When You Write Humor, It’s Okay to Tamper with the Truth
In The Deer on a Bycycle, Excursions into the Writing of Humor, Patrick McManus says, “Never write about real life humor.” Now that sounds pretty harsh when you’ve been told to draw on your own experiences for your writing. But it is damn hard to capture with words the hilarious events of your life. If you’ve ever told a story that got only a smile and had to follow it up with, “Well, I guess you had to be there, to appreciate it,” you know what he means.
Pat says, “Real-life humor depends upon hundreds, perhaps thousands of details that you can’t capture in writing …” For example, when I was a teenager, my best buddy, Nicky, once laughed so hard at me crawling out backwards from under a pile of corn shocks stored in his barn that he wet his pants. There’s no way I can do the story justice if I tell it just like it happened. To make it funny, I’d have to weave a good tale and embellish it–well maybe stretch it a little. Just recounting that my buddy peed his pants isn’t enough. Either I looked funny as hell or he was a hell of an audience. But the event itself was not the humor.
Pat says sometimes the story teller can process the event and come up with a version that is funnier than the event itself. His point is that the humor is really a product of the story teller’s art rather than the humor in the event itself.
I see a lot of attempts at humor that begin with, “This really happened, etc. “Most folks don’t care if it really happened. They want a good story. So jump right in with a good lead that hooks them—and don’t restrict yourself to the absolute truth. You’re not testifying under oath; you’re telling a story to make an audience laugh.
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Filed under: Insights & Opinions, Writing Technique