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

Generate a humorous texture by:

• Overlapping systems of language – e.g. Produce and technology in “My BlackBerry is not Working”; sex and intellectualism in “The Whore of Mensa” (“I want a quick intellectual experience, and then I want the girl to leave”; “That’s so deep, baby.”)
• Creating incongruities in gravity – e.g. In “The Seagull Army,” the juxtaposition between Nal’s life “jump[ing] the rails” and him getting “an ‘avant’ haircut performed by Cousin Steve”; or the aggression suggested by Nal’s “ravaged head” after Cousin Steve “razors” his hair, juxtaposed with Nal’s emotionless response of “radical” (and also with the dispassionate, matter-of-fact narration).
• Being more or less specific than the reader expects to generate surprise – e.g. Examples of humorous specificity in “The Seagull Army,” include “Cousin Steve (rather than “his cousin” or even “his cousin Steve”), “airmailed” (rather than “sent” or “mailed”), and “$17.49 in postage.” “Examples of un-specificity include “Nevada, America” and “the United States desert.”

Keep the joke fresh by:

• Varying its logic throughout the piece, even if it is essentially the same joke – In “How Things Even Out,” we come to expect a two-part joke structure: 1) an assertion that X evens out, and 2) a ludicrously illogical illustration of how. Still, Handey manages to keep the joke fresh by varying that illogic, basing it on false equivalencies, tension and release, anti-jokes, inversions, puns, hypotheticals, &c. Since we never know how the joke will work, it continues to surprise us and make us laugh.
• Starting with a simple joke and making it more elaborate as the piece progresses – Presenting the joke simply at the outset is important for conveying the premise of your piece with immediacy and clarity. Once you’ve established this, you can create surprising twists on the joke by expanding its details. e.g “My BlackBerry is Not Working” moves from the simple pun in the title to “well you could try using a mouse to drag the blackberry to the trash, and after you’ve done that you might want to launch the blackberry from the desktop”; Handey’s “How things Even Out” breaks a rapid-fire sequence of jokes and takes a surprising comic turn with the ludicrous story about the bum who wins the Nobel Prize.
• Shifting the pattern from one section to the next – In “How Things Even Out” Handey inverts the joke halfway through by shifting the pattern to things we do expect to even out—coin flips, the afterlife—and disrupting that logic.

Spin an initial joke into a longer piece by:

• Staging the joke in a dramatic situation – Give the joke a chance to unfold, one punchline at a time, within a longer narrative.
• Creating a character – Put the joke in the mouth of a character (or characters) and use their personalities to carry its zany logic forward.
• Brainstorming – Generate lists of associated words that you might use in elaborating the initial joke (e.g. lists of fruit words and technology words to elaborate the initial pun in “My Blackberry is not Working!”)

Keep puns from being groaners by:

• Putting them in the mouths of characters – When characters are the mouthpiece, the puns are attributed to their personalities rather than to the author trying to make a joke.
• Not acknowledging the joke – The more it feels like you’re trying to make a joke; the more forced the pun will feel. Puns are typically funniest when they feel effortless. (The strained humor of Dad jokes is the opposite of effortless puns.)
• Increasing the velocity – Like most jokes, puns feel funniest when we don’t have time to anticipate them.
• Bringing together un-like things – The wider the incongruity, the more creative, surprising, and absurd it will seem. (e.g. Fruit and technology is more unexpected than sign language being “handy.”)
• Making them unexpected – The cleverer the linguistic overlap, the more comic surprise it contains.

What makes a piece funny

1. Subversion of expectations—creating a shared expectation and then breaking it
2. Shared experience or relatability—the audience recognizes a common experience or a specific cultural or linguistic norm in the joke
3. Mixing the sacred and the profane—an incongruity between the culturally high and culturally low.
4. Revealing an uncomfortable truth
5. Pain
6. The persona of the narrator (character humor)
7. Escalation
8. Subtlety or indirectness—stating the idea directly usually isn’t as funny
9. Challenging the norms of humor—you can’t surprise if the audience can anticipate where you’re going from the patterns in other jokes
10. Connecting dissimilar concepts—proposing a connection between incongruous things
11. Self-awareness—I’m unlikely to find you funny if I think I understand things about you that you don’t seem aware of. You can show your awareness of yourself through:
12. Self-deprecation—undermining one’s vanity makes one more relatable
13. Likability—often an effect of self-deprecation, though that isn’t its only source
14. Uncanniness—reflecting human truths back to us in decontextualized ways that foreground the messiness and degradation that are hidden by everyday life
15. Multifaceted perception—seeing an everyday thing from an unusual angle, or from several incongruous angles at the same time
16. Detachment from the object of ridicule—Henri Bergson: laughter requires a “temporary anesthesia of the heart.”
17. Miscommunication—an incongruity between what was intended and what was perceived
18. Surprise
19. Specificity—replace generalizations with specific things. Specificity is especially important for crafting funny:
20. Images—The more you can create a mental picture in the reader’s head, the more access you have to physical comedy techniques. Overlaying one image on another incongruous one—in a simile, for example—is also a common comic device.
21. Thwarting the audience’s expectation of sense or clarity—Starting a sentence earnestly and ending with “BLAMMO!” Kant: “Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.”

Establish an incongruity between

1. Style and subject (aka manner and matter)– Using slangy profanity to describe seasonal decorating.
2. A modifier and the thing it modifies – “mutant fucking squash,” “freaky-assed harvest.”
3. Language registers– “Welcome to autumn (high), fuckheads (low),” “Avian (high) ass (low)”
4. Character & subject– Swearing bro gushes about decorative gourds (also an incongruity in our gender expectations)
5. Relative importance – A low gravity subject treated as if it’s high gravity, or vice-versa
6. Sound and meaning– Assonance and alliteration make “wicker fucker” and “avian ass” sonically pleasing, which is in tension with the aggressively profane content.
7. Where the sentence starts—“like a crisp October breeze just blew through”—and where it ends—“and fucked that shit up.”
8. Images – “Salamis in an Italian Deli” as a metaphor for gourds decorating one’s house
9. Realms – “get his avian ass (physical) bitch-slapped all the way back to summer (temporal)”

 

We will use this site every week—often more than once. It easily accessed through Canvas, but you may also want to bookmark it. It will serve several significant roles in our course:

1. It contains the forums where you will post your weekly humor challenges. You will also post daily language challenges here during the weeks of 1/23 and 4/3, and you’ll each take turns posting a week of topical jokes during the term. To post, click the forum title in the right sidebar and locate the appropriate thread for that day’s challenge. To guard against lost work, you may want to type each response in a separate document before copying and pasting it into the assigned forum.

2. It is where we will catalogue our ever-expanding Humor Writing Toolbox—a summary of the humor writing moves, principles, and strategies that emerge during class discussion. Starting in the second week, two students per class will be assigned to take these notes and post them within 24 hours. Humor Writing Toolbox entries should be posted here, in the blog section of the site, by highlighting “+ New” at the top of the page and selecting “Post.”

3. It houses the ENGL 429 Hall of Fame, which gathers model essays from previous semesters.

4. It contains published work by alumni of the course, which you will read for class on 2/15.

5. It contains a list of online humor publications, which you can read for your pleasure and use to find pieces for the four classes this semester in which you all will choose texts to assign and teach—which I call “Student Text Presentations.” There are also links to the guidelines for submitting pieces to these publications, which I highly encourage.

PS. Since we’ll be posting regularly in the forums, you should definitely upload a cool avatar for yourself by highlighting your name in the upper right corner of the page and selecting “Edit My Profile.”