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.”

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

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”

Lacher, Client Feedback on the Creation of the Earth

John, Nate Silver Offers Up a Statistical Analysis of Your Failing Relationship

Pierce, “I’m Sorry I Was Being so Crazy while You Were Treating Me Like Shit”

Mohney, “Post Hostess Donettes Cereal” (Reviews of New Food)

Feurer, “I am Your Pug and I Have Heard the Call of the Wild”

Salinas, “My Ex-Girlfriend Reviews the Mix CD I Made Her in High School”

Rich, “Crayola Co.”

Dalit Humor

Generate a humorous texture by

• Overlapping systems of language – e.g. Produce and technology in “My BlackBerry is not Working”; sex and intellectualism in “The Whore of Mensa” (“I want a quick intellectual experience, and then I want the girl to leave”; “That’s so deep, baby.”)
• Creating incongruities in gravity – e.g. In “The Seagull Army,” the juxtaposition between Nal’s life “jump[ing] the rails” and him getting “an ‘avant’ haircut performed by Cousin Steve”; or the aggression suggested by Nal’s “ravaged head” after Cousin Steve “razors” his hair, juxtaposed with Nal’s emotionless response of “radical” (and also with the dispassionate, matter-of-fact narration).
• Generating surprise by being more or less specific than the reader expects – e.g. Examples of humorous specificity in “The Seagull Army,” include “Cousin Steve (rather than “his cousin” or even “his cousin Steve”), “airmailed” (rather than “sent” or “mailed”), and “$17.49 in postage.” “Examples of un-specificity include “Nevada, America” and “the United States desert.”

Keep the joke fresh by

• Varying its logic throughout the piece, even if it is essentially the same joke – In “How Things Even Out,” we come to expect a two-part joke structure: 1) an assertion that X evens out, and 2) a ludicrously illogical illustration of how. Still, Handey manages to keep the joke fresh by varying that illogic, basing it on tension and release, relatability, anti-jokes, reversals, puns, &c. Since we never know how the joke will work, it continues to surprise us and make us laugh.
• Starting with a simple joke and making it more elaborate as the piece progresses – Presenting the joke simply at the outset is important for conveying the premise of your piece with immediacy and clarity. Once you’ve established this, you can create surprising twists on the joke by expanding its details. e.g “My BlackBerry is Not Working” moves from the simple pun in the title to “well you could try using a mouse to drag the blackberry to the trash, and after you’ve done that you might want to launch the blackberry from the desktop”; Handey’s “How things Even Out” breaks a rapid-fire sequence of jokes and takes a surprising comic turn with the ludicrous story about the bum who wins the Nobel Prize.

Spin an initial joke into a longer piece by:

• Creating a character – Put the joke in the mouth of a character (or characters) and use their personalities to carry its zany logic forward.
• Brainstorming – Generate lists of associated words that you might use in elaborating the initial joke (e.g. lists of fruit words and technology words to elaborate the initial pun in “My Blackberry is not Working!”)

Keep puns from being groaners by:

• Putting them in the mouths of characters – When characters are the mouthpiece, the puns are attribute to their personalities rather than to the author trying to make a joke.
• Not acknowledging the joke – The more it feels like you’re trying to make a joke; the more forced the pun will feel. Puns are typically funniest when they feel effortless. (The strained humor of Dad jokes is the opposite of effortless puns.)
• Contextualizing them in a larger form – When the point of the text is a larger story (rather than the pun) it will feel more surprising and less forced.
• Bringing together un-like things – The wider the incongruity, the more creative, surprising, and absurd it will seem. (e.g. Fruit and technology is more unexpected than sign language being “handy.”)
• Making them unexpected – The cleverer the linguistic overlap, the more comic surprise it contains.

What makes a piece funny

1. Setting up expectations and then breaking them – Some kind of surprising twist, the defiance of a norm, or a shift from the familiar into the unexpected
2. Relatability—joke teller shares some common ground with the audience
3. A surprising recognition about something we were already familiar with
4. Tension and release—often involves making the audience nervous (Kurt Vonnegut: “How do jokes work? The beginning of each good one challenges you to think. We are such earnest animals. . . . The second part of the joke announces that nobody wants you to think, nobody wants to hear your wonderful answer. You are so relieved to at least meet somebody who doesn’t demand that you be intelligent. You laugh for joy.”)
5. Character of the speaker / narrator – especially if it is incongruous with the subject matter
6. Juxtaposition of two extremes
7. Makes the audience feel better about itself
8. Engages the parts of ourselves that we feel worst about, but helps us feel accepted for them
9. Absurdity
10. People acting illogical or weird—especially when we know the cause
11. High stakes—often stakes we initially perceive as high but that peter out into nothing
12. Exaggeration
13. Common experiences that are confusing or annoying—mild irritants that aren’t perceived as threatening
14. The misfortunes of others
15. Narrator who is a unique or idiosyncratic character
16. The exaggeratedly sad or melodramatic (intensity of response is incongruous with the gravity of its cause)
17. Irony
18. Intimacy—especially intimacy that is incongruous with the closeness of the relationship (i.e. oversharing)
19. When the audience feels included in the joke—likely by understanding the references (especially references that others might not get)
20. Speaker’s response is incongruous with the gravity of a situation (e.g. nonchalance amidst chaos or insanity)
21. Subtlety
22. Taking risks—either with the subject matter, or by trying something you’re not sure will work (i.e. willingness to fail)
23. Clever word play (puns, sound)

Establish an incongruity between

1. Style and subject (aka manner and matter)– Using slangy profanity to describe seasonal decorating.
2. Language registers– “Welcome to autumn (high), fuckheads (low),” “Avian (high) ass (low)”
3. Character & subject– Swearing bro gushes about decorative gourds
4. Relative importance – A low gravity subject treated as if it’s high gravity, or vice-versa
5. Images– Gourd “replica of the mayflower”/ Snorting cocaine off it with a hooker
6. Sound and meaning– Assonance and alliteration make “wicker fucker” and “avian ass” sonically pleasing, which is in tension with the aggressively profane content.

Techniques

1. Use beginning of a sentence to set up an expectation that the end of the sentence defies. we also discussed this as playing the first half of the sentence straight and then breaking that convention at the end. (e.g. “like a crisp October breeze just blew through / and fucked that shit up.”)
2. Use surprising or incongruous word combos– This generates surprise and creates passing incongruities (e.g “shellacked vegetables,” “wicker fucker,” “avian ass”).
3. Vary your phrasing for the same thing to generate comic surprise– e.g. “mutant squash,” “shellacked vegetables.”
4. Vary the set-up, while keeping the punchline the same – e.g. gourd necklace, Mayflower replica, Diff’rent Strokes all end on some aggressive pronouncement about fall.
5. Strive for immediacy – Second-person includes the audience and makes jokes feel forceful
6. Escalate – moving from wicker baskets and gourd necklaces to sexual molestation and doing blow with a hooker.

Profanity

1. It doesn’t work when it is:
   1. A substitute for a well-crafted joke
   2. Just used to transgress (cheap thrill)
2. It can work to
   1. Create a character’s voice
   2. Create an incongruity between style/tone and content

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 language challenges (during the weeks of 1/20 and 3/30) and weekly humor challenges. 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 2/19.

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 the texts we’ll read and discuss—and which I’m calling “Student Text Submissions.” (You can, of course, also peruse these websites for your own amusement.)

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.”