Our topic for April is: How easy or difficult do you find including humour in your writing and/or have you ever incorporated a true life humorous event in your own life or the life of someone you know in a book you were writing?
This is a great topic.
I would love to say I inject humour into all my writing but that just isn’t so
because I find writing humour incredibly difficult. It isn’t that I don’t have
a sense of humour. I do but, as I tend to be a visual person, ie: I learn best
by seeing and doing, it follows that I find visual humour, such as slapstick
comedy, the funniest. That is not easy to write and if humour does find its way
into my writing, it’s more by accident than design.
Being funny, and humour
as a whole is subjective. I remember a movie from the early 80s called ‘The
Gods Must Be Crazy.’ Very briefly, a Kalahari bushman encounters civilization
and its stranger aspects. It was a low budget $2.5 million South African film
which netted about $20 million. I couldn’t stop laughing at it but my kids barely
cracked a grin.
So, what is humour? Like
the example above, what one person finds funny another won’t. It’s a bit like
beauty being in the eye of the beholder. Humour is defined in Webster’s as
having the quality of being amusing or comic. Wit, on the other hand, is
defined as having a natural aptitude for using words and ideas in a quick and
inventive way to create humour. Forms of wit include the zinging one-liners aka
Violet, the Dowager Duchess of Grantham in Downton Abbey. Other forms of humour
can be satirical, self-deprecating, surreal, or plays on words as this by John
Lynn: his legacy will become a pizza history.
But in every instance,
I come back to the slapstick comedy routines favoured by Victorian music hall
and vaudeville audiences. These I remember, not from personal experience
until the advent of the BBC TV series The Good Old Days, but from hearing my aunts
and uncles talk about them and sing songs when I was little. One of my father’s
favourite acts, Wilson, Keppel, and Betty, did a sand dance routine which still makes me laugh. You can check them out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sn83cCEpZV0
Before we had a TV in
the house, we listened to radio programs such as Hancock’s Half Hour, Round the
Horne, and Much Binding in the Marsh. Later there were TV programs with the
comedy duo of Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, Fawlty Towers and Monty Python. These
were all English programs but I Love Lucy and the Carol Burnett Show were
amongst my favourite classic comedy shows.
And then, of course,
there were Donald McGill’s saucy English seaside postcards of the 50s and 60s. They
were risqué humour at best but that didn’t prevent one of his postcards,
featuring a bookish man and an embarrassed pretty woman sitting under a tree,
with the caption: "Do you like Kipling?" / "I don't know, you
naughty boy, I've never kippled!", holds the world record for selling the
most copies, at over 6 million. (source: Wikipedia.) That was the upside. The
downside was a police raid on stores in Ryde, Isle of White, confiscating 5,000
of his postcards for indecency.
I love reading books
that make me laugh out loud. Elizabeth Dearl’s Diamondback and Stuart J. West’s
Zac and Zora series are recent reads that did exactly that. They are the
positive side of humour. The negative side of humour is all about deriding,
belittling, demeaning and ridiculing which are all aspects of bullying. Nothing
funny there.
I find it impossible to
write things that make me laugh. What I think I do manage from time to
time, is more wit than humour As for
including real-life situations in any of my stories, the closest is a scene in
my book Loving That Cowboy where Cameron Carter and his brother Mackenzie remember
a fistfight behind the barn. Their father comes across them and, rather than
try to stop them, he hauls them in front of their mother and insists they
finish their fight in front of her. We didn’t have a barn, but my two boys were
once in a similar situation. The chagrin they experienced was too good to waste
and it fit perfectly in that story.
Thanks to Skye Taylor for suggesting this topic. I hope you visit my
Round Robin blog partners and see what they have to say.
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blo
Diane Bator http://dbator.blogspot.ca/
Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspo
Dr. Bob Rich https://wp.me/p3Xihq-1Tb
Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
Anne Stenhouse http://annestenhousenovelist.w
Margaret Fieland http://margaretfieland.wordpre
A.J. Maguire http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com
Judith Copek http://lynx-sis.blogspot.com/
Rhobin L Courtright http://www.rhobinleecourtright
