So You Want to Be Funny

Beyond the Margins gives writers a primer on humor writing.

From the piece...


Magical Element #1: Absurdity

From Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" and Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal"(admittedly more disturbing than funny) to Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and Jasper Fforde's "Thursday Next" series, absurdity has gotten more readers laughing than all the other comic elements put together.

But how exactly do you make something absurd? And how do you work it into your own writing?
First, let your imagination—and your fingers—fly. Turn off the editor. Turn off the physicist, biologist, chemist and sociologist. Then let your brain dance with the impossible. Most of what will come out will be garbage. But it will be entertaining garbage.

Second, and this is the more important part, take those flights of fancy and weave them together with the most mundane details you can imagine. An alien race coming to destroy the Earth? Interesting. An alien race coming to destroy Earth in order to build a hyperspace bypass? Absurd. Literary characters escaping from their books and running rampant through modern England? Fantastical. Hamlet running away from his own play to find out what people in the real world think of him? Absurd.