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