Are you naturally a funny person? If so, consider yourself lucky. Humor adds more than you realize in your writing. No one likes boring. Humor can make a mundane event in your book a hilarious moment and entertain the reader while providing the necessary background for the storyline.
Probably no one was better at this than Mark Twain. Twain was by all financial accounting a failed writer but he delighted in making a splash on the talk circuit. Twain was the George Carlin of his time. In fact, Carlin was awarded the Mark Twain Award in 2008. Twain’s ‘stand-up comedy’ made him famous, and sold his books. Have you noticed how entertaining people like Stephen King are in interviews? A natural or practiced sense of humor is key to making people laugh.
What’s the Secret?
Humor must occur naturally in your book. Do your characters have a sense of humor? In The Organized Crime and Corruption series, Jason Foster has a dry, cutting sense of humor that irritates Horace Jackson and Foster knows it. So do the other characters, but Jackson can’t let Foster’s comments go without a response. A simple stop for coffee on a road trip turns into a funny scene as they go after each other like children, and another character, Samantha Ross, rips into both of them for their petty albeit comical behavior.
How do you plan such an event? You don’t, really. It just happens. How does any argument happen? You have to have a sense of timing for when it’s appropriate. How do you inject humor within a morgue scene when a headless corpse is pulled from the Chicago River? You will have to read my books to find out, but I’ll give you a hint: Don’t overplay it. Subtle comments at the right time are golden. A series of silly one-liners by the medical examiner would come off as inappropriate.
Don’t Force It
A good one-liner comes when it’s not expected. A witticism from an unexpected source is funny. A character that is always saying sarcastically dumb things isn’t going to fly with the reader. You don’t need to have a joke jammed onto every page or add a section purely to spin a joke. Also, never be crude thinking it will come off as funny. Bad language at inappropriate times isn’t funny; it’s bad language at an inappropriate time. If you’re trying to make the character a jerk, that could be a method, but don’t pretend it’s humor.
Material
Where do you get the humor for your book? Life. I recall a subtle comment my stoic grandfather once said about a family situation that caught everyone off guard. It was all I could do not to laugh out loud as the room went silent. Humor is all around us. You have to recognize it as the opportunity arises in your writing.
I inherited a dry sense of humor and love nothing more than saying things that stop people in their tracks and cause them to think. I was even hired once for a job because I was funny. We call it a ‘sense of humor’ for a reason. Either you can sense it, or you can’t.
Please feel free to comment on the series of posts I’ve provided. My experience is what it is. If you have something to add that will help other writers, I greatly encourage all feedback.