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

Voices

-find what’s distinctive between authors voice and editors voice

Hamilton Piece

Original: focuses on secretaries/history

Edited: focuses on miranda

Original: Low-low humor (thick Jamaican accent) ,

Edited: High/low humor (raises register on language to get incongruity)  (authentic patois)

Edited: More emphasis on parody (character writing it is a theater person writing reviews— addition of dates, “five performances”, etc)

Original: Explains joke more (“show took place 40 years before the space race…”)

Edited: Holds back explaining joke (“most found this a peculiar choice to dramatize the farm loan act of 1916”)

Original piece gives away the “game” at the beginning with the title, you have to figure out in the second

Which is better?

Original:

-People enjoy absurdity of descriptions more than parodying

Edited:

-High/low register — can laugh at the high register but low content

-Funny to figure out the game

Alexander Piece

Authors voice concise but dark

Original: favors absurd

Edited: favors structural issues/white privilege

“My agent..” makes it weird. Why would the kid have an agent?

Edited one: spells out the joke more: bank loan, run for office.

Original one: you have to figure out its about privilege

Revisions: Wasn’t clear what was intentional/what wasn’t clear. Shouldn’t get arrested at the end

Original: more clear

Revisions: stays to the same level

Original: more buildup, it goes higher at the end

Is the jump too big in the original to disemboweled?

TSA: an obvious place to go to discuss white privilege, original is more subtle

Edited: makes people laugh if they know that book

Would You Rather:

-Starts small, get longer and longer, but then ends on a short funny last line

-hard to laugh throughout the piece

-end the piece feeling crappy

-compelling takedown of society, not necessarily humorous?

-escalating of ending of paragraphs: “you filthy skank” to “you frumpy, melodramatic, PMS-ing, bossy, ball-busting bitch”

-nihilistic/cutting form of humor

-can convey lots of information and keep people engaged enough — thats why it is probably sent around a lot/ is popular

-escalating ends of paragraphs?

-smartly crafted

-funny form but content isn’t jokes/funny -> incongruity can be funny

-humor that you laugh at because it affirms our liberal values -> “snap humor”

-incongruity of official statistics and “you hormonal bimbo”

-contrasting “would you rather” informal tone/childhood game to serious content

-maybe would be funnier with multiple characters to contrast serious character with someone asking normal would you rather questions

–

Ah this woman has her mother’s trauma

-funny lines are “family goals!” And “twinning” cheery tone with serious content

Wow this bug is femme – short and absurd

Shon->meta

“Tapas monster” joke -> taking something very stupid very seriously

Grains:

Answering rhetorical questions as literally as possible can be funny a

“Which grain is waiting to take quinoas spot next”

“Rhett can’t wait to get its grubby paws on quinoas neck”

What qualities make something publishable?

-clearly describable game

-listy pieces where each sentence makes you laugh

-timeliness to something that just happened

• “Satire is a lesson; parody is a game.” – Vladimir Nabokov
• Parody
  • Use the form as the form of comedy
  • Highlight existing ridiculousness
    • Ex. recognize an already existing “high/low” and make it “higher/lower”
  • Parody— find the game that the original is playing, but try to play it better
  • The form is high and the content is low 
  • The form is culturally sanctioned then you plug in something that’s not culturally sanctioned 
  • Getting at the lack of self awareness that the writer has in the piece that is being parodied
  • You can shift the object of ridicule in a parody
  • Takes mechanical qualities and reproduces them 
• What has to change in a parody
  • Incongruity of what changes and what stays the same
    • Start sentences in the form then veer away from them
    • Making the situation ridiculous
• Function of similarity
  • Pleasure in recognizing the game
  • We laugh at humans when they act like machines
• What has to remain the same
  • Identifiable characters/character traits — behave predictably
  • Overarching structure/premise
  • Recognizing some things from the original
  • The feel
• Are there different kinds of parody?
  • Parody songs
    • Form of parody: Plug something incongruous into something stable, and take it as far as you can go
  • Parody speaker vs. parody form

**things that stay the same in Plato parody

• Layout on the page (plato dialogue)
• Socrates name
• Socratic debate structure
• Style of speaking
• Premise

**things that change

• Names of the other characters
• The content of the dialogue
• Casual words

**things that stay the same in T.Swift

• 2 characters
• Questioning by socrates
• Topic of love
• Verse/song structure

**things that change

• Low language of socrates
• High language of taylor swift
• Morphs into shape of song

• NYT article 
  • Parallels
    • Overachiever profile (qualifications and accomplishments)
    • Paragraph qualifying what reporter quotes from subject, using professional opinion/research
    • Vase maneuver — broaden out from a narrow perspective

Charlie notes

Parody

• What is parody
  • Find the game that the original is playing an play that game better
    • Example- socratic dialogue for tailer swift
      • Form high and content low in parody usually
        • Can shift this around- eg the whore of mensa
        • Low pulpy genre and changes to intellectualism
• What changes the form is the change in ridicule 
  • About self awareness
• Different kinds of parody
  • Parody music
    • Basic form- plug something incongruous into something stable
  • Parodying speaker or parodying form
    • Subtle distinction

Plato parodies

• , “The Paparazzi of Plato”
  • What stays the same in the paparazzi of plato?
    • Sentence structure
    • Similar vocabulary
    • Premise
  • What changes
    • More casual vocabulary
    • Technology
    • Celebrities
    • More than two characters
    • Logic 
    • Lower stakes
  • Smith, “Taylor Swift: A Socratic Dialogue”
    • Same
      • Two characters 
      • Questioning by socrates
      • Topic of love
    • Changed
      • Plato Low language
      • Taylor high language
      • Morphs into shape of the song
• If humor is derived from incongruety, why does parody have to be similar
  • Pleasure in recognition- elements of the game
  • Similarity is the strait man- gives tability to play jokes off of
    • Plausible reason of connection for incongruety to be funny

HUMOR THEORY

• We laugh at human beings whenever they remind us of machines
• We laugh to correct them
  • Parody takes mechanical machine like eliments and shows they can be reproduced
• This is the bergson theory-1899

MANY WOMEN AT ELITE COLLEGES SET CAREER PATHS TO MOTHERHOOD

• What mirrored moves are there across these peices
  • Vase maneuver- narrow- broaden- narrow
  • List of credentials like for experts
  • Parenthases for small details
  • Asking questions and then answering them
  • Introducing then calling the person by their last name
  • Rule of three punchlines
  • Interrupted quotations
  • Colon reveal
• Trend peices signal cultural shifts

1. 1. Burkas and Birkins vs. Dear Guy Who Just Made My Burrito
      1. Cutting Essays
      2. Generic vs. Specific
      3. “Realness” of the piece
      4. Getting into the head of the thing being ridiculed
      5. Personal Attack vs. Object or group
         1. Possibly more insulting to insult just the Burrito guy vs. the entire cast and plot of Sex and the City 2
      6. Stakes: Feminism vs. Burrito 
      7. Does it all depend on your own sense of what “cutting” means?
         1. Anger vs. cutting
         2. High or low humor (punching up vs. down)
      8. Tipping point where you’re laughing at the narrator not the subject
         1. Redirection of ridicule might come back to narrator; may keep piece moving
   2. Ebert Reviews
      1. Reminds us of authority of the speaker
      2. Makes and unexpected connection/comparison
      3. It looks as if [unexpected, insane combination]
      4. We all know….
      5. Start bad, go worse
      6. Slow build
      7. Broadens the stakes
      8. Pretend compliment inessential things
      9. Worry for audience/consumer
      10. Finds some metric for zero, then goes below it (ie bottom of the barrel
      11. Direct focus to more peripheral element
      12. Question actors/participants’ judgement
      13. Comparison
      14. Understatement
      15. Have to try to be this bad
      16. Tone of disappointment
      17. Say back the facts out of context
      18. Say things that seems like exaggerations but aren’t
      19. Compliment things that aren’t achievements
      20. Go surreal
      21. So bad I can’t do my job
      22. “Flashy phrase” gives you authority to ridicule

2. Rakoff, on Rent
   1. Option of writing yourself into the review
   2. Personal story alongside critique then ties it together
   3. Cutting at the assumptions, not just the surface
   4. Flat, short declarations as first lines often are very effective
   5. X has done Y
3. Mad Dog Time should…
   1. Too graphic is distracting from the humor you’re trying to get across
   2. Need to lay the groundwork for an intense punchline

Topical jokes– Take a piece of news and effectively turn it into a joke by:

• One sentence setup that sets up a premise by stating the fact in a semi-concise way
• Playing with language and spelling
  •  e.g. ‘Påpa Dzon’
• Using high/low language, working with the setup through connections
  • e.g. Royal family → Big Mama
  • e.g. Nine year olds → “Promise” v. “Dino Chicken Nuggets”
• Creating incongruities
  • e.g. between statistics and race
• Using puns but not making them “groaners”, making them fluid and work within the context of the joke themselves
  • e.g. Correlation does not imply caucasian
• Inserting colloquial language in with actual news, deflecting the joke away from a serious nature
  • e.g. “well, at least she wasn’t a witch”
• Recognizable connection
  • e.g. Salem and witches
• Inserting the comedian’s voice, creating a personal commentary on a pure fact; creates a comedic shift
  • e.g. “Nobody finds this bitch cute”
• Applying humor to serious premises, undermining the seriousness of an actual political event → going more serious from an already relatively serious premise
  • e.g. “Single use [Chinese] party members
• High stakes and tension; creates a release with the joke → going from more serious to less serious
  • e.g. “Not the type of threesome we were talking about!”

Language Challenge 1– Make a good comic simile by:

• Heightening or an incongruity in the stakes
  • e.g. “like a DIY Vasectomy Kit”
• Something being very relatable or wildly not relatable 
  • e.g. unrelatable = uncle with his pants on
• Novel imagery, anything that calls into question the history of the writer
  • e.g. “DIY Vasectomy Kit”
• Something you shouldn’t laugh at, mocking of a viewpoint
  • e.g. Woman in a voting booth
• Using specificity → imagery can make the joke especially funny 

The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid – Create humorous descriptions with nouns by:

• Making the noun unpredictable, ambiguous
  • e.g. “Abandoned chewings”, “syphilitic dribblings”
• Picking a new noun each time the reference is made
• Tracking the narrator’s psychology
• Increasing nouns in specificity as the piece goes on
  • e.g. candy → Chuckles
• Using a shorter noun → conveying the same thing in fewer words is often more forceful (and therefore more humorous)

Language Challenge 3– Create humorous descriptions with modifiers by:

• Opposition of verb and adverb
  • e.g. “Feverishly” v. “Slow, procedural, and consensual”
• Creating a character and showing their reaction in the modifier
  • e.g. “begrudgingly”
• Setting up with an adverb, joke comes from the fact of the word (Language game) 
  • e.g. “kafkaesque” and “hermeneutical”
• Using adjectives and adverbs that contract the thing that they modify
  • e.g. “Absentmindedly” v. “made out”
• Avoiding modifiers that reinforce/add emphasis to the thing they modify
  • e.g. “he ran quickly” v. “he scurried

 Present a unique premise by:

• Asking an humorous “what if” question that puts two incongrous things next to each other:
• • • e.g. Wilmore’s “Letters to the NAACP” asks the question, “What if a black person tried to convince the NAACP to call black people “chocolate” people?” (juxtaposing the formal and informal) and Martin’s “Picasso Promoting Lady with a Fan” asks, “What if Picasso had to promote his latest work on TV?” (juxtaposing high art and low entertainment)

• Imagining a character who lives in this absurd world:
• • e.g. Wilmore’s “NAACP” narrator establishes in the First Letter why he believes black people should be called “chocolate people,” and then in the Second Letter, he lives in this world (at least in his own mind), as he talks about putting “chocolate” on his driver’s license and taxes
  • e.g. in “Snake Fight,” we assume the world of the piece is one in which enough people are asking about the snake fights that uptight academics have to write down the frequently asked questions. 

Utilize form by:

• Finding a unique form to use then set up jokes with it:
• • • Examples of unique forms: entertainment interview (“Picasso”), email (“NAACP”), FAQ (“Snake Fight”), a birth plan contract (“Jamie and Jeff’s Birth Plan”)
    • In “Snake Fight,” Burns sets up his FAQ-style questions and answers, both of quick have potential to act as the punchline.
    • In “I Want to Make Love to You Like in the Movies,” Gondelman sets up his form of a long-winded smooth talk speech or sort of sext, and then uses this to set up “what’s not going to happen” jokes, with very specific details (e.g. very realistic and honest account of a really disappointing hook-up). He’s able to start jokes with either of his two incongruous topics (realistic awkward sex and cinematic sex) and then end with the other.

• Breaking the form itself:
• • e.g. “Picasso” breaks the form for the line about “femininity” and realistic decisions he made for the painting (it’s a serious high answer about art history, low response of “Uh huh” which returns to the form of the interview)
  • e.g. “Birth Plan” asks lots of absurd questions uncharacteristic of a normal birth plan, perhaps to make a commentary or to exaggerate some of the needs on the list

Use narrative to organize your piece by:

• Setting up a beginning, middle, and end:
• • • e.g. the rom-com style set-up of “In the Movies” goes through a seductive beginning, a middle with specific examples of sex in real life vs movies, and an ending about the future of the relationship 
• Escalating the stakes or tone:
• • e.g. “Snake Fight” (despite being a list of questions) escalates in the stakes of the questions being asked; throughout “NAACP,” Wilmore’s suggestion transitions into an obsession over this idea

Strengthen the humor’s texture (‘the humorous flesh’) by:

• Using contractions and/or brevity in sentences:
  • e.g. Gondelman’s “In the Movies” uses (or doesn’t use) contractions and brief sentences to make funny, simple lines such as “That’s how I want to make love to you.” or “I have seen the movies.”

• End sentences on the punchline: 
  • e.g. Davies’ “Birth Plan” ends a lot of sentences with random, absurd, incongruous words/nouns/etc, such as “We would like mood lighting, like on Virgin America.” or “In lieu of a traditional hospital gown, Jamie would prefer to be dressed like Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer.”

~ Marty and Veena

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.”