Writing Humour

[BellaLestrange87]

When you're writing a humour fic (whether a parody or just regular humour), there's a fine line to walk between something that is funny and things that are ridiculously silly and unenjoyable. If your fic has too much of the second category, it will be hard to enjoy.

 

How do you manage that balance?

[banshee]

I think humor has to be relateable for it to go over well. The times that I've seen humor fail in stories are when it's outrageous to the point that it wouldn't conceivably happen.

 

Or, when it's just too much. Even in a story that's primarily humor there needs to be a balance of not funny things for the funny ones to really work. When the humor consumes the story to the point that it's witty dialogue and crazy action after crazy action without any context it's hard for the reader to follow and it stops being funny.

[Deeds]

Humor is my base for a majority of my stories. What you think is too much I think is not enough. I have written stories that are anywhere from 1,000 - 5,000 words where it's all humor. I'm talking outrageous, laugh out loud funny. Banshee is right. It has to be relatable. I try to ground my story with one thing. It could be a cooking mishap. I start from the basics and make it grow from there. I think the hardest humor to write is drunk humor because that can go every which way. I find if I'm not laughing myself as I write the story it's not funny anymore or it's not funny at all. What's the point of writing humor if you can't make yourself laugh too?

[Stella Blue]

As someone who's written a fair bit of humour, from just quirky, mild humour to outright absurd parodies, I think the most important thing to keep in mind when you're writing it is why you want a scene/story to be funny. Is it because you're writing a hilarious character? Is it because you're satirizing a character or events or fanfiction tropes? For example, the type of humour I use to write Fred and George Weasley is vastly different from what I use to write Gilderoy Lockhart which is very different from writing a silly romp through Barty Crouch Jr's adventures in quiche-baking. (All things I have actually written.) My parodies are generally soooo over the top, full of things that could never happen, but I think what grounds them is there's some sense of self-awareness that it is over the top.

 

And I agree with previous posters - having it be relatable is key.

 

On ‎4‎/‎21‎/‎2017 at 5:03 AM, Deeds said:

I find if I'm not laughing myself as I write the story it's not funny anymore or it's not funny at all. What's the point of writing humor if you can't make yourself laugh too?

YES. Agreed.

As you write, you should be sitting at your computer cackling to yourself and scaring away your cat. That's how you know you succeeded.

[lebensmude]

I've written quite a bit of humour myself, I try to insert it into every story I write because it's my specialty (which sounds cocky but I don't mean it to). I 100% agree that it has to be something relateable, and it helps if it's along the lines of funny that people would laugh at today. I also think it really helps if it's realistic, something that you can imagine happening to you or to a friend if you were in that situation. And I also agree that if you're not laughing while you write it, or at least mildly amused, then your reader probably won't be either because the way that you're feeling doesn't translate to the tone of your writing (and I've learned this the hard way).

And I just want to add this even though it's not exactly that can be changed as it comes down to personality, but if you're good at making people laugh in real life, then chances are that you're very good at making your reader laugh while they're reading your story.