Let's Get Critical

I have a problem with stupid things - and, sadly, I'm talking about the fun kind today. You know what I mean, those books, movies, TV shows or random internet sketches that appeal to the absolute basest sources of humour and make your inner five-year-old guffaw so loudly you can't help joining in. 

I have a problem with them. Several problems. Problems I will grumble about to anyone within hearing range, prompting several rolled eyes and quiet insinuations that I'm being too picky / too uptight / too politically correct and should just turn my brain off and enjoy the stupid for stupid's sake.

See, I can't turn off my brain. And, now that I think about it, I don't want to.

Humour is one of the most subjective and slippery responses to stimuli that the human body produces, like that slightly undercooked pancake sat atop the head of the rabbit in that picture your grandmother has sent you four times in the last month because she thinks that's the sort of thing young people these days find hilarious. Everyone's idea of humour depends on innumerable varying factors, personal and cultural and a thousand things in between, and the sheer breadth of the genre defies any real objective statements.

However, that does not mean we cannot think critically about things that move under the banner of humour, and consider the responses it seeks to ellicit, how it seeks to generate them, and what exactly it wants us to be laughing at.

One of the jobs I've taken on alongside my degree involves reviewing drama - either in CD form, or in live performance, as was the case with Dickens Abridged here. My own distaste for Dickens notwitstanding, I was a little leery of my first live review having to hinge on my understanding of something as subjective as whether or not the jokes hit home. After all, I could say what I liked about the staging, lighting and production value, but if I did not laugh then I was missing out on an enormous part of the play's purpose, and my review, to my mind, would fall short.

Luckily for me, Dickens Abridged scored enough hits on the treacherous spinning wheel of my funny-o-meter that the anxiety never came to fruition, and I was left with the much less challenging task of trying to decipher the comments I had written in pitch blackness with one eye still on the stage. 

If I had turned off my brain and tried to enjoy the humour without any critical thought, I could probably still have written that review. Heck, I might even have given it a full five-star rating, without the nasty, spindly voice of criticism sat on my shoulder, clutching a pen in one hand and cutting its teeth on the theatre guide with the other. On that logic, I might also have been able to sit down with my friends and watch the very worst of 90s daytime sitcoms without the urge to spit verbal bile at the screen every time the canned laughter starts up.

But what's the point of a brain if we have to turn it off? And, surely, any humour that you have to go against your instinct to enjoy is not humour you should have to make yourself watch. Life is too short, and comedy too diverse, to have to lower your expectations and waste your time on something that isn't making you laugh. 

Because I had that little voice on my shoulder, I had a much better time. No, I wasn't laughing as often as I might have been, but I was thinking, I was engaging with the material, realising why one joke worked while another did not, and forming a much more informed and comprehensive opinion as a result. After all, just because I didn't think a joke was funny didn't mean I couldn't appreciate why it would be, or why it was there.

Don't reject that nasty little voice, everyone. Don't tell yourself that you're having a worse time just because you're the only one in the theatre squinting at the stage rather than rolling in the aisles. Embrace that critical voice. Offer it some of your popcorn. Invite it to think harder about why that particular joke makes it want to tunnel back through your skull in embarrassment.

Thinking and laughing are not mutually exclusive. Do both. Trust me.

~ Charley R

Let There Be Laughter

"It began on a Sunday, when a rotten oyster entered into a violent disagreement with some part of my father’s digestive tract."

Thus opens my 2012 NaNoWriMo novel, Ikarus; the story of one young recluse's attempts to unravel an ever-darkening conspiracy in a city on the verge of anarchy. I've been having a delightful time dissecting, diverting and making a wonderful mess of the interweaving strands in the narrative, pulling them all together and sending them all shooting off in different directions to keep the reader guessing. The stakes are very real, and very high, for all the characters involved. And not everybody is telling everything they know.

What better place to open it than with a declaration of the evils of seafood?

Comedy is wonderful stuff. Shakespeare knew it, as did Oscar Wilde, Alexandre Dumas, and a thousand and one other iconic authors. Today, authors like Terry Pratchett and Jasper Fforde are renown for their skill with parody and the comic. 

Why? Because, to me at least, it's one of the best indicators of what makes a good book.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold your flaming clouds, trumpets and biscuits of wrath for a moment. I'm not saying that books geared specifically towards comedy are the best sort - far from it. What I mean is that, because comedy is a theme that can be used and exploited in so many different ways, its inclusion is so easy and has so much potential that its use can really enhance a book.

Not all books, seemingly, have much of a place for comedy. My favourite series this year, George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, is a highly political, very bloody, and at times downright horrifying series. But despite - and, arguably, because of - this, the comic moments are really important. I doubt I'd have survived the events of A Storm of Swords without the occasional sarcastic remark from Tyrion Lannister to cheer me up. 

Very dark books, in particular, can often benefit from the humanity that dashes of humour can bring - it'll certainly help to keep the readers from calling the priest to exorcise the thing because of the psychological damage it's doing them. But genres can also benefit from the counterpoint, because humour has a fairly universal appeal. Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson books first got my attention because I liked the clever use of humour, rather than the premise (which didn't, surprisingly, impress me all that much). Humour in an individual character can also help their appeal to the audience. I personally have had to exploit this with a particular character in Ikarus, because I'm pretty sure his general lack of morals, empathetic callousness, and lack of opportunities for any real exposition of his nature could otherwise render him rather unpleasant, which is not my intention. 

Note: I don't believe characters should all be pushed towards likeability, however. But that's an entirely different post.

Furthermore, humour does not have to undermine the tone of a novel. Got a gritty, fast-paced, slightly racy sci-fi? Why not use some naughty innuendos? Or maybe something a little more dramatic, with spies and explosions and interesting interrogation methods - some dry wit or wordplay might not be out of place here. 

Humour can allow for real empathetic engagement with the story and its denizens. Conversely, it can also make for some of the saddest moments. The character who tries to make the best of a disaster with a joke even they know is awful is sure to tug at someone's heartsrings. Also, characters who use humour in a perverse way - villain and anti-heroes, especially - can be made even creepier and more repulsive. And what better way to make that irritating side-character even more annoying than by imbuing them with delusions of comic genius? Even better when it backfires.

Human beings, for the most part, enjoy humour - and that applies to your characters just as much as your readers. You can use whatever sort of humour you like, and you can add it in whatever amount and to whatever degree you like. Not every book has to be a Good Omens, where every other sentence contains something that brings out an inhuman degree of mirthful snorting.

What about you guys? Do you have a preferred type of humour you like to put in your writing? Do you even like to use humour at all? Leave a comment and let me know!

~ Charley R