by Marge Piercy
Both of these examples depend on a staple a of humor writing, the repetition of events.
REPETITION
We love to see characters “doing it again,” repeating the same mistake, harping on the same obsession, getting in trouble once more. (In the examples above, the viewpoint characters are acting on some previous knowledge—about the masseuse, the vibrator—expecting a repetition of events and getting something else. Not only the character is fooled, but the reader as well.)
Repetition is fun for readers because they have inside knowledge of events, information they’ve received previously, so they are surprised and delighted to see it come up yet again.
Here’s an example of comic repetition in dialog from The Devil and Daniel Silverman in which Silverman, a failed writer, tries to pitch a new book to Tommy Sutton, his New York literary agent:After three novels bombed in a row, Tommy Sutton gave Silverman clear warning that he was in trouble. But not to worry, Silverman told himself. He was sure his next book would turn things around. That book was Deep Eye, the perfect concept: Moby Dick retold from the whale’s point of view. “The whale,” Sutton interrupted. “Moby Dick there—he’s doing the talking?”
“Yes, but we don’t call him Moby Dick. We call him Shirook Han Omura. That’s his name in Whalish, see?”
“Whalish?”
“The natural language of the whales. He speaks in Whalish.”
“The whale is speaking Whalish? Which means like what? The book is written ... in not English?”
“Of course it’s in English,” Silverman snapped, letting his impatience show. Christ! Wasn’t the man listening? Just because I’m a minor client, he can’t rent me ten minutes of attention? “As I said, there’s an author’s note that explains the book is translated from the Whalish.”
“Not good,” Sutton said woefully.
“What—not good?”
“Author’s note. That’s a killer. It tells you right up front this is a hard read. I never buy books with notes from the author.”
“Well, maybe we can do without that. The readers will catch on. The important thing is the footnotes about the semiotics of the animal mind, see?”
“Oh.” Sutton had an oh like a rabbit punch. It knocked the wind out of you.
“What ‘oh’?” Silverman asked, tense now with frustration.
“Footnotes.”
“Yes, footnotes.”
“A novel with footnotes. That’s worse than an author’s note.”
JOKES
Generally, we watch comedians on TV to hear jokes. The humor in literature, however, often emanates from character: the ways people fool themselves and/or try to trick others; the absurd lengths we’ll go to get what we want; unexpected or ridiculous things that come out of people’s mouths. The joke, the short, formulaic story with set-up, development and punch line is difficult to find a place for in literature—unless you are using it to comment on the story. In the movie Annie Hall, Woody Allen starts with a Groucho Marx joke: I never wanted to join a club that would let me in as a member. That’s the plot in a nutshell, a movie about a guy who never wants what he can have. If you can find a way to use a joke to set up or comment on the action, it can be great fun. Here’s a scene from The Kitchen Man in which Gabriel, who has a crush on Cynthia, desperately wants contact with her, but admits:
I feel like the stable hand in the old joke who doesn’t know what to say to a girl he’s been wanting to meet for months.
“What’s the big deal,” his buddy tells him. “Just start talking. Relax. Be yourself.”
“B-b-but I don’t even know how to begin.”
“Girls like a guy who’s unique. Tell you what. Paint her horse’s tail pink. When she comes in she’ll ask you, What happened ? The you make something up and you’re talking.”
The stable hand dips the horse’s tail in a bucket of pink paint and waits. That afternoon, when the girl comes to the stable, she runs up to him and gasps, “My horse’s tail, what happened?”
His big chance is at hand. He takes a deep breath. Steps forward. This is it. “I painted it. Wanna fuck?”
As the scene progresses Gabriel concocts a ridiculous scheme to ingratiate himself to Cynthia, a theater director, by removing a bunch of women’s purses that are left unguarded by the door of the rehearsal hall. He assumes the women will think he’s thoughtful and sensitive for keeping the purses safe from someone who might wander in and steal them. But when he grabs up an armful of purses, he is spotted and taken for a thief. Someone yells. He is chased. Then tackled. Everyone is upset. The rehearsal has been ruined.
“What do you have to say for yourself,” Cynthia asks.
“I painted it. Wanna fuck?”
Now, the most important for last.
CHARACTER
The most effective comic characters are not hastily sketched buffoons but carefully created personalities with obsessive needs, unobtainable goals, recognizable weaknesses, fanatical fixations, odd ways of perceiving the world, and a myriad of strongly held human foibles. Some of the great comic characters in literature are powerfully motivated even in their impossible pursuits. Think of Candide, the incurable optimist; Yossarian, butting his head against the wall of illogical military bureaucracy; the over-sexed Portnoy; the love-sick Bridget Jones; the unscrupulous Gulley Jimson. Many comic characters have become archetypes of human folly and beloved to us because they are doomed, because they represent the human condition for all of us, our constant attempts, and failures, to get what we want.
If comic characters are to be memorable and effective, they must be created with the careful attention we talk about in the chapter on Characterization. You’ll want to imagine all the aspects of their lives. Focusing merely on their obsessions will give you nowhere to go with your story. Bridget Jones has friends and a work life, an odd family and a kooky internal world. If she was only about her obsession for one man, if she thought about him exclusively and paid no attention to her society, her diary would be a very dull book.
It’s often how an obsessive character interacts with the world that brings us pleasure: the odd minor characters they are surrounded by, their strange take on events; the memories of their former selves. The more you know about your comic characters, the more you imagine them in your dossiers, the more activities you create to engage their strange personalities, the richer your work will be. David Sedaris’s comic memoirs are beloved to many readers because he unleashes his sarcastic, well-meaning, insecure, self-deprecating, somewhat elitist and very gay personality not just on his family life, but in various work capacities, sexual situations, schools, and so on. In short, he’s out there in the world, giving himself many different opportunities to meet people, screw up and get into trouble. Even though he is writing about himself, Sedaris’s character dossier is wholly imagined. If you are writing about yourself, if you are your main comic character, imagine yourself in many situations, mundane and bizarre; surround yourself with many minor players who can bring out the best and worst in you; figure out your longings, those that you outwardly crave as well as those you desire in fact (e.g. I attempt to seduce someone not necessarily because I want sex but because I’m lonely); in short, make a character dossier on yourself. Comic characters are well-developed characters. Ask of yourself (or your comic persona) what you would do in many different situations. If you do your characterization work, you may discover weird and curious traits you’d never dared imagine before.
DIALOG
Comic dialog is one of the joys of reading. Even in books not intended to be humorous, writers often find their comic wings and treat us to a flight of the ridiculous or the unexpected, a reversal, repetition, a sarcastic taunt, a wacky detail. After all, almost everybody is funny sometimes, so of course any character could be. If you study these witty snatches, you’ll find that at core they’re simply well-written dialog following the loose set of rules in the Dialog chapter. Often they’re short exchanges. Humor tends to have a cadence. The speaker
s are well defined. It’s not funny to have to count lines to see who’s speaking. If there is dialect involved—some writers use a form of pidgin English to get laughs—it doesn’t get in the way of understanding what is being said. Humorous dialog can define character by what the speaker says and to whom. (Remember Eddie Haskell? Obsequious to adults and nasty to Beaver and his friends.) Humorous dialog can also build character. You can use it to show relationships changing, people teasing each other, or double entendre between lovers (briefly, however, because this becomes too cute if it goes on too long). Humorous dialog also lends itself to the techniques we mentioned above:
REPETITION IN DIALOG
From The Kitchen Man: “Mom, how are you?”
What do you care?”
“I do care. I love you.”
“No, you don’t.” Understand, this can go on for half an hour. I do, you don’t. I do, you don’t. My mother’s keenest pleasure is the affirmation of other people. To that end she demeans herself to everyone. The dentist. The dry cleaner. The plumber. Lady, you need a new hot water heater. It’s my fault. No Lady, it’s not. It is. It’s not. It is. What does he care at sixty dollars an hour? The only way to stop it is to wait, pause; you don’t disagree with her, she can’t disagree with you. “So,” finally she goes on, “how do you like your new apartment?”
“We love it, as soon as we’re settled you’ll have to come over.”
“You wish I never called, don’t you?”
“Why do you say that? Of course I don’t.”
“You do.”
“I don’t.”
“You do.”
Detail in Dialog
From The Kitchen Man: “Pouilly-Fumé.” Geller holds each bottle up to the light. “One third, not bad. And this one, Chateauneuf du Pape, about half full. That table left in a bit of a hurry didn’t they, Gabriel? Les Clos Chablis. A Grand Cru, the very wine our führer drinks. Just a glass left in this one but I kept it cold. And, the pièce de résistance, a bottle of William Duetz Brut, 1974. Two-thirds full. My sister-in-law’s favorite.”
Mary kicks off a shoe, massages a dangling foot. “You know if one of your customers drives into a wall on the way home some night you’re going to have to live with that.”
“Fair is fair,” Geller says. He sells more wine than Paul Masson. His customers stagger out the door. He pours full glasses for everyone and then approaches the drunkest customer with the empty. Nine times out of ten the big spender hiccoughs, “One more!” and Geller has the bottle open before anyone at the table can object. His tips are twenty percent of enormous tabs and there is always wine left over for us.
EXAGGERATION / SNOW BALLING / WEIRD IMAGES / CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
In the following scene from The Kitchen Man, the desperate playwright Gabriel has been summoned by the mad director Petrushevsky. It includes many of the elements of comic writing:“... I’m afraid I can offer you nothing here.” Nothing? His eyes are too powerful. I have to turn away. But why did he write me? He has to work with me. If he doesn’t who will?
“Nothing...,” he hisses, his spine rolling toward me like a snake’s until his face, crooked teeth the color of old newspaper, breath of cigarettes, spreads wide angle before my own, “ ... nothing except work, the work of facing yourself for the first time in your life. Is that why you came to me, Gabriel?”
He laughs, he knows it is not. “We believe,” Petrushevsky continues, “in the many working as one. Unless you are a genius. Are you a genius, Gabriel? Are you Shaw? Are you Shakespeare? Are you Artaud? Artaud who said, ‘if we could feel, then we could feel the pain, and if we could feel the pain, it would be so great we would end it.’ Are you Artaud?” Petrushevsky presses, “Are you a genius?”
“Of course not,” I mumble.
“What?” his voice makes me jump.
“No,” I say.
“What?” he shouts.
“No!” I shout.
“No!” he stands, “we are none of us geniuses. We are workers, workers in the theater, not the theater of plush and gold but the theater of pain and sweat. We are communards, each member pulling his weight, shoveling the shit of his life, working until the play is ready. If the play is not ready?” He pauses. “We do not perform. We are not cows, Gabriel, we do not squirt plays like milk, we are not turtles, we do not drop our plays like eggs in the sand. We are artists working toward perfection and truth.”
“I understand.”
“You understand?” This amuses him. “Then I shall tell you why I wrote you. I wrote you because your play is ... almost very good.”
Not every writer wants to write humor. No humor writer is funny all the time. All of us, however, encounter humorous moments in our writing, and moments of humorous potential, whether it’s a strange conversation, or an odd grouping of characters, an unexpected turn of events, or a situation that might be exaggerated. Knowing the techniques of humor writing can help you recognize these moments in other writers’ work, analyze what makes them funny, and apply them to your own.
Exercise: A Very Bad Day
Ever had a day when everything went wrong? Record it in a story. Event by event, from the moment you step out of bed ... onto a warm dead mouse the cat laid beside your slipper. Into the bathroom where the toilet’s backed up. Downstairs where the heat has cut out. Lay it on, detail after detail. Have no mercy. Do not stop. Read it aloud. It would be the cold audience indeed that did not find this funny. Why? Because we identify. Because we vicariously revel in those universal domestic misfortunes that on any day of the week can fall on our heads.
Exercise: An Extended Metaphor
It’s ninety degrees outside and the humidity is ninety-eight percent. You feel like a dishrag. Write a story from the point of view of a dishrag. You have just finished the hardest project of your life; you are totally worn out. You feel like a mule. Become that mule, the way Kafka became a cockroach in “Metamorphosis.” Or maybe your co-workers are pigs; your boss is an ass. Make your office a barnyard. Make each person the animal they most resemble in behavior and temperament, as Orwell did in Animal Farm. Maybe your character feels as alienated and misunderstood as a bear who plays the saxophone. Check out Rafi Zabor’s The Bear Comes Home. The object is to bring the image to life.
Exercise: Repetition in Dialog
You may have friends whose brains are somewhat fried, or elderly relations with very bad memories; or you may know people who simply don’t leave room for others to speak and who continually repeat themselves: telling the same story no matter how many times you’ve heard it; reiterating the same phrase again and again; or, like the mother in the example above, deriding herself over and over in a search for affirmation. The object of this exercise is to create a dialog between two (or more) people in which at least one of the speakers constantly repeats a story, or a phrase, no matter how ridiculous or unrelated. Make us see them “doing it again.”
Exercise: Finding Your Voice
This exercise may involve other people. Or, it may involve being far, far away from other people. For some, it may take your favorite stimulant. Or relaxant. What you’re trying to accomplish, by whatever means, is a state in which you are most completely yourself. A state in which you are not attempting to impress anyone, but feel free to let loose.
Think of a ridiculous story or situation in which you were involved. By ridiculous, I mean absurd, out of the ordinary, unwinnable, embarrassing. Perhaps it was hair-raising at the time, but in retrospect it was bizarre, off the wall. I can’t tell you more than that. We all have these kinds of stories. I remember a time I was invited to the Emmy Awards ceremony in New York City. I thought I was going to meet television stars who would discover me or advance my career; in fact, I ended up getting drunk and passing out. We all have ridiculous stories. Marge tells one from her destitute days as a fledgling writer in Chicago when she woke up in a cheap rooming house and found a rat in her bedroom with its head stuck in a mouse trap. She battled it with a broom, threw shoe
s at it, grabbed it by the tail and, not knowing what to do next, tried to flush it down the toilet. Those kinds of stories.
Now the idea is to tell it in all its ridiculous detail. Take all the time you need. If you’re telling it to someone else, take note of where they laugh (but also, where they doze off). If you’re nervous at first, keep going. If it’s a story worth telling, it will begin to tell itself at a certain point. That’s your voice. That’s the story speaking, not the embarrassed adult or the person who is attempting to use language to impress. However you can, take note of what you leave in, what you leave out, the characters who inhabit the story, the phrases that you use, and especially the rhythm.
I could tell you to use a tape recorder, but some people freeze up before a tape recorder. But you need to capture the story and the telling of it however you can, in notes, in memory, or maybe constant retelling. Some people freeze up in front of an audience. I like to wake up very early in the morning, drink strong coffee, begin the story in my head and capture it all while furiously writing on a legal pad. Sometimes I’m thinking and writing so fast the pages rip as I turn them. Most times I can’t read my own writing and I almost always lose parts of it when I try to transcribe it later. Occupational hazard. The idea is to capture a stream of consciousness rant. Once you’ve caught it, that’s your voice. And then the real work begins, the editing: the crafting of the language into an artifact that makes sense to readers, the locating of the repetitions, the choosing of details.