On Comedy · 11:48am Jan 11th, 2015
I like writing comedy. It's how I got an appreciation of the written word (through Terry Pratchett) and it's almost my default setting for writing. But I've never actually thought about it properly or developed a theory for it, so let's take this opportunity to put my perspective into words.
I'm going to use two examples throughout; Yours Truly as a story that has comedy in it, but is about something else, and Do Not Serve These Ponies, which is a comedy throughout. Gonna get pretty blood-and-gutsy with the self analysis here so if you don't like seeing how the sausage is made this one isn't for you.
Comedy is about tension and release. This means it, more than anything, is incredibly subject to pacing. In Yours Truly, the jokes were placed at or right after the moments of highest tension to help the reader relax a bit before settling back in. I think this was a huge success and contributed to the overall pacing structure of the piece - slow buildup to emotional peaks, followed by resolution and release. Without the jokes I think the story wouldn't be half as good; the audience would fatigue much quicker and there wouldn't be those important emotional reset points.
Do Not Serve These Ponies was meant to be a comedy throughout, so I took a very different approach. The basic structure of the story was rampant escalation - there were no breaks or breathers, things just kept getting bigger and bigger. The comedy there was fed by the huge uncertainty. If I ended chapter 2 with Lyra going to jail then, bam, the entire story falls flat even if she gets out immediately afterwards. The tension from those first two chapters would be dispelled and resolved. Because I left it on an ambiguous note the next escalation feels more severe. Everyone reading knows consequences are coming and their expectation is constantly subverted by the shift upwards.
With both of these the theme is the same: Keep the reader off balance! When the reader becomes comfortable reading a story they're not laughing. A comedy needs to be an unsteady, unpredictable thing. It's almost the same as horror in that way. A really good example of this is Over The Garden wall, a recent and excellent animation (look it up). The genius of that show is that it has this layer of terrifying menace laying over the top of everything; you're constantly wondering if this scene is going to end in a horrifying axe murder or a tea party.
This is all different from jokes, which I define as individual, discrete funny things. Anyone can do jokes, you just have to be reasonably clever. My general approach to doing jokes is to write using my absolute first thought without any attempt to structure or second guess myself. It's tricky to get the hang of but I used a message board game to master the technique - I was playing a character who was an idiot, and whenever anyone said anything I blurted out my reply as quickly as I could and refused to backspace it even if it was terrible. It really helps if you're able to switch mentally between one character who's doing that and a straight man personality. Most of DNS jokes were written like that; flipping on and off my idiot switch like a malevolent five year old who has just learned that daddy has a headache.
The other technique I use is elaboration. The basic methodology of this is to write something, then squint at it angrily for a few seconds and then write something funny instead. This often involves elaborating on the initial concept - exploring it a bit, adding a hypothetical or a comparison. Take an ordinary turn of phrase and just go a little bit further. Nails on a chalkboard? Boring! You lose author points for even writing that! Instead, how about,
"Imagine a soprano opera singer was taking her cat for a walk. Being somewhat confused about the nature of cats, she had affixed a leash to the creature. Now, like any self respecting hypothetical cat, this cat needed to make a show of force to deter further humiliations. This was why it had decided to sink each of its claws into the soprano's legs - digging one particularly nasty talon into the nerve cluster just behind the left kneecap.
Now, picture in your mind's ear the scream of the cat and the wail of the soprano as they act out this primordial conflict. Imagine the cat being kicked free of the leg, whereupon it whirls through the air until its flight is cut short by a head-on collision with a nearby blackboard. In this scenario, the blackboard is covered in glue - maybe a school project went terribly wrong - and so the cat finds itself clinging onto it, hissing and scratching, claws tearing up and down the screeching surface, while a wounded soprano wails in agony and tries to frantically dial 911 (who respond immediately by turning on their siren).
This is what Martin thought of Jessica's violin playing. Of course, he was too polite to say anything like that, so instead he just smiled and said "Bravo," a few times."
That's my understanding of comedy in writing! Obviously any verbal medium is very different, but in writing you have much more limited tools to control peoples' attention (and gosh its good to have mine written out formally). So what do you think? When you want to tell jokes through the medium of text what techniques do you use?
I've written stories that I've tagged as comedy and which are hopefully funny, but I don't think I ever really set out to write comedy. I think comedy is in some way incidental to me, much more so than any other genre I write. What I do with all my stories - comedy or not - is to write some kind of absurdity or weird idea that I want to explore, and sometimes absurdity simply breeds comedy. The other thing it frequently breeds is horror.
Absurdity is usually either comical or disturbing, and sometimes both.
With genres other than horror and comedy, such as adventure and romance, the element of absurdity is often less defining. It's still there, there's always something unexpected or twisted at the heart of my stories, but only with comedy and to a lesser degree horror is the whole story born out of the desire to explore something utterly absurd.
Oh and, I felt the second paragraph killed your cat-soprano example. The first paragraph was perfect, an amusingly vivid image, but then you did the classic mistake of taking it too far and it got tired and lost its spark. And then you kept going and it just became sad. At least to me.
2715363 Its so strange to me how that doesn't work for everyone! In my mind everything follows naturally but it doesn't receive the response I want. I guess that means I have to learn how to generalise my own perspective better. Brevity is the essential characteristic of wit and all that.
Incidentally, the pacing thing is something that I feel you haven't got the hang of in your stories. When you're writing horror your complete lack of laugh breaks is something that contributes to a deeply exhausting and oppressive mood, which was why I liked Fillystata so much. But when you're writing action adventure it makes your story feel joyless and wearying. I feel like that's almost what you're going for in Uniformity, like a character study of the miserable Bon Bon, and I'm enjoying it a lot from that perspective, but it's in the back of my head that it might be a blind spot rather than an intentional effect.
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I'm a very introspective person, and I personally enjoy the sort of heavy feel of oppression, which I'm certain reflects in many of my stories. Not the blatantly light-hearted and silly ones like "As Celestia is my Witness", but all my longer, more serious stories certainly seek to evoke a deeper and sort of oppressive mood.
I absolutely try to keep them from descending into hopeless nihilistic trudges through humorless and lightless swamps of total despair. Even if it's some kind of arch-Lovecraftian horror where true hope cannot exist, I still firmly believe there must exist a certain charm and wonder.
Uniformity is meant to be introspective, oppressive at times too, but in the end it's also a story about Lyra, and Lyra is the mostest light-hearted pony there is. A story about Lyra is a complete and utter failure if it's not a little charming and light-hearted, no matter what else it is.
I don't always feel like I bring out Lyra's charm enough in Uniformity, especially in later chapters, and perhaps the story has changed or even lost some of its original focus and intent a bit (the danger of publishing a chapter at a time, and a mistake certainly). But aside from that, I don't think it's too far from how it's meant to be.
To some degree I think it's a matter of taste, and also about what you expect from the story, but I'll readily admit that I can get better at bringing out the charming and the light-hearted, even amidst the oppression.