We will use this site every week—often more than once—so you may want to bookmark it. It will serve several significant roles in our course:

1. It contains the forums where you will post your weekly humor challenges. You will also post daily language challenges here during the weeks of 1/31 and 4/4 . To post, click the forum title in the right sidebar and locate the appropriate thread for that day’s challenge. To guard against lost work, you may want to type each response in a separate document before copying and pasting it into the appropriate forum.

2. It is where we will catalogue our ever-expanding Humor Writing Toolbox—a summary of the humor writing moves, principles, and strategies that emerge during class discussion. Starting in the second week, two students per class will be assigned to take these notes and post them within 24 hours. Humor Writing Toolbox entries should be posted here, in the blog section of the site, by highlighting “+ New” at the top of the page and selecting “Post.”

3. It houses the ENGL 429 Hall of Fame, which gathers model essays from previous semesters.

4. It contains published work by alumni of the course, which you will read for class on 2/23.

5. It contains a list of online humor publications, which you can use to find pieces for the four classes this semester in which you all will choose texts to assign and teach—which I call “Student Text Presentations.” There are also links to the guidelines for submitting pieces to these publications, which I highly encourage.

PS. Since we’ll be posting regularly in the forums, you should definitely upload a cool avatar for yourself by highlighting your name in the upper right corner of the page and selecting “Edit My Profile.”

Khue’s and Lindsay’s Notes

• Writing comedic dialogue 
  • • Prompt: choose a section of dialogue on in your assigned piece, note its funniest lines, and identify some techniques for creating humor in dialogue.

      • Sedaris, Long Way Home: 
        • Coming from South Korea line
          • Condescending without having to say it out loud 
          • Imagined dialogue: I thought you liked me
            • Creates a character powerless compared to her
          • The dialogue creates level of discourse between what’s being said (child/child or parent/child) and the actual situation 

• • • • Haddish, Tiffany’s True Hollywood Stories: 

• • • • • Most humor is derived combination of explicit jokes with reactions from the other people (straight man trope) 
          • Explicit jokes usually aren’t said aloud
          • Tiffany uses dialogue to show her being unhinged against straight character but she is still more rational
        • Internal dialogue that Tiffany has with situation is also funny
        • Character: She is a Hollywood outsider so she tries to fit in here
        • Puts us right into dramatic situation and begins dialogue

• • • • Rich, I Love Girl:

• • • • • Any dialogue can be funny for building a character
        • “I was being sarcastic”
          • He’s supposed to be the smart guy but that’s not a very smart way of saying that at all
            • Trying to explain sarcasm makes a funny situation paired with people talking inside that situation 
        • Conversation, pause, unrelated comment 

• • • • Egerdie, Frog & Toad Are Self-Quarantined Friends
:

• • • • • “Toad stared at Frog in disgust.”
          • One plays the straight man while the other plays a contrast which works well for building comedic moments
            • It leaves space for imagining situations with sparse dialogue and pauses
        • Simple dialogue but fluctation in speed 
          • The actions in-between can slow it down
          • Rise and fall in velocity of dialogue to create surprise, jokes and variation 
        • True to the voice 
        • Best when playing off of each other 
          • Personal space line

• Every funny story is in some ways a “Fish Out of Water” story 
• • • What is a fish out of water scenario? 
      • Put someone in a situation where most people are different from them/don’t fit in and see how they react 
      • They don’t have the tools to succeed in a situation 
    • Why are they funny? 
      • We like to see struggle — it’s human
      • One may not be afraid of pigeons, but we can remember feeling vulnerable and remember that we are not alone
      • Narrator’s relationship issue in the ex-girlfriend piece is funny because all his exes are obsessed with this one weird thing. It plays up the fact that he is a shitty boyfriend by heightening incongruity. 
      • Jokes come with coping from miscarriage, such as whispering things to a baby and arguing with husband. This comes from her reactions of not being able to have a normal version of a situation i.e. concieving a baby but because she didn’t get the normal version, she makes it absolutely absurd.
      • Call of the Wild Pug realizes he is a fish out of water
    • In terms of revision
      • Different ways to edit based on the ways your narrative takes place 
        • Add to and sharpen jokes
        • Is my piece a fish out of water scenario? How can I sharpen the jokes and strengthen the narrative?

•  The class is built on the four themes:
  • Texture, Tone, Character, Narrative (actions + character is funny
  • Funniest pieces harnesses all four of these themes
  • World building 

• How does a piece build a world? 
  • Nod to the norms of how your story’s world is similar to our world 
  • You can think about character psychology and see the world that the character has built in its head versus the actual world 

• Cold open before going deep on one topic to prep the audience
• Smash cutting: say one thing, cut to a contrasting thing
  • “I love being a mother” ⇒ getting spit up on
• Being mindful of length ⇒ if it takes multiple days it may be more of a tv episode than a sketch
• Eliciting “real human emotions” from celebs
  • E.g. maisie williams fearing for her career
• Politicians and similar figures are going to have intentions for your specific audience (highlighting a new policy position, letting loose with the crowd)
  • Are going to want to stay intelligent/reputable

Charlie Notes

“Have your vegetables and eat them too” – basically  have information in the jokes- difficult balence

-have to find what ideas fit within format. Things that are too plot driven might be episode of tv rather than sketch

When you say “I have a funny story” what qualities make it funny?

• What qualifies a funny story usually is an extended set up that mimics a regular story followed by an actual punchline that hits harder because of the “story form” that proceeds it. It’s just an excuse to do a joke set up that’s longer
 -Charlie
• Out of the ordinary

Funny story told out loud vs written

• Delivery, intonation is important for out loud
• When telling a story out loud, you get to use your physical body 
• The same things out loud aren’t necessarily funny written and vice versa
  • Ex: “It’s decorative gourd season motherfucker” works mostly just over text
  • Ex: Some John Mulaney jokes wouldn’t be funny written out
• Emojis
• Sometimes it’s funny for authors to write down what the narrator is doing. Use physical space

Narrative (not words) vs. discourse used to transmit narrative

• Cinderella story has been told a bunch of different ways. One narrative, many discourse.
• There’s something about how the story is being told that makes it funny

Theory: Comedy is about (1) an ordinary guy or gal (2) struggling against insurmountable odds (3) without many of the required skills and tools with which to win (4) yet never giving up hope

• Have to be ordinary but not so relatable you feel bad for them. Can’t be too emotionally invested because then it becomes painful 🙁  
• Navigating unfamiliar situations and trying to work your way through 
• Multiple character shows like the Office: 

Examples:

-John Mulaney stories

-Napoleon Dynamite

Counterexamples:

• Twitter — laughing at the jokes, not the character
• IASIP
• The thing we are actually laughing at is not necessarily the struggling character, there are other jokes
• Eric Andre show
• Rom coms? Who knows 

How much of what we laugh at is covered by this theory? A lot, but not everything

Can use theory to structure current pieces by thinking about how to frame them in terms of making an ordinary guy/gal struggle against insurmountable odds

1. Yale student admitted by mistake

-character essay about someone trying to play hard to get with admissions (meet cute element, i just ran into you)


2. The Little Mermaid 20 years later


3. NY Times article: “How McKinsey Has Helped Raise the Stature of Authoritarian Governments”


4. New product: Do-it-yourself circumcision kit


-one idea: infomercial, someone trying to sell product “dont let someone touch your baby’s penis”

-other idea: narrator tries to cut tip off penis for having sex with jewish woman — keeps messing up (cuts off too much or gets infected or doesn’t have the balls to do it) 

-form: 1950s mail ad of gadget

Three biggest weaknesses in student’s narrative essays

1. Surprise
   1. Hard time arranging events such that it’s surprising
2. Internal monologue 
   1. Disjunction between character thinking and doing, students focus too much on doing, not thinking
3. Themes
   1. Narratives typically have themes, students don’t
   2. What’s the central conflict, how do steaks in here in that conflict? 

Big Boy by Sedaris does all 3 of these 

Lydia and Sol

 Language Challenge #7

• Mayonnaise
  • People who would use it
    • Food of the white diaspora, etc.
  • Sexualized
    • Sticky as glue, tasty as cum
    • Lubricant of ambitious white lovers
  • The thing itself in different language
    • Frosting’s evil twin, BLT grease, etc.
    • Strategies
      • Comparing it to other things that it looks like or feels like
      • Relates it directly to analogies or different, similar, objects
• Your Roommate’s Boyfriend/Girlfriend
  • Jokes that are more general, apply to roommate, “roasts” of the subject
    • Five fingers, always there, husband/wife
  • Jokes that apply to you
    • Yet another vagabond…, obnoxious free-loader
  • Strategies
    • Think about what this person relates to and make fun of them through that lens
    • Capture some characteristic in an unflattering way, “man-couch, etc.)
      • Reduce the person to one thing, one small thing
  • The direction you go will be contingent on the material
    • When you have a word that you could insert a funnier word, here are some lines along which you can think to make it funnier/punch it up
    • How can I make fun of this thing?

Language Challenge #8

• Choose the three responses that seem freshest, most surprising, or unexpected given the expectations set top by the context.
  • 1: That good ole fashioned Italian motor oil
  • 5: Sicilian Lube
  • 10: John Travolta’s Whole Career
    • If you’re in on the joke (Travolta in grease) makes it more fun 
  • Proper nouns help, specificity is funny
• Does fresh and surprising equate to funniness? Are others funnier?
  • Surprise without being totally random
    • Moisturizer is surprising, but too unrelated to be funny
    • John Travolta and Italian motor oil are somewhat related, but surprising enough to get a laugh
    • There needs to be some sort of connection, totally random at every turn isn’t that funny
  • Get to the literal translation
    • Liquid cholesterol is literally what grease is

Text Submissions

Which piece is most successful in crafting a funny character and why?

• Riding Solo: The Oatsy Story
  • Create a character arc, attacking horse wife, etc.
  • Take on historical event from different perspective
  • Familiar anti-hero story, bitter voice, depressed 
  • Subject that we’ve never thought about, bringing something to life
  • Incongruity with horse-ness
    • Acknowledgement of incongruity
  • If there’s some kind of paradox or contradiction, the reader is going to wonder what it is, and pointing it out at the end of the essay gives comic relief
  • Use of voice
    • How do non-human characters speak? Making it slightly unrecognizable is funny in itself
    • Forces reader to speak/read in a different voice than their own
    • Adds to paradox, doesn’t make sense
• Trader Joe’s Parking Lot
  • Giving a character to an inanimate object
    • A parking lit itself is evil, not the people that made it
    • Gets to shopper’s frustrations by personifying the object of anger
  • Lot is addressing us and engaging us directly
    • Narrator is provoking us and combatting us
  • The language is very human and elevated and villainous, and yet we don’t forget that it’s a non-human object
  • Applies villain archetype to non-human object

Both defamiliarize familiar experiences by viewing them through a different angle, creates incongruity

• Hillary Clinton/Elizabeth Warren
  • Suggesting a broader, richer view of character from a smaller picture
    • A more forceful character allows you to extrapolate more
  • Useful exercise to brainstorm more about a character and write those details back in
  • Illogical jumps from what’s been set up in the narrator’s head, which is also illogical
    • Lydia stretched her wrist 🙂
  • How to bring these traits back into the essay
    • Set up joke with being in the Yukon

Language Challenge #6– What makes a good long replacement:

• Specificity (bizarre specifics are great)
• Setting up a particular scene (create a character)
• Incorporate a twist
• Don’t make them too long
  • Might feel like a digression
  • Don’t want to make it hard to read/distract from the essay as a whole
• Two main principles:
  • Anticipate what the reader is expecting, and replace that with fresh & surprising language
  • Replace abstractions with some thing that models that abstraction (ex: replace low self-esteem)

Flat and Round Characters

• Flat characters: don’t have much change/depth to them. You know what to expect; easy to make fun of the character; predictable
  • “Act the way they act” → not driven by their psychology, but by the story
  • Machine-like
• Round characters: more nuance to their personalities; more jokes about them adapting to the environment
  • Know details about their background or how they think/how they see the world
  • Psychology– what has happened to make them see the world that way?
• What kind of character is funnier?
  • Juxtaposition of flat/round character (straight man vs. crazy man)
  • “Laughter requires a temporary anesthesia of the heart” → if we laugh at someone, we are less likely to feel for them
  • Round characters can allow us to be more creative versus flat characters don’t have as much depth
  • Laugh at flat character/laugh with round character
  • Flat characters are less self-aware than round characters, which can be funnier
  • In summary: both can be funny– just in different ways
• Flat characters tend to be unsentimental; round characters tend to me more likeable
  • “Unprotected” is rare because it manages to pull off “sweetness” in a flat character. Also tells a cliche story, but the strange angle is what makes it so funny
  • Even the most normal, cliche narratives can be made funny through a unique character frame
• Dern– I Like All Types of Music, and My Sense of Humor is So Random
  • Starts off very flat (but thinks they are round), then gets rounder than we’d expect
    • The changed meaning of “random”
  • Incongruity between perceived self and actual self
  • Does the piece stay as funny/ get funnier when the character gets rounder?
    • Surprise creates humor
    • The twist makes the essay more complex (rather than being so simplistic)
    • Makes us feel bad for judging the character in the first half of the essay
    • Dramatic irony of us knowing something about the character that they don’t know
    • Pieces tends to get less funny when they get more sentimental
• Saunders, I CAN SPEAK!
  • How it uses form to develop character/ how form creates a dramatic situation
  • Form (customer service letter) reveals narrators quirks: slightly passive aggressive tone, robotic professionalism (at first… then we see more and more of the narrator’s quirks), love, belief, and defense of the product
  • Relates a normal customer service sales pitch to his weird life (super specifically)
  • Middle part of the piece: runs through the features of the product and describes how to use them based on his own experience → few line jokes. Intent is to be reassuring, instead is disturbing
  • Mix of disturbing and funny
  • Punctuation reveals character (sounds frantic)

• How do you get ~ in the mood~ to write humour
  • Writing humour for a class assignment is inherently paradoxical
  • There’s this psychology theory that divides people into two states
    • Telic (goal-oriented)
      • Being assigned to write something is this 
    • Paratelic (play-oriented)
      • Humour is this
    • Can’t do both, cuz you suck
  • Strategies:
    • Panic! 
    • Write a bunch of first paragraphs, see what sticks (“creating a more exploratory structure”)
    • Write down on phone as you go out for the week and sit down to write essay later 
    • Add ideas to notes
    • Copying forms before anything else. Write a joke that sounds like something you’d hear from someone else 
    • Just try and get a really really rough draft down the day that it’s assigned even if it’s crap and then going back throughout the week
    • Talk with your friends
      • Note: requires friends 
• When you don’t feel funny, how do you make yourself feel funny? 
  • Chaos and disruption good for some, not for others 
  • Get drunk
    • “This will definitely get you into a play-oriented state” -Professor Wepler
  • Wait
    • A variant: Go into a dark room and wait until you go insane
  • Right before you go to bed, think about a single thought or a weird line that’s funny 
  • Force myself to write or make someone else force you to write #accountabilibuddies
  • Don’t try to write, do other stuff. Let the Muse hit you 
  • Watch something funny, read something funny
    • This might backfire because you just copy people 
• Word choice
  • Style conveys narrator’s character
  • Words that a person says 
    • Bitch, gay, fuck 
    • Can show emotion, inner state, rebellion

• Dramatic situation
  • Drama between the form and the words 
    • Fuck in a haiku
• Objects carry a certain range of associations and often are a way to establish a character and give an audience a lot of associations with that object without having to spell out all those things. 
  • Use objects
    • Not cliché, gotta be surprising but also fitting and expected
• What does it mean to maximize difference and project theatrically? 
  • Narrator’s unique position or stance 
  • Different situations they find themselves in, but their reactions are different= because of their unique backgrounds and whatever
  • Show, don’t tell
  • Don’t acknowledge something that’s funny is funny
    • Mismatch of earnestness
  • Focus on things that seem less consequential to reader (Bryson)
    • Differences in kinds of things audience takes seriously vs. character takes seriously 
    • Author’s reaction differs from what you expect the reaction to be
    • Make the audience care. Progression

• Being lighter in the tone of ridicule
  • “New Erotica for Feminists” plays with the form of porn/genre of porn, then adds lighter twists (i.e. the man says something feminist, people are aroused by feminism)
• Push the ridicule over the tipping point so that you ridicule another thing (i.e. a different subject, the narrator, etc)
  • “An Open Letter to Would-Be Improv Comedians” slowly shifts the object of ridicule to the narrator
    • Uses recognizable logic
    • Uses the lack of self-awareness
• Play with the varying personalities/thoughts of a narrator by using form to switch back and forth
  • “Hello, 911?” flip-flops between the longer personal thoughts the narrator is anxious about and with the quick urgent moments of panic she has too
    • An inner-thought vs public performance balance
• Show don’t tell
  • The “Improv” piece lets you figure out that the narrator is a bad person, rather than tell you
  • Add something specific and then the audience can make associations from that for themselves
    • i.e. “that show “Greenleaf” on the Oprah Network” (“Hello, 911?”)
• Using God and religion to make fun of something
  • Use God’s infallibility to make fun of humans/your object of ridicule
    • i.e. “Client Feedback on the Creation of the Earth”
  • Raise the stakes or escalate
    • i.e. “God Updates Mankind on Their Pronouns”

• Putting joke in the headline to carry piece
  • Sustaining joke
    • Parodying form
    • Making sure you play within the form
  • Ridicule can vary within fake news form
    • Dark or weird
    • Ie. Reagan vs Fish
• Ridiculing narrator
  • Slow build of piece
  • Overly descriptive sentences 
    • i.e. “An actual crevice-cleaning, hair-washing shower”
  • Dramatic situation
    • God vs Subjects

~ Marty and Luna

Paul, “I am Part of the Resistance Inside Nyarlathotep’s Death Cult”

Falk, “An Open Letter to Would-be Improv Comedians”

Irby, “Hello, 911?”

O’Mara & Malsky, “God Updates Mankind on Their Pronouns”

Onion, “Pete Buttigieg Admits Only Recently Realizing Black People Can Vote”

Onion, “Depressed Roommate Hitting the Gamecube Pretty Hard”

Dark Humor

• Tone — cheerful or indifference to gruesomeness
• Language
  • Funny sayings like “beaten to a pulp”
  • Consonance or beauty of rhyme
• Element of surprise — not just grotesque
• Try and break the form to incorporate more surprise

I am Your Pug and I Have Heard the Call of the Wild

• Pug switches between the perception of himself with a distinct pug voice to a typical dog voice which makes it funny 
• Self-loathing is through both tones but the interjections of showing what the dog has become moves along the narrative to reaffirm feelings of self-doubt and self-hate
• “Susan my person” as opposed to “Susan my owner” 
• Density of jokes in the essay is what you can learn from because it allows you to make jokes every sentence/line. 
  • You understand everything you need to learn from the essay through the jokes 
• Good callback of vacuum cleaner and peeing
• Does a great job of putting a lot of personality in the voice of the narrator
• DISCUSSION: How to utilize language and words to make it more funny 
  • “Susan” creates urgency 
  • Questions of self-doubt and what the hell happened
  • Soliloquy of pug giving William Shakespeare monologue
  • Empathic to reflective
  • Run-off sentences can be funny by taking the normal and building it off from there
  • No pause for reflection — just states absurd things matter of factly and then continues on
  • Contrast between high and low language — set up in each one that makes the transition between each one even funnier

Client Feedback on Creation of the Earth

• The thing you call back has to seem insignificant at first and so when you call it back, there’s an element of surprise which makes it funny. 
• Funny to laugh at inferiority of man to God
• Derived from incongruity between form and content)
• Language has to overlap between two contexts (corporate manage language and biblical language)
• Overlapping puns (brand evangelists)
• Number 9 is the climax and brings together all the things we previously were talking about

My Ex-Girlfriend Reviews The Mix CD I Made Her in High School, by Pedro Salinas

• To come up with ideas for your own writing, imagine that the author had to write this essay in response to a prompt and try to imagine what was the original prompt. You can then generate ideas from there. 

I’m Sorry For Being So Crazy While You Were Treating Me Like Shit

• Takes form to opposite extreme
• Extreme sarcasm
• Making fun of ridiculousness that she has to apologizes but also very sincere tone of having to apologize 
• Builds on its own momentum

Crayola Co.

• How do you keep the joke/piece going?
  • Gradually revealing details about the whole process
  • Stretches it out and brings up the old joke 
  • Not much action but you understand more of scenario as dialogue unfolds