by Addison and Ben

• We will meet during reading period (yay) + you’re allowed to have missed two humor challenges 

Text presentations 

John:

• Taking a really, not funny narrative and making it funny for the reader, lots of line jokes
  • Rapid truthing (helps to defuse the dramatic and make it funny) 
• make stabbing friendly and polite (Caesar) 
  • reframing of very critical and obvious part of the traditional narrative of Caesar
  • retelling of an existing narrative in general can be funny (and a fun in class assignment woo)
• The meaning of a narrative really lies in how it’s told, you can tell the same story very differently for like #differentvibes

Kiran: 

• Amelia Bedelia – using characters that we are already familiar with to come up with a new narrative and to derive some of the humor from the reliability of the character 
• What are the necessary ingredients of a narrative
  • Ex: How can we take “Wikihow to Hit on an East Asian Woman in America” and distill a story (arc) out of it 
    • With this list, the climax of the story arc seems to be implied.
• Does a resolution have to be necessary for a comedy piece?
  • Perhaps if it is surprising in some sort of fresh and fun way, predictability is no fun.

Lekha:

• What are important parts of comedic tone, especially when telling personal, non-fiction stories. MEMOIR
  • Character and voice 
  • Diversion/switch-up 
  • Things you thought as a child that are completely unrealistic and show how you’ve #grown and developed as a person
  • Lots of tangents, “brain vomit” feel that goes beyond just plot points 
• Talking in pairs, considering hypothetical memories 
• Common theme of people wanting to start their memoirs with a subversion
• How do you know when rambling has gone too much?
  • Hard to get a sense of what the piece is about by skimming 
  • Might be unsettling or difficult to get into to readers that aren’t already invested
    • but u gotta be endearing and funny, still tangentially relevant (secret word stuff is completely irrelevant)
• P.I.T. (Place, Intro, Tone) – how do you want to set the stage and balance between the different elements of the piece. Creating room for comedic voice while also not rambling too much to make the piece inaccessible 
• establishing place grounds the reader, helps give a perspective on setting

Dialogue in Narratives:

What does it do that it couldn’t do just descriptively? 

• Adds characterization 
• The person in dialogue is not the same as the narrator (forge a second character) 
• Dialogue makes for a more streamlined experience; reader has to do less imagining 
• Other voices makes humor more funny because characters can be compared 

Descriptive sections (not dialogue):

• Add context that wouldn’t sound realistic if in dialogue (e.g. I’m high right now…)
• Thwarts expectation (dialogue is what she’s doing and description is what she’s thinking)

How to write good dialogue: 

• Exist in a different tone than description / narration 
• Establish characters
• Make dialogue true to the character if they are real people
• Allows you to repeat funny words to heighten tension/comedic effect/theatricality 
• Quite short sentences

Philosophy:

• Almond: The jokes that stay are the ones that make his characters face themselves.
• Turn towards the truth of jokes (though this is just one tactic) 
• Saunders: Something is funny because it’s true, and it reaches a level of truth that exceeds our normal standards
• Normal way of saying something OR more truthful way of saying something that leads to surprise (the second is comedy)
• The words “fried chicken” hide some basic truth about what the actual item is
  • Ie the method in which it is made 
  • This is a matter of velocity
• “Rapid truthing” 
  • In Persuasion Nation: 
    • Little exposition, lots of description, ends at solid point
    • Voice over (thesis)
    • What If? Question

Lawson: 

• “Humor dwells in the awkward, shameful places we prefer not to dwell” – Almond 
• Confronts the truth bluntly at points and sometimes in more cheeky ways 
• Sometimes humor in a single line in an entire paragraph 
• structurally: pretty funny, not funny, then funny again at the end
  • Even in not funny section, there are little glimpses of humor 
• When she’s not confronting the truth, she is purposefully turning away from the truth

List

• Rule of threes (two normal, one funny)
• Escalate and de-escalate
• Break the pattern
• Eventually, you’re just making a joke off of the thing from before
• Lists are about building and breaking tension

Micro-jokes in readings

• Observing ridiculousness with sober lens
• Form conflicts with story they’re telling

Dear Committee Members Structure of Sentences 

1. Establish form and relationships
   1. “I’m writing to…” and says he was a Creative Writing student 
2. Characterization of student (the grade)
   1. Establish caliber of student through grade
   2. Use specific example to mirror writing style of student (run-on sentence recount of short story is similar to the messy writing expected of this mediocre student) 
   3. Example should be an immediate escalation 
3. Critique to Praise (Spin facts from #2 into a positive about the student)

• Rigid form broken by subject of form
• High praise
• (incongruity between praise and truth)
• Recast concerning trait as praise  

Language challenge

Metonymy in language challenge

• TikTok
  • Sex jokes vs. other app relations
  • Quick allusion vs. other jokes (how can it sound good in the flow)
• First crush
  • The XXX (slight connection) with pithy, rogue, well-known phrases 
  • Implied backstory via label is good
  • Actual descriptor

Text Presentations

Lil

Exercise: groups work together to construct a character and place them into situation from piece

Characters:

• “Laz” skinny blonde hipster who drinks THC smoothies to make himself chill when he’s actually chronically anxious
• “Tyler” 12 year old boy, plays Rocket League, skateboard, BEATZ, someone’s first crush, growing away from his mom, not good at school, but not sure if it’s not 
• “Jeb” monk that couldn’t stay celibate, super erection condition, drives the Oscar Meyer weinermobile
• “Jared” works at Subway but he’s not THE Jared From Subway

How does their character connect to the story

• Different groups imagined different characters acting differently
  • ACTIVITY: how would the character behave in the Sedaris poop piece?
  • ACTIVITY: CHARACTER SWAP! How would someone else’s character behave in the Sedaris poop piece?

Addison

Compare and contrast Riverboat vs. Clif Bar piece

ACTIVITY: Which had stronger sense of character

• Riverboat: just a man locked into life on the water, with allusions to sexuality
• Clif Bar: man tries to eat Clif Bars every day until the CEO of Clif Bar adopts him as his son
  • Everyone except Kiran agreed that Riverboat has a stronger sense of character, has more subtle allusions to his personality, past, and habits, whereas Clif Bar is a lot more about the mission than the character behind it. Also the accent helps.
  • Kiran thinks Clif Bar because Riverboat Captain feels like a caricature.

ACTIVITY: How to make character stronger?

• Could we give him a why? (i.e. climber/athlete, no father figure, lost soul, etc)
• Traits vs. Actions
• How does form contribute to character stagnancy?

QUESTION: Riverboat captain might be better character, but does that necessarily mean funnier

Chesed

Cookie Monster/Patty articles

ACTIVITY: Describe line where character speaks incredibly in form or incredibly out of form

• Everyone focuses on Cookie Monster (stronger character specific voice)
• Easier to break from
• Cookie Monster already has a voice, vs. Patty doesn’t speak, so her voice must be imagined (“go up to Charlie Brown and punch him in the fucking eye”)

From John and Kiran!

• Flatness and Roundness can be used for comedic effect by contrasting them with each other
  • In a piece that beings Flat (Random Piece) you can take a turn that makes an aspect (perhaps a character) more round at one point, only to contrast it with a flat element, like another flat character (fleabag maybe?) or a flat interpretation of that character by the narration (Random Piece again)
• In parody, if we view adherence to the style of the form being parodied as a kind of flatness, you can build jokes based on contrast by allowing the roundness of the central character come out through the format. 
  • In the Saunders piece, this character shares a lot of internal thoughts and personal life details within a customer service letter, which adheres closely to the style of a letter like that. 
  • Where is the character speaking and where is the genre speaking?
    • There isn’t a hard line between genre and person
    • The piece becomes most interesting and fun when they bleed into each other

• You can also take a very round (and now the meaning of this word is getting stretched) subject matter and have it narrated by a character with a kind of flat perspective
  • In the Simon Rich Condom Piece, the high stakes, nerve wracking story (from Jordi’s perspective) of Jordi losing his virginity is told from a totally different, lower stakes, silly perspective. The condom usually doesn’t quite know what’s going on, and its fears are totally different.
  • Simplicity in this story also lends a sincerity and sweetness to the character of the condom, and to the story as a whole. Gives Jordi growing up an extra sentimental dimension
  • You can also learn details about another character as filtered through the perspective of a second. (I stay in wallet long long time). 

By Ava and Addison 🙂

• American humor vs other humors
  • American humor distinguished by not acknowledging joke
    • Not a distinctive trait anymore
• Objects are aspirational; comparing self to object
  • “You are not your fucking khakis”
• Character essays and the use of objects
  • People as characters can be merged with an object and become caricatures of themself or an identity
  • It’s funny because it’s true, people and personalities gravitate towards certain objects
  • Clothes carry cultural, political, class significance, and everyone got them
  • Introduce an object that two characters see differently (ex. Book of baby names in “How to Become a Writer”)
• How to get across who your character is
  • Have character be assertive/pushy (use of second person, commands)
  • Huge generalizations, especially if generalization is based on nothing
  • Make it clear how character views themself; “I” statements
  • Set a clear goal/intention
  • Make the narrator have an outburst or a moment of high emotion/response, build a situation that reveals them to the audience
• Making sad things funny
  • Velocity matters
  • Giving readers permission to laugh
  • Not dwelling upon the sad stuff, or at least having an oblique angle towards it
  • Give people moments of relief
• Strong characters maximize differences and project them theatrically
  • Give a character a difference, and put them in situations that reveal and emphasize said difference
    • Essentially show don’t tell, make the character do something funny
  • Give character limited choices

Punctuation Lesson: 

• How to make an em dash (it is long,)
• No spaces on either side of it 
• Hyphen -, en dash – , em dash —
• Option, shift, hyphen = the magic recipe 
• You need the long one and there is no space on either side 
• For humor writing in particular benefits from a large punctuation vocabulary so that it has a specific feel and sound 

Mid-semester Feedback:

• Things to add to the class:
• More pitching?
• There will be opportunities for revisions
• Really enjoyed the Ben, Rebecca, Isabella visit 
• Feedback on the humor challenges is not possible… please stop trying to overwork your professors, why do you want more work for yourself and others?
• Writing other people’s pitches for essays 
• Group writing projects?
• Lessons on crafting on the line level (making funny one-liners) 
• More or less of:
• Pitch Wednesdays 
• The humor writing toolbox is a set of rules that are constantly broken… is there a constitution that isn’t malleable 
• The strong arm of the law bends towards justice. 

Ava’s text presentation: 

How can we ridicule the same subject from two different angles?

Text 1: “Welcome to BodyMind”

1. Ridicule techniques: 
   1. Non-self-aware narrator
   2. Parody of Amazon as a whole and the dystopian nature 

Text 2: “Jeff Bezos’s Same-Day”

1. Ridicule techniques: 
   1. More personal–focused on making fun of Jeff Bezos and his troupes (ex. Puffy vests)
   2. More cutting? Mapping Amazon troupes onto charity troupes (save day giving pledge v same day delivery) 

Ridiculing Yale libraries exercise

• Naked run v. the security guard checking bag 
• Looking mysterious at Haas v. dissociating in Haas library
  • Ridiculing the narrator (+ the people of Haas) v. ridiculing the library 
• Ridiculing the nonsense of the library (can’t study because everyone is misusing the library)

Andrew: 

Ridicule techniques: 

1. Talk about sports more
2. Talk about sports more in humor 
3. Headlines can front the joke – Onion style to have the headline carry the joke 
   1. In this case, you kinda only get a paragraph to work with, hard to carry the piece on for a while when you make the headline punchiest 
4. Compare via an aspect (like gas) that has no relation to the think you’re talking about (sports)
5. Ridicule a very recognizable trope (eating sandwiches awkwardly) 
6. Assume logic that what you are talking about is very important 
   1. Basketball can influence gas prices 

Lizzie: 

“A Fantasy I had in 7th Grade”

1. Strongest punch up top, quick tone shift (ex. Congrats… engaged in warfare) 
2. Title goes totally against the content of the piece, gives it a great extra punch 
3. Juxtaposition of high and low (warfare v. middle schoolers) 
   1. Corollary—middle schoolers love videogames
4. Short and sweet? Maybe this piece could have gone on a bit longer 
5. What is the object of ridicule? Indoctrination? Why the tests even exist? The narrator? 
6. Come up with a situation in which you were the underdog and rearrange the world so that YOU are a winner
7. The peak of the essay is not the same as the best joke of the essay 
   1. Best joke is the funniest one liner 
   2. Peak is the climax of the long term joke of the piece as it evolves and builds, the “height of ridiculousness” 

from Lizzie and Chipi

“Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” —Vladimir Nabokov

Humor Challenge Ridicule Strategies
Defy expectations: if the form is about ridiculing a product, it is surprising to instead ridicule what the product is for.
By critiquing the character, you’re critiquing the product
Buying the product means taking on a personality
Use a ridiculous character to reveal the ridiculous quality of a thing/activity
Incongruity between hating your devilish children and performing as a cheery mom.
Solve a problem that doesn’t need to be solved
Wilful misinterpretation (e.g. graphite as pencil lead)
Talk about something ridiculous in a serious tone/ not acknowledging the ridiculousness

Satire v. Parody
Parody imposes a different set of rules to an established structure
Satire emphasizes a failure/how stupid something is
“Who is the Bastard?” said Phillippe from Clown School.
Satire is a takedown. Parody changes something
In parody, the game supersedes the message
Satire points out a general truth
Goofiness bumps towards parody
Serious subject bumps towards being satire
Clear target makes satire
Short boyfriend and button ending points ridicule at girlfriend, not boyfriend
To make a satire, you have to play a game (match some form), but also make it a lesson

• Successful paragraphs end with buttons that summarize the content and end with a witty joke 
• Bitterness robs a piece of humor, keeping a humorous/ lighthearted tone 
• Keeping a cheery tone with a depressing topic
  • Maintaining a conversational tone and directly talking to the reader 

Idea generator: take a whimsical creature/pop culture icon/character and relate their characteristics to modern, real world issues 

• Randomness is humorous if there are rooted in reality/ realism (example: “random” results of the research in the science paper is incongruous to how scientific research is supposed to provide clear correlations)
• Randomness isn’t funny if anything could replace the line (Someone in Cincinnati thinks about getting a ferret in the next month could be replaced with anything)

Instagram Parodies 

• The humor came from the first half, when there was a direct critique of something we’re familiar with (Instagram moral posturing, etc.) 
• Using actual facts from historical events (numbers, data, etc.) helps to show the narrator’s choice to lessen the stakes of a serious event through more conversational language.