On Comedy

There is something to be said about talent in the field of comedy, a personality that goes well with being funny. From the reading/watching documentaries about my favorite comedians (Eddie Izzard, Jon Stewart, Margaret Cho) the personality type that brings out stand up comedians is perseverance. It is not, in the end about being really funny (though I'm sure it helps). The ability to talk into the silence is what makes a good stand up comedian, and as I am currently writing a blog about writing and don't even have the guts to share my writing with my best friend, stand up is probably out for me. Not that I really wanted to do it.

The other kind of comedy you get is from writing. There are mediums to writing comedy and shows that come to mind almost at once for me: the straight up sitcom (Friends, How I Met Your Mother), the dramady (Castle, Psych), shows that are serious drama but have humorous moments and sarcastic comments (Sherlock, Doctor Who), novels that are humorous (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, David Sedaris pieces) and so many other forms that listing them would waste your time. So the question becomes, how in these contexts, do you create comedy. And do you want to include it (the answer is yes, always yes).

Comedy looks easy and is hard while drama looks hard and is easy. You can kill someone off in a dramatic, horrible fashion easily, but you can't just have someone walk into a room, slip on a banana peel and have people laugh. So the first thing I think about when attempting to write humorously is practice.

I am a big proponent of practice. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, brings up the point that most people who are considered to be geniuses in their fields are in fact, simply well practiced -- a lot practiced in fact. He goes into a magical number, and while its interesting, its not the major point, you can read the book if you want to know more. The point is that practice is very important. I don't think I had really grasped this until I took a class in logic and discovered that the only way to learn logic was to do logic problems, over and over again until something clicked. But then it started bleeding into other parts of my life. I realized that chemistry made more sense because I had practiced problems in it to the point where it was intuition that brought about the answer, I found that when I was saying my characters were "telling me" how the story went, it was because I have read and written for a long time, and my mind was following the path that stories go in, piecing back extraneous information from the first chapter to make it very important without me even realizing it.

Practice allows you to write without thinking about it, which in turn, allows you to write effortlessly, discovering the story as it comes out of you, and seems natural instead of forced. So, shouldn't practice help you fumble for the joke, the moment that will be the most funny? I don't see why not. Most people say when you start attempting humor, you should write in the voice of someone you admire who is funny. When you do this, you are starting to ingrain the flow of your humor, you are practicing being funny the way you want to be.

So practice, its important, but there are other factors involved, of course. These factors do depend more on genre then on anything else -- after all the joke in a sitcom is not the same as the joke in a dramady, and the joke written for TV can fall flat on the page without an actor to prop it up.

I suppose though that there is a common theme to comedy and that is taking something and expressing it in a new and unexpected way -- juxtaposing situations, or physical gags -- but always leading to some greater truth. Comedy gets to express truth through making you laugh, and I think in some ways, it makes the lesson stick better that way.

Now, if only I could write it. I'm just going to attempt witty at the moment. ;)