Prompt #122: Writing Humor

When funny writing SUCKS (so it doesn't suck)

Hi Friends,

Yesterday, I received the results from my latest brain scan. We have been watching a small tumor, a parafalcine meningioma, to make sure it’s staying small. The good news is that it’s the exact same size as it was six months ago. The bad news is that the scan revealed another tumor. This one is a pituitary adenoma. In the world of brain tumors, the two I have are among the best you can get (only the best for me). Certainly, some do have very bad outcomes, but for the most part, these tumors are benign and slow growing and treatable. Most people, however, don’t have two totally different kinds of brain tumors. According to the internet, this situation is exceedingly rare. I’m that special.

Two things at once: a clown spider. Funny or scary?

When I started notifying friends about my scan results, I said things like, “Why settle for one brain tumor when you can have two!” and “I’ve always been an overachiever.” Of course I made jokes out of the whole thing, because even though I’ll have to monitor these tumors with scans and testing for the rest of my life, the whole thing feels ridiculous. No one expects to get the news that they have TWO different kinds of tumors in their head (I also have a cyst in there that I’m not even counting, because that’s just over the top). It’s all very surprising, so it’s also funny, which is what we talked about last time, with this writing prompt on surprise.

Now, if these tumors were higher grade, aggressive, and life-threatening, they wouldn't be funny at all (though to be sure, there would be funny moments, as there always are with illness and death). In order for something to be funny, the stakes have to be high enough that we care, but they can’t be too high. It’s funny if someone slips on a banana peel and falls down. It isn’t funny if someone falls down and ends up with a traumatic brain injury. A certain presidential candidate was (a little bit) funny when he was a reality TV star, because when he was mean, the stakes (at least for the viewers) were pretty low—what did we care if someone got fired? As a presidential candidate, the stakes are way too high to be funny. And also, it’s only funny if you can laugh at yourself, which this person has never done once in his entire life.

What makes something funny?

Using humor in our work is a way to get people to listen, to open up, to approach the most difficult topics, whether we’re talking about brain tumors or climate catastrophe. How do we use craft to make this happen?

In addition to the element of surprise, there are a number of subtle craft issues we can use to make our audiences laugh, or at least smile. Because I am a fan of acronyms, even bad ones, I have created one for some of the elements of humor writing. The acronym is SUCKS (although the K you see is really a C—so yes, it’a bad acronym, but maybe someone here can think of a better one)

The elements of writing humor

S: Surprise:

Incongruity, shock, an unconventional pairing. Or maybe incongruous action with thought—someone behaves in a manner that is ill-suited to the situation. Misdirection. We covered this last time.