First off, I am not a writer of comedy. While I note that I’m often very funny in person, comedy writing seems to me to be extremely hard to pull off well. So much of comedy is its timing, tone and/or body language. Some of it is time-sensitive, i.e. related to a news event or cultural phenomenon, and these often do not hold up well. Saturday Night Live’s recent 50th anniversary special pulled out some old comedy skits specifically to demonstrate what did not hold up well – case in point: “Jane, you ignorant slut.”
Examples of funny writing I can recommend are few and far between. Though I read it seven years ago, Less by Andrew Sean Greer still comes to front of mind. For many years I found Dave Barry’s newspaper columns laugh-out-loud funny and felt the same about Dave Barry Does Japan, but I wonder if it hasn’t held up over time, as cross-cultural jokes rarely do. If you have any examples of good comedic writing, please share in the comments!
On to a story, which generates the writing prompt…
An incident occurred at work recently that was funny enough to inspire me to write my first comedic scene. Names will be withheld to protect the guilty. I work in a virtual office environment and spend most of my day on video calls with various running text chats to communicate in between meetings. In one running chat amongst a group of a dozen or so managers, normally about as dry as could be, looked like this:
This is my image, but I can’t explain the turn of the events. It may be noted that my role at the company is human resources and there was an appropriate response, but, I let it go for a few minutes. I couldn’t stop laughing, alone in my home office, with only a concerned dog looking on. After a few minutes of hoping that J would look down at his screen and take some remediation measures, another colleague on the group chat sent me an individual message referencing, you guessed it: the aforementioned Jane from the SNL skit. I did eventually write to J privately and make a productive suggestion related to his message.
Your task is to write a comedy scene about a normal everyday interaction that you experience, perhaps getting ready in the morning, making dinner with your spouse, greeting the mail carrier or the neighbors. Halfway or so through the scene, throw in a completely random word or phrase that bears no relation to the scene. If you need further inspiration, there are random word or phrase generators on the internet. See where the randomness takes you.
Enjoyed reading this, Kimberly. Great idea for a prompt.
Thanks, Gail!
Comedy is such a tender flower. I read somewhere that one of the oldest recorded jokes – 4000 years old, from Sumer, written in cuneiform on a clay tablet – begins:
A dog walks into a bar and says …
And haven’t we all heard something that starts like that before? But the joke goes on:
… I cannot see a thing. I’ll open this one.
You can’t say it’s a belly laugh. I guess the dog is blind and it’s a play on ‘open eyes/open the bar’ but, who knows? It was funny enough, once, for someone to want to record it, though.
I used to see SNL, and I still watch some of the Late Night monologues – Colbert, Meyers etc. On a good day I get about 80% of the jokes, but sometimes they are so specific to US culture they’re as funny – to me – as a blind dog in a bar in Ancient Sumer!
4000 years, very funny, John.
I used to enjoy Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Trevor Noah, but satire is no longer funny when real life actually becomes satire. Or is it satire becoming real life? Not sure.
I’m a bit like you, Kimberly. I too love to through in (what I think are) funny comments/asides in conversations. Yet writing outright comedy eludes me. We’ll just have to make do with being comic in person.
Debbie, I hear you. I plan on continuing to be funny in person even if I fail in writing, but it was worth a try! 🙂