Humor Writing Is No Joke

In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 272.

I’ve heard people say that writing humor is particularly hard. Is it? I suspect that people who believe it to be particularly hard may be thinking about jokes rather than humor. Personally, I don’t know any jokes. I have a brother-in-law who can produce a joke on any topic, on demand, but five minutes after I have finished laughing at his punchlines, I’ve forgotten the setup and some of the context of what he said.  

Writing humor, I think, is very different. After my novel Dear Committee Members (Vintage, 2015) won the Thurber Prize for American Humor, I discovered that people sometimes expected me to be funny. Spoiler: I’m not. My brain doesn’t work that fast. I’m the person who thinks of an amusing comeback two days after it should have been said.

Jokes usually rely on wordplay or on a cleverly unexpected twist. (“I was addicted to the hokey pokey but then I turned myself around.”) Longer jokes (“a priest, a rabbi, and an imam walked into a bar…”) similarly toy with the listener’s expectations. These formulas make me think about volleyball: Set, and then spike.

Because humor writing is knitted into the fabric of a longer work, I think of it not as a mechanism or technique but as a perspective. Consider Patricia Lockwood’s loving but loopy depiction of her family in the memoir Priestdaddy (Riverhead, 2017). Or James McBride’s ragefully affectionate portrayal of a drunken church deacon in Deacon King Kong (Riverhead, 2020). Is the material in these works inherently funny? Or does the humor come from the authors’ outlook and from their treatment of that material?

I like to think of these and other humor writers—Annabelle Gurwitch, George Saunders, and David Sedaris—deploying their idiosyncratic perspectives as if fine-tuning the lens of a kaleidoscope, looking for just the right combination of colors, the mix of tenderness, angst, bewilderment, irony, satire, and bite that will breathe life into the material at hand. The style of each of these humor writers is a sort of thumbprint, an amalgam of the author’s personality and the needs of the story being told. 

Ultimately, any kind of writing is hard. But if you’re writing humor, I suggest letting go of the joke’s focus on timing and surprise and reversal. Instead, let yourself experiment with voice and mood and tone, with character and perspective. Try to look at an episode from different angles, to see its comic as well as its bewildering or difficult aspects, inviting emotions other than humor to infuse the whole. 

Here’s the good news: You don’t have to be a funny person with a backlog of jokes at the ready. You can be yourself, having fun with your own voice and approaching a writing project from a multitude of perspectives, including those that might cause you, and your readers, to laugh.

Julie Schumacher is the author of a dozen books, including the national best-selling Dear Committee trilogy. She is a Regents Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota.