious and interested in the human animal and how it functions. Reading about them, your reader shares the feelings one or more of them feel. If you could achieve the same results with algebraic formulae, we’d all be mathematicians.
The principle involved here is simple enough. You want your reader to draw his own conclusions as to what’s going on, how the characters feel. You do this by giving him appropriate stimuli to react to . . . in terms of sensory perceptions, not prepackaged emotions which he may or may not accept. You don’t just tell him “This person is nice.” The trick is to show Character doing nice things. Whereupon, Reader will form an opinion of his own, rather than having to rely upon another person’s judgment.
Why? Because we always trust our own experience more than what someone else tells us.
Your most effective stimuli for getting through to readers thus are what are termed “significant details”: details that both individualize the character and evoke the desired feelings about him.
A character notices things according to what’s important to him at the moment. If you’re an alcoholic desperate for a drink, the clink of glassware may loom large for you. As a burglar on a midnight foray, you quite possibly magnify every sound that hints at a door opening. Light is the enemy in a photographer’s darkroom.
You, as author, must decide what’s significant. What feelings, what effect, do you want? It’s only common sense to select material that you think will evoke it . . . arrange it in an effective order . . . describe it to fit Character’s personality and tension level. The external stimuli and sensory details which will best bring the chosen feelings forth are the significant ones.
To this end, often, the key issue is what to leave out.
Which is?
Deadwood. Generalities. Empty words—words that apply to anyone, words that tell the reader nothing meaningful and so don’t develop the characters or advance the plot by changing the situation in terms of someone’s state of affairs or state of mind. Details about the character that confuse the reader, as when a smart person does a dumb thing. Or a description of Character’s ingrown toenail when it has no bearing on the action.
More specifically, you need to pick out and zero in on the salient/significant/symbolic features that distinguish Character as an individual and make him or her memorable, while at the same time
evoking feelings in him and in the reader. All else is secondary and to be subordinated.
In brief, you select, arrange, and describe your material in such a way as to achieve a predetermined effect.
Take Stevenson’s Long John Silver as a case in point. What image flashes into your mind’s eye when you think of him? And any of you who fail to answer, “His peg leg, of course,” may consider yourselves slapped on the wrist in spirit. By introducing a significant detail, Stevenson has both individualized him and raised intriguing questions that evoke curiosity—a feeling to keep readers reading.
Similarly, Sherlock Holmes bears labels and tags recognized in every country, and so does Tarzan and Mister Macawber and Fanny Hill and Philip Marlowe. So, too, do your own friends and enemies and family members—not to mention the men and women whose faces grace the wanted posters in the post office.
Now step even further into your own experience. Close your eyes. Think of how a friend appears to you. How would you describe that person to the police? In all likelihood, your friend would come through as a “big guy,” “little woman,” “pretty girl,” “smartass kid,” “shabby old man,” or the like.
Vague, right? Blurry. Indefinite. Less than sparkling.
Does this come through as distressingly close to some of my comments earlier on tags and labels? It should, for I confess shamelessly that elements of repetition are involved.
This time, however, our emphasis will be not on the labeling or tagging process as such, but on how best to describe such tags and labels.
What we’re after is an approach—a technique, a tool—for using language, words, to make each character individual and unique and evocative of feeling.
That tool, that technique, is specificity.
Rule of thumb: The more specific you get, the more vivid you get.
Thus, it’s not enough to speak merely of a man or a woman. What’s essential is to make that man or woman different from any other; to individualize him or her to the point that he stands out unmistakably from the crowd.
Creating Characters: How to Build Story People Page 15