ECCENTRICS, MISFITS, ORDINARY PEOPLE
TAKEN BY SURPRISE
When serving as a mentor for beginning writers burning with desire to write humour, I try to send them down that appealing but lonely road without too much of a burden of negative advice. What good would it do to rain on their parade by telling them that humorous fiction in Canada is a ghetto, with its one little prize named for wonderful Stephen Leacock, and given as often as not to someone whose work would have made him cringe long before it ever made him laugh? Why say how much smarter it is to write fiction that happens to be funny in places but is serious overall (for then you might fool readers into letting you out of humour’s ghetto to play with the big boys and girls)? People who are hot to destroy their readers with laughter will seldom listen to such cautions anyway.
What I hope they would listen to is advice about how to be funny in fiction, and that’s what this chapter is all about.
Lectures on humorous writing often begin with a steely-eyed, not-very-amusing-looking person staring at you with doubt and saying, “First: you must be funny.” Any way you look at it, being funny is a prerequisite. If people seem to find your verbal anecdotes and asides worth laughing at, that’s a good sign. But it’s not a guarantee, any more than the absence of these responses guarantees the impossibility of your ever being funny in print. The people in ordinary life who get the most credit for being funny are those who work at it hardest, who perform most easily and uninhibitedly, and who laugh at their own jokes. Quieter sorts are thought not to be funny, when that has nothing to do with sense of humour at all. I’ve often read to an audience, with a strong response of laughter, only to have someone who “knows” me come up afterward and say, “I never guessed you were funny.” It’s a compliment of a sort.
Being funny in fiction is different than being funny in life. There may be a total overlap and there may not be; therefore, I invite those who think they would like to write humorous fiction to give it a try. The world, being cruel, will let them know if the experiment fails.
Another thing to get out of the way at the outset is the question of whether being funny can be taught. Like any other human ability or talent, it cannot be created through teaching, but it can be improved. Another expectation I would like to blunt is any assumption that this chapter on humour will itself be funny. Humour is serious business to me. I approach it with dour mien.
This discussion of humour will be illustrated with reference to Rachel Wyatt’s “Visitation,” Diane Schoemperlen’s “Stranger Than Fiction,” and my short story “Positive Images.”
♦♦♦ The Protagonist’s Problem
Imagine a spectrum of humorous fiction. On one end is fiction whose entire intention is to be funny. On the other end is fiction that is tragic but still contains humour. All the other possible intentions, involving humour in fiction, lie in-between.
Rachel Wyatt’s “Visitation” is about as close to the tragic end of this spectrum as I can imagine. What could be more tragic than the death of someone’s child? But the story is nonetheless humorous, when cartoonish cousin Martha comes to call, with her grief ranch and her theories about what to feed the grief-stricken.
The first rule of writing humorous fiction has to be knowing what type you’re trying to write. Is it a serious story that happens to be funny? Or is it a funny story that happens to be serious? Is it funny and serious in equal measure? If it is neither funny nor serious, throw it out.
For my money, the hardest thing to attempt, and I never do, is the story that is entirely funny: first sentence to last. Such a story rarely works, maybe never, not always because its jokes fail, but because the reader has no real reason to go on. Without a serious human story to propel the reader forward, it’s just a joke book. Does it matter in a joke book whether you stop at page one or three or read to the end? Also, something that proclaims itself to be roaringly funny, that seems to be saying, “This is really going to crack you up,” courts reader backlash. Readers look fiercely back and say, “Is it? Am I?” If the readers aren’t with you, they are against you.
My number one rule about humour in short fiction is that the humorous short story protagonist needs to have a serious problem, every bit as much as the serious fiction protagonist. The protagonist needs to feel real pain. That is, the problem may be funny to readers, but it can’t be funny to the protagonist. Readers read on, engage with the story in search of the problem’s solution, just as they do in a serious story. The fact that the story is funny is almost incidental. The serious problem is what is providing the propulsion forward.
“Positive Images” is a short story of mine from a collection called Teeth. It is a linked collection about a fictional professional hockey team and its reluctant scoring star, Doug Burns. My master plan was to have every story somehow grow out of the same moment of climax in the first story when Doug Burns loses his first tooth to hockey in his fourth year as a pro.
This climax in the title story becomes the point of attack in “Positive Images,” Doug has lost a tooth to hockey, and now he wants to retire. But, he realizes, on sober second thought, that he can’t leave pro hockey until it yields him a superior wife. All his toothless teammates, the undeserving bunch, already have superior wives, and he wants one too. So Doug embarks on a systematic plan to find a wife, and the quest is the point of the story. The way the quest leads to his retirement party at season’s end is the story’s part one. The party is the big scene in part one, its climax, and as it winds down, it appears that Doug has failed. It appears that he has found no future wife. Then Renata, the party’s hired hostess, comes over to him and begins a relationship that will lead (in part two) to their marriage.
The second part of the story, almost a second story, begins with Doug’s marriage to Renata. They get married (the point of attack in part two), and Renata starts a number of successful business ventures with Doug’s money. He hardly ever sees her. To try to keep pace, and to give meaning to his consort existence, Doug starts a chain of doughnut shops that are a failure from the moment their doors open. Renata’s view of it, which Doug accepts, is that the doughnut chain’s failure signifies that Doug has had a breakdown. To deal with it, Renata sends Doug to a spa that treats the fragile mind with heavy doses of golf. While he’s there, she sends a lawyer to serve him with divorce papers.
Instead of another action climax, this story ends with Doug’s new understanding of himself. As he’s leaving the golf farm, where he has been healing with several rounds a day and lots of positive imaging, he realizes it has worked, something he never considered possible. “Positive imaging like mad,” he begins to see his trials and troubles as a rich and varied life, and he continues on to his next adventure in a state of optimism.
In its two parts, Doug has at least two problems. He takes them seriously. If readers were to doubt his desire, his need, to have a wife, his fear of not getting one, the story would fail. Then, when he has a wife, and hardly ever sees her, his loneliness is again real. He feels it, and so should the reader. When Doug’s doughnut shop fails, and he loses his wife, he is sad again. At the end, when Doug blossoms forth into freedom with a new optimism, I wanted readers to feel that joy.
The story illustrates a few other things about humorous fiction. Whatever the difference is between serious and humorous, it is not structural. This story has the same need for a point of attack and a build-up and a big scene and a meaningful end as a serious story. Whatever the difference is, structure’s not it.
♦♦♦ The Big Scene
Although I’m not proposing it as a dogma, I have noticed in analyzing my humorous short stories that many of them have a big chaotic scene as a moment of climax. The party in “Positive Images” at the end of part one is an example. In the title story of the Teeth collection, the big scene is the hockey brawl in which Doug loses his tooth. Because the stories are meant to be funny, the big scenes have an element of burlesque. If I had been portraying a hockey brawl in a serious story, it would have been real blood and pain and smashed teeth and expletives undeleted—something sad, pathetic, and brutal. But in the burlesque version in “Teeth,” I portray it like a big dance, where everyone has a dancing partner but Doug, who daydreams along the bench about an old girlfriend and a poignant post-pubescent moment. Just then, a young Montreal Canadien, frantic to find someone to hit, hunts Doug down. He smacks his head into Doug’s mouth—and when I read it to an audience, the laughter stops right there. A respectful silence comes as Doug is helped off by the trainer.
People laugh at the burlesque because it is different from the real, because they are surprised. But the moment of violence, the banging out of the tooth, is serious. They like Doug. They don’t want to see him maimed.
♦♦♦ The Ending
In the earlier discussion of short-story structure, the ending beyond the big scene, after the moment of revelation or the climax, was seen as a moody time when the emotions of the story reverberate. Another strong opinion I have about humorous short fiction is that if you have a big, bang-up burlesque scene for the climax, the audience is done laughing when that scene is finished. Whatever the other dominant emotion of the story is, besides humour, I go to that emotion for the story’s ending.
In “Teeth,” the burlesque scene of the hockey brawl that costs Doug a tooth is followed by a little scene of Doug in the locker room. Beyond humour, the other emotions in “Teeth” are Doug’s fatigue with hockey, his desire to get out of it in one piece, his feeling of being trapped. At the end, I go to those emotions. If I have done it right, the mood should be bittersweet:
On the narrow bench in the dressing room. Mouth wadded full of cotton batting. The muffled roar of the crowd as the game peters out to its lop-sided conclusion.
The game ends. The team trudges in. Chip follows, raving about a shake-up. I am not around to be raved at, however. I am off in the near future this time, rather than the distant past I so often visit. In this near future, there are sticks but they are embedded in weenies and the soft bellies of ice-cream bars. There are pucks too, of bacon. Body checks come annually at the doctor’s office and he always pronounces you in great physical condition.
Somehow, every time I lick up under my swollen lip, I am reminded of this near future and the many sources from which money can come. Money, unlike teeth, can be replenished. A missing tooth is a hole in your head for life.
There is a saying that laughter and tears are close relatives. The success of a bittersweet ending to a humorous story depends on that truth—might even be proof of it. One of the greatest humorous novels I have ever read is J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man. It is a black comedy, ribald, a little nasty, often wildly funny. If you have not read it, or even if you have, have a look at the ending. It is wonderfully sad.
♦♦♦ Beginnings
Humorous story beginnings share with other fictional beginnings the need to hook the reader, but often the humorist will do so with a funny line or couple of lines. Remember the opening of “Stranger Than Fiction” or better, go back and look:
Aunt Maude was frightened by a bald albino juggler at the East Azilda Fall Fair when she was six months’ pregnant ...
Schoemperlen’s representation of people’s stories about cosmic coincidences they claim to have witnessed or heard from reliable sources made me laugh.
In “Positive Images,” I knitted together a point of attack, a startling statement, and what I hoped was a funny statement:
I lost my first tooth to hockey in the middle of my fourth season in the NHL, and, being the kind of fierce competitor that I am, I said, that’s it, I quit.
I believe a story that is going to be funny should tip you off in its first lines or page that this is the case. If a story begins tragically and then delivers humour, readers feel cheated—but not as cheated as if a story that started out as a rousing comedy turns tragic. For all its comedy, you will recall that “Visitation” begins with a sentence of utter sadness.
Almeida went to answer the door hoping it was a stranger come to tell her that it had all been a mistake. Mrs. Kerwell. Your child is alive and well and will be home tomorrow.
♦♦♦ Characters: Eccentric and Ordinary
Another hindsight discovery I have made about my own humorous writing is that my story protagonists fall into two camps: the eccentrics and the normals. Whenever I have built a story around an eccentric (such as Doug Burns, the hockey player), the comic plot consists of taking him and placing him in the situation that most conflicts with his eccentricities. In Doug’s case, I put him in the game of professional hockey. Hockey players are said to be rough and tough, to play through pain, to be brave and foolhardy about their health. Doug is meek and frightened, and he would never play while in pain. He is cowardly and careful, and fanatical about his health and appearance. He is a misfit in this situation, and from this misfittedness flows the humour.
The eccentrics can be subcategorized as likeable, unlikeable, or blackly humorous. Doug Burns serves well enough as an example of the likeable eccentric, as does Diane Schoemperlen’s author/protagonist in “Stranger Than Fiction.”
For the second type, the unlikeable protagonist, “unlikeable” is a bit of a misnomer in that you generally do like the unlikeable protagonist; you just feel that perhaps you shouldn’t. I have in mind J.P. Donleavy’s Sebastian in The Ginger Man. You like him despite his doing some fairly unkind acts, such as cheating on his wife and refusing her money he intends to spend on drinking.
Push it up another notch, and you have the black-humorous hero-villains, like Harry Flashman in George McDonald Fraser’s Flashman novel series. Harry is a horrible guy. There is nothing he won’t do to save himself; no vile lie he won’t stoop to telling; no one he won’t sacrifice. We read on in guilty fascination.
These eccentrics are also rendered misfits by the situations their authors put them in. Sebastian, a most unreliable and unhandy man, with a taste for high living, is placed in a marriage with an infant child in a poverty-stricken part of Dublin, in a flat with bad plumbing his wife would like to see him fix. Harry Flashman, a total coward, is put in the British army, and he is then made a British war hero by mistake. He must continually deal with the dangerous circumstances into which Britain’s war-hungry government thrusts him.
The second type of protagonist I use for my humorous stories is the so called normal or ordinary person. Again, the method of achieving the humour is by putting such people in situations that render them misfits. In a story called “Blueballs the Pirate,” from a collection called Working Without a Laugh Track, I start with a fellow who prides himself on being an everyman. He lives in suburbia, has a nice wife and family, and brags of being totally satisfied. He goes off to his job that he enjoys, and he likes his co-workers with whom he shares many a merry joke. He would hate to be thought of as different.
Then he has a vasectomy by local anaesthetic.
He is so shocked by the experience and by the pain that comes later, and is so angry that no one warned him, that he undergoes a temporary personality change. He becomes the inverse of himself. He hates his wife and the restrictiveness of his marriage, his job, his life. He decides that he is running off to the Caribbean with the West Indian nurse who attended his surgery. He turns back into his ordinary self at the end, but he is haunted by the presence of that other dangerous fellow who inhabited him for a day.
In another story from the same collection, “Bill’s Sperm Count,” Bill, who has a nice marriage and an ordinary happy life, discovers himself unable to go through with giving a sperm sample at an infertility clinic. He keeps trying to overcome the obstacle, keeps failing, until it becomes a serious problem in his marriage. The ordinary man is again rendered a misfit by unexpected circumstance.
♦♦♦ Voice in Humorous Fiction
Voice may be the aspect of humorous fiction that is most often misunderstood. Nothing grates so much as when a writer puts on a funny voice to write a funny story. Might as well put on a funny hat. Often, these are high-tone voices jam-packed with jawbreaker words. Saying someone is astronomically stupid, saying someone is gargantuanly fat are not funny statements. Fat does not become hilarious by growth into the gargantuan, nor is stupidity funny just because you say it achieves astronomical proportions.
The adverb, for my money the most suspect part of speech, is often used by writers attempting to inflate the language as a means of achieving humour. The following example will try to combine the sins of elevated language, useless adverbs, and the funny-punny name.
Georgio Pantaloon sat up to the table as close as his voluminous abdomen would allow. He addressed his wife floridly while dashingly raising the silver soup spoon to his flabby, lubbering lips. “Soup’s off, love. No crime. Just telling you,” he added simperingly.
My reaction to something like this is as Rachel Wyatt writes in “Visitation”: Why not the rack, oh Lord! Why not a plague of frogs!
The voice in third-person short fiction (humour included) should be heavily influenced by the point-of-view character it represents. In first-person fiction, it simply is that person. Characters in humour are often eccentric. The form of their eccentricity may be an odd rhetorical style, an intriguing turn of phrase, a penchant for exaggeration. Whatever it is, it is correct for this eccentricity to enter and guide the voice of the story. It is right because it originates not in the mind of the author, but in the mind of the character.
If instead we look at the other type of protagonist, the normal or ordinary person, why would that person have an odd, intriguing, or unique style of address? As pointed out in an earlier chapter, even neutral and distant forms of third-person narration still lean in the direction of the syntactical world of the point-of-view character. To try to get humour out of funny sayings when representing a character who isn’t funny (his or her situation is, but he or she isn’t) would be wrong. It would feel wrong, and therefore, would not be funny.
So, write in the voice of, and from the knowledge and culture of, the fictional character, as you would in any other kind of fiction, is the best advice.
♦♦♦ Politically Correct Humour
And now for a word about political correctness, which various people have represented as the death of humour, its strangulation at the source. This subject has run its course, but I bring it up here because of how well it illuminates a question of great importance to writers of humour. That is: who can be the butt of whose humour?
It is glib to stand behind Lenny Bruce and contend that humour must be free. Political correctness came about because groups in society were being damaged, ridiculed, and held back by disparaging stereotypes and jokes. Political correctness didn’t come about because these things occurred (they always had); it came about because the stereotyped groups decided not to take it anymore.
There are two kinds of political incorrectness. One is deliberate and the other allegedly innocent. Deliberate political incorrectness is synonymous with black humour. It goes in search of taboos, the things the society is most tender about and embarrassed by, and it flouts those taboos deliberately. Black humour is not nice; it is not meant to be. It is often cruel, the crueler the better. Bad taste is good. This is how we got Challenger jokes instantly after the blowing up of the space shuttle, Woody Allen jokes after he married his daughter by adoption, dumb blond jokes in the age of feminism, and so on.
To detect black humour, just ask if it flouts a taboo. If it does, it is.
Why we like it is an interesting question. Some say that to laugh at death takes some of the fear of death away. But that doesn’t account for all our fondness for black humour, not by any means. It is funny for the same reason that you can always get a child of three to laugh by saying “pee pee.” The adult version is to laugh if a joke is unkind; if it flouts taboo.
There is different humour for different audiences, different venues, different times of day. Black humour used to be private humour (between friends, between people at work). Then it became late-night public humour. It is now moving out of those niches into the world at large, into prime time. The more liberal the society, the more quickly this movement happens.
The second kind of politically incorrect humour is the kind that proclaims itself innocent of the charge. The person behind it claims that he has honourable intentions, is being misunderstood, is the victim of society’s straight lacedness. (And I am using the pronoun he deliberately because the person who does this, in my experience, is always male.)
This is far different than black humour. The innocent one does not understand that he is flouting a taboo–he doesn’t understand the taboo.
We have all heard the innocent’s defences:
- I really like (Natives, women, Jews, and so on); that’s why I joke about them.
- I hear (Natives, women, Jews, and so on) making these jokes about themselves all the time.
- Some of my best friends are (Natives, Jews, women, and so on).
An understanding of this whole business of political correctness can be found in these statements of defence. The person who says these things assumes that friendship with or fondness for the people he jokes about entitles him to make the same jokes they do. Or he assumes that the fact that they joke about themselves entitles him to joke about them. And he’s wrong. He should remember that he can make fun of his mother, but probably wouldn’t stand for it if anyone else did.
In the age of PC, we are still entitled to make fun of ourselves, of our tribe, of our society—of any group, as long as we are part of it. If we make a claim to belong to a group and can’t back it up, the people who are in it will let us know.
Here’s an example of what I’ll call a chain of belongingness: the groups to which I belong and therefore can write humour about. I am a man. Okay. I am a writer. Okay. I am a farm boy. Okay (though if I were to start making fun of farmers, I would probably be told that I’m not a farmer anymore). I am an Albertan. Okay. I am a Canadian. Okay (unless I use my nationality as an excuse to make fun of subgroups of Canadians, such as Maritimers and Natives, to which I do not belong).
My collection of short stories, Working Without A Laugh Track, is about sex and health in the late-twentieth century. It pokes fun at the highly medical approach my generation of adults took to conception, the prevention of conception, reproduction, and to the end of reproductive capacity. These were all things that my parents’ generation thought about very little, but that my generation thought about a lot. The group to which I was claiming membership when I satirized these things was the group of men and women who shared the experience.
Why exactly can we make fun of ourselves and our groups? Because there is an assumption of fondness, fairness, and sharing the sting of the joke. If you are part of what you satirize, you will likely be warmer and less cynical. If your humour happens to be that of self-loathing, expect your humour to be criticized; expect it to fail.
When I wrote my book Teeth, I was in one sense out of the group I was satirizing, because I am not a professional hockey player. But because I have always loved to play hockey and watch it, I could claim membership in the greater group that is obsessed with hockey. At the same time, that doesn’t stop me from noticing many things about professional hockey, or even the game of hockey, that are excessive and verge on insane. If I had hated hockey, never watched it, and tried to satirize it, the whole venture would have failed—because I would have got it wrong. It is hard to satirize that which you do not know, inside and out.
The other group you can innocently satirize is the powerful. Here, you don’t have to belong. In fact, if you do belong, it doesn’t work. If you think of how vicious comedians and columnists are on TV and on radio, and wonder how they get away with it, the usual answer is that they are picking on the powerful. People make the joke that the only thing left to joke about is white heterosexual males, and there is some truth to that. It is somewhat true because that group still is, statistically, an advantaged group in our society. Big business, government officials, the mega-rich, the big unions, rich athletes, rich athletes’ agents, owners of sports franchises, movie stars—who says we’re badly restricted in our comedic opportunities in the age of political correctness?
My belief is that you can still make fun of most of the people you always could make fun of. You can kick people when they’re up, never when they’re down. What really is wrong with that as a rule?
♦♦♦ Your Process
- Imagine two eccentric fictional protagonists. Write a paragraph about each one just to make sure that you know them well.
- Imagine two normal fictional protagonists. Write a paragraph about each one, again so that you demonstrate your knowledge of them.
- Imagine a situation for each eccentric protagonist in which he or she would be rendered a misfit.
- Imagine a situation for each normal protagonist that would turn him or her into a misfit (for example, the honest, respected employee who is stuck with a charge of theft).
- Choose the character and situation that seems most promising to you and write a monologue from that character’s point of view (first-person or third-person).