“Well, I thought it was funny”
— Stephen Corbert
Humor is hard. Really hard. Yet because we admire the funny friend, the one who has the witty quip, the one who can diffuse a tense situation by saying exactly the right thing to make the group laugh, we know that when we deliver a speech or are teaching a workshop, make your audience laugh, then launch the one idea you want them to remember. Laughter is powerful, and contagious and who doesn’t want to wield that power?
You can. Just not all at once.
When funny is a job, or the result of tremendous effort, it won’t work. Remember all those knock-knock jokes you suffered through both as a kid, then at the hands of your unfunny progeny? My boys loved the jokes written on their popsicle sticks. They would roar with laughter, then thrust the melting popsicle through the crack in the bathroom door and demand I read it again because it’s so funny.
Even telling a joke you practiced is fraught with the danger of complete humiliation. My mother told two jokes in her lifetime. She never remembered a salient point and both times delivered the punch line first. We found her inability to tell a joke hilarious. That joke is part of the family legend. It depends on how you want to be remembered.
There are two ways to be funny.
The first is the professional approach. Comedians who want to either continue their passion or be paid, constantly practice, enter contests, they haunt open mic nights. It’s part of the job, work at being funny. It can be a natural talent but mostly it’s about effort, study, and application. But even if you don’t want to be a Marvelous Mrs. Maisel or Joan Rivers, perhaps you do want to be funnier on the page, read on for the second way to be funny.
I was the first woman to burn my bra — it took the fire department four days to put it out.
~ Dolly Parton
The best start to being funny is through a funny story. In-person you have movement, voice inflection, and expression all to help along the story, sometimes the funniest part of the story is your expression coupled with an oddly contorted body.
Start light and brief. Add a funny comment to a presentation. You can make a quick funny comment in an email. But of course, be careful, because full-on humor has a way of backfiring.
“Humor is just another defense against the universe.”
~ Mel Brooks
If you want to write humorous stories, you are in good company. American women have been writing humor since they arrived on the East Coast shores and discovered the grand house their fiancée promised was a shack – pig farm adjacent.
There was nothing else to do but laugh because crying upset the farm animals. Both of them.
Mark Twain wrote: “The humorous story is American, the comic story is
English, the witty story is French. The humorous story is strictly a work of art —high and delicate art — and only an artist can tell it, but no art is necessary in
telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it.
My final Master’s Thesis was on American Women Humorists. What I discovered was how American women took over the humor genre to get through, well, just being a woman in the expanding Americas.
This approach hasn’t changed. Like the women before us: Anne Bradstreet, Betty MacDonald, Dorothy Parker, and Erma Bombeck, all funny women expressed themselves through exaggeration (I Love Lucy) and domestic situations (oh, like husbands and children).
We tell our stories in person, in the kitchen, in the sewing circle, at book club. Writers in the newspapers and growing periodical market were able to expand this audience of women, and at the same time bring them together by expressing common concerns, and like their grandmothers, proposing change.
How can you be funny?
With all these brilliant writers behind you, you can be funny. Slow it down and start small. Offer up an interesting observation or tell a story about when you were embarrassed but with time, now it’s funny.
Humor is often defined as disaster + time. Pull out stories of when you were a kid, the time your sister did this . . Or your brother did that . . . The stories can be gentle, they don’t need to be screamingly hilarious.
Start your humorous journey slowly. Insert a witty remark, or make a reference that could, possibly, in the right light, be funny. for me, I want my stories to be inclusive, I want to err on the side of compassion. I don’t ever want to be mean just to score a hollow embarrassed laugh.
Be entertaining but be kind.
