In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 273.
Ten years ago, when my father was dying, I was eleven hundred miles away, unable to travel because of a hurricane raging up the east coast. Airports were closed. One of my sisters was with him, doing her best to keep me informed.
I called her every hour with questions, and because she knew that I found it painful not to see him, she asked in a whisper, “Should I send you a picture?”
A picture of our dying father? Well, yes. Yes, please. Though I knew that a photo taken during the final hours of a very long life wouldn’t flatter anyone’s appearance, I asked her to send one, and she agreed.
Forty minutes later I texted to remind her. She said she’d already sent me the photo. Then: “Shit: I accidentally sent it to a different Julie.”
I think of that moment—what did the other Julie make of the photo of a dying stranger that showed up in her inbox?—when I think about writing humor. People sometimes imagine that humor writing relies on silly or upbeat raw material, but often, instead, it’s rooted in pain. Take Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood (Spiegel & Grau, 2016), for example, a hilarious memoir about apartheid. Or Alison Espach’s The Wedding People (Henry Holt, 2024), a hilarious novel about a suicide planned at a wedding. Or John Kenney’s Talk to Me (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2019), a hilarious portrait of a man who loses his job and his wife and his friends because he’s a selfish misogynist.
Comedy equals tragedy plus time, the saying goes. If I were to fall down the steps while holding a bowl of tomato soup and break my arm, I wouldn’t be laughing on my way to the clinic. But, looking back, arm securely wrapped in its cast, I’d probably feel the pull of a story and want to tell a friend about my tumble. And because I write fiction, I’d want to embellish, the tomato soup staining my clothes to make them seem blood-drenched. I’d compare myself to Stephen King’s Carrie at the prom.
Here’s an exercise that I sometimes assign to students: Make a quick list of personal failures or embarrassing moments. (As examples, I offer excerpts from my own catalogue of humiliations: being fired from my first job at an ice cream parlor because I was unable to produce a banana split; being accused, during a twentieth high school reunion—rightly or wrongly, I no longer know—of having once bitten a sophomore classmate on the nose, on a bus.) The students and I share items from our lists and talk about which might have the most potential, and then we write either fiction or nonfiction.
The point of the exercise is to demonstrate that once-painful (though not actively traumatic) moments in our lives can be great source material when writing humor.
I haven’t made use in fiction, yet, of that misdirected image of my dying father, but I keep the incident in one of my brain’s back pockets. My sister and I laugh whenever we think of it, while also feeling sad and embarrassed. That’s the type of raw material I look for when writing humor, as it relies not on cheery, uncomplicated emotion but on a muddle of unparseable feelings, which both writer and reader try to make sense of on the page.
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.
image credit: Megan O’Hanlon