by Marge Piercy
When I was in my early twenties I could not write about having been an overweight child. It took many years to find a voice that could tell the story without casting blame, without self-pity; to develop a sensibility that recognized the obsession involved (the methods of losing weight) and the twisted logic (the strange diets I would go on) and the physical comedy (like the poses I’d adopt in the mirror) and the cast of characters involved (the diet doctors, my parents, my friends); in short, to be able to apply technique. Nor could I write a funny story about sexual jealousy while my girlfriend was sleeping around any more than Joseph Heller could write about World War II while he was serving overseas. You can have a humorous take on any subject, even a painful subject, if you’re distanced enough from it to apply technique.
Once you’re beyond the pain you can exaggerate it; you can recall the events in a voice that captivates the reader; you can add characters to complicate the story and comment on it; you can pile on ridiculous images; you can set up repetitive occurrences and confusing situations; you can create expectations in the reader’s mind and reverse them; you can even add jokes.
Truly funny books are rare and then, of course, not everybody finds the same things funny. There are, however, certain devices that recur in humorous writing, devices that can be identified and applied. (Joseph Heller said that when he wrote Catch 22, he plagiarized shamelessly ... from techniques he stole from Shakespeare.) While the following list makes no pretense to covering every technique used by humor writers, they are devices that have continued to delight us.
VOICE
Just as a painting can be about color, or texture, or simply about paint, humor can depend a great deal on language and style. Sometimes the voice of a particular writer amuses us with the peculiarity of its cadence, its strange logic (the conclusions it draws), its use of dialect and phrasing. To read the stories of Damon Runyon is to enter a stylized world of tough guys, murderers with a heart. Runyon’s Broadway mobsters attempt to sound more educated than they are. They employ descriptive monikers for one another. They use understatement and repetition. Countless writers have introduced us to violent thugs, but few did it quite this way:
“One evening along about seven o’clock I am sitting in Mindy’s restaurant putting on the gefillte fish, which is a dish I am very fond of, when in comes three parties from Brooklyn wearing caps as follows: Harry the Horse, Little Isadore and Spanish John ... I hear that many citizens of Brooklyn will be very glad to see Harry the Horse, Little Isadore and Spanish John move away from there, as they are always doing something that is considered a knock to the community, such as robbing people, or maybe shooting and stabbing them, and throwing pineapples, and carrying on generally.”
The voice in many of Grace Paley’s stories has a similar affect. Paley’s voice, also a stylized derivation of downtown, New York City English, speaks to serious and tragic issues while sounding maternal, sympathetic, and wise. Mark Twain takes on racial injustice with the voice of Huckleberry Finn, a country-raised, uneducated naïf commenting on the inequities of his society. Kurt Vonnegut charms us with an avuncular voice that embraces everything from mass murder to universal Armageddon. So it goes. None of these writers depend on jokes to amuse us but each voice wins us over with its own rhythms, insight, inner logic, and odd juxtapositions. There is a compelling originality and a unique likeableness to each of these voices and all of them, no matter how serious the material they present, appear to withhold judgment.
You may not think you have a unique voice but if you pay attention to the way you sound when you’re relaxed, when you’re talking to friends, or when you’re fired up about an issue, you may have discovered the distinctive voice you’re looking for. The trick is to catch it, to figure out its peculiar cadence and syntax, the phrases you repeat to signify emphasis, the stresses as well as the silences, any dialect that you may however unconsciously find yourself speaking, and then to harness it to tell a story using its own distinctive images. One way you may know you’ve found it is when it’s going too fast for you to write it down.
IMAGES
Images such as simile and metaphor can be used to great comic effect:Mom is still a perfect size two, still consumes no solid food except Sarah Lee cake. Her every vertebrae is as distinct as a swollen knuckle and as I envelop her in a welcoming hug I imagine a skeleton shellacked with hair spray.
Some writers have extended the use of metaphor to encompass an entire story or novel. Everybody at one time or another feels as lowly and despicable as a bug. Kafka’s famous “Metamorphosis” is the story of man who wakes up as a cockroach. What Kafka has created is an image that rings true, however ridiculous, and he exaggerated it, taking every detail to its logical conclusion. In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift satirized the politics of eighteenth-century England by turning people into horses, giants, and tiny midgets. During the Bill Clinton impeachment hearings, Theodore Roszak was alarmed by what he perceived as the influence of Christian fundamentalism on government. His response was the novel The Devil and Daniel Silverman in which a gay, Jewish liberal from San Francisco finds himself trapped in an evangelical Bible college. The novel is an extended metaphor for Roszak’s perception of American secular humanists as “trapped” in an alien America, challenged by fierce religionists, constantly having to defend ideas they’d thought Western society had taken for granted since the Enlightenment.
EXAGGERATION
Exaggeration and overstatement make people laugh because after a while too much of anything becomes absurd. Some writers pile on the details.
In his story “The Country Husband,” John Cheever introduces us to a corporate executive who survives a plane crash and flees home to his perfect suburban family, only to be confronted with warring sons, a pouting adolescent daughter, and an overworked wife. Argument after argument, complaint upon complaint is piled high, until he’s left sitting at the dinner table alone with everyone having gone off in a snit, so angry with each other and filled with their own resentments that they don’t give a damn about the fact that he almost died. What Cheever has created is a gross overstatement of contemporary family life that turns a very sad situation into a very funny one.
In Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth piles on the various methods an adolescent boy can use to masturbate—with a piece of liver, with his sister’s bra (I don’t have to go on)—and illustrates him attempting to do so while locked in the bathroom, his mother banging on the door demanding to know whether he has diarrhea, his father loudly lamenting that his own bowels are hardened.
In Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a four-hundred-pound Samoan lawyer named Dr. Gonzo on a colossal LSD trip begs, cajoles, and dares Raoul Duke to throw a plugged-in radio into the tub in which he is taking a bath, electrocution being the only possible high he can think of that will add to the “two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers. ... A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls” they have already consumed. This might be the most exaggerated, and hilarious, drug trip in American literature.
But you don’t have to go bigger, louder, grosser, to exaggerate. You can diminish your character, exaggerate your shortcomings. In many of David Sedaris’s brilliant stories, he paints himself as the world’s most ineffectual patsy, doormat to the world.
Diminishment perhaps has never been taken to greater extremes than in Kurt Vonnegut’s famous satire “Harrison Bergeron.” Satires take ideas or trends in society and exaggerate them to nightmarish conclusions. Satires can be harrowing as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, in which Christian fundamentalists have taken over the government, or ridiculously funny. Vonnegut’s story takes place in the year 2081, a time when it is decreed that everyone should be equal in all ways and by law no one is to be better than anyone else. These laws are
strictly enforced by the Handicapper General of the United States. Fourteen-year-old Harrison Bergeron, a genius and exceptional athlete, is jailed for being too talented and good looking and therefore a risk to society. He is shackled with earphones to disrupt his thoughts and forced to wear thick, wavy glasses to make him blind and give him headaches. He is also harnessed with three hundred pounds of scrap metal to handicap his strength and made to wear a red rubber ball on his nose to offset his good looks.
COMIC SITUATIONS
Again, no situation is inherently comic. In fact, situations that are inherently horrifying will turn out differently in the hands of different writers. In the Doris Lessing story, “One off the short list,” an actress meets a BBC journalist friend at her apartment where she is forced to have sex. In the David Sedaris story, “c.o.g.,” Sedaris accepts a dinner invitation from a friend at an Oregon apple packing plant who attempts to have sex with him against his will and the situation is hilarious.
Circumstances in which characters have differing intentions and desires are charged with conflict. You can turn that conflict in a humorous direction with comic technique: you can pack it with ridiculous details, smart dialog, surprise turns-of-events, reversals of expectations, jokes that comment on the action, characters with embarrassing or recognizable obsessions. Situations that involve characters who have differing expectations, or who do not understand each other, who want different outcomes, or do things at inappropriate times, give you a head start.
Long-distance bus trips don’t strike one as interesting comic settings. People are grumpy, inactive, mostly staring out the window or sleeping. But what if one passenger on a packed bus wants to be a good guy and offers to give up his seat for awhile to a woman who is standing in the aisle ... and she won’t give it back? Now you’re dealing with characters who want different things. What if the other passengers forget it was his seat to begin with, and castigate him for suggesting the woman give him his seat back? Now you’ve added a reversal—instead of a good guy, he’s now seen as the bad guy. What if a large, surly passenger switches seats in order to sit next to her, and those two begin to have sex—yes, right there on the bus. Now you’ve added a surprising turn-of-events, and in the hands of David Sedaris this incident in the story “c.o.g.” is a hilarious take on a good deed gone terribly wrong.
DETAIL
In the date rape scene in Sedaris’ story “c.o.g.,” the naked hero grabs a coat from the closet before escaping into the freezing night. What he ends up with is the fluffy pink parka belonging to the would-be rapist’s 80 year-old paraplegic mother. In a closet full of coats, why choose a ladies’ pink coat? Because it’s a totally ridiculous detail that the author uses to infuse humor into a horrific situation.
Names stick with us as humorous details even in works not considered strictly humorous. In Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, Augie’s family’s nickname for their landlord is Five Properties, because the guy never introduces himself without bragging about his real estate, spreading out five fingers and boasting, “I have five properties.” A small humorous detail, but a memorable one.
Details that embarrass us are funny. In Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women, Nora Efron details her fascination with her growing breasts as an adolescent. In The Kitchen Man, I talk about getting naked with a lover for the first time. There’s a lot of risk involved in detailing our embarrassments. You may be labeled immature, you may reveal secrets, you may tell the world you once did something considered shameful, you may “out” your family as imperfect, or show your disrespect for something you’re supposed to honor. The upside is instant recognition with readers. Even if they haven’t experienced the specifics, they’ll love you for it. Indeed, one of the rewards of literature is the ability to observe others experiencing those things too personal to admit to in public.
The piling on of details, sometimes called snowballing, creates a cascade of imagery. Like the scene in the film Hannah and Her Sisters when Woody Allen, investigating various religions in a quest to find meaning in his life, decides to convert to Catholicism, and sets out on a table all the things he thinks will be necessary—a crucifix, rosary beads, white bread, mayonnaise—you set up your reader for surprise.
Here’s an example of snowballing details from The Kitchen Man:Wellfleet.
The art gallery town. On any given Saturday evening in summer this tiny salt marsh hamlet becomes the Filene’s Basement of objets d’art. Happy hour begins at five when tourists following the centerfold map in the local paper wind their way from Main Street to the pier, drinking white wine, snatching crackers and cheese, searching to fill that empty wall over the couch with the largest and least expensive painting that matches their color scheme. By six there isn’t a litre of Folonari Suave left in town. The streets teem with sunburned collectors, slouching on to the next temple of art and then the next. ... There are New Yorkers who dress up and Bostonians who dress down and local artists in faded blue oxford shirts who stand around politely answering the question, “You mean you live here all year?”
August in Wellfleet.
When the razor edge of the dune grass crinkles brittle brown. When the sun burns a tired heat and the nights are long and cool.... Paradise. Unique in all the world. You come here if you possibly, possibly can. Unless. It is a rainy ...
August in Wellfleet.
When the divorce rate for vacationing couples hovers at thirty-nine percent. When the bed sheets never dry and the dog smells like a compost pile. When the Sunday Times grows very, very boring by Wednesday. If you can get one.
Long, languorous breakfasts when you begin to notice that your husband chews his granola like a Clydesdale. Afternoons when the trees drip like bad pipes and you wear the humidity like a wet pea coat. Nights when you retire early only to bash your shins on the bicycles in the hall that will rust if they get wet. Neighbors in the cottage on the right who fight until three A.M. and neighbors on the left who screw, grunting the passion of wild pigs.
REVERSALS OF EXPECTATIONS
A late-night subway train pulls into an empty station. A young woman gets off on a deserted platform. The train pulls away. She hears footsteps. She walks faster. So do the footsteps. She stops. The footsteps do, too. She runs. Her pursuer keeps pace. Turning, she glimpses a large man in a leather coat. She breaks for the stairs. He’s hard at her heels. Halfway up, she stops. She turns. The man’s face is inches from her own. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I’m not going to hurt you.” The man doubles over in laughter and she walks home with no incident.
This is an urban folk tale. This is also a reversal, a surprise turn of events. Screenwriters use them all the time. They are required elements in all thrillers. The fatherly police captain turns out to be ... (oh shock!) the criminal mastermind. Reversals are also very handy to the humor writer because comedy is often about the unexpected, the last thing you would have thought of, the unlikely response, the opposite of conventional wisdom.
In the novel Going Public, Corey Richardson and his much-younger girlfriend are spending the weekend at Corey’s daughter’s prep school in order to see a production of the school play. Also up to see the play is Angela, Corey’s ex-wife, the mother of his child. He assumes Angela will be the possessive, frumpy housewife he took her for when he left her. But she’s done quite well for herself, she looks fabulous, and her date for the weekend is a former pro athlete. When the desk clerk mistakenly gives Corey the keys to Angela’s room (she has kept her married name) he’s shocked to find some wild sex toys. Big surprise for Corey. Major opportunity for unexpected complications. There has been a reversal. Corey is now the jealous one.
TRANSPOSITION OF EXPECTATION
A different kind of reversal occurs when a character thinks he or she experiences something that is in reality something else. In The Kitchen Man, we meet a character early on in the novel who is a masseuse whose specialty is the hand-release (a euphemism for masturbating her clients to orgasm). In the last chapter of the
book, the character is glimpsed with a man in the back room of a crowded party. She is shaking her arm up and down. It is assumed she is performing the hand-release on a party guest when in fact she is innocently shaking down the mercury of an oral thermometer. Gotcha.
Another example occurs in Going Public. Having spied Angela’s vibrator on his first trip to school, Corey, when occupying an adjacent room during graduation later that year, hears a buzzing drone coming from Angela’s room and assumes it’s the vibrator. In fact it’s a hair dryer.