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bettsfic · 2 years ago

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craft essay a day #7

i was just talking with @volturialice about comedy writing, so it's something that's been on my mind, and i've never really written about it. so consider this an early draft of a future essay that's far more coherent.

"Funny Is the New Deep: An Exploration of the Comic Impulse" by Steve Almond, The Writer's Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House

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filed under: comedy, meaning making

key terms: comic impulse (his), comic intention (mine)

summary

i was hesitant to read this essay because comedy is very important to me. i can handle bad craft essays but i'm not sure i can handle bad craft essays on comedy. but, i thought, if you're writing a craft essay on comedy, you're probably pretty funny. that's the thing about comedy: it's not usually inspected by the unfunny.

Almond opens with Aristotle's four modes of literature: the tragic, the epic, the lyric, and the comic. he disagrees with the common belief that tragedy and comedy are working in opposition to one another.

"In fact, the comic impulse almost always arises directly from our efforts to contend with tragedy. It is the safest and most reliable way to acknowledge our circumstances without being crushed by them."

he talks about how Aristophanes is the father of comedy, and goes on to discuss the history of comedy in literature, focusing mainly on Vonnegut who tried to write about the bombing of Dresden seriously before eventually, twenty years later, succumbing to his comic instinct and writing the very darkly comedic Slaughterhouse Five.

"...comedy is produced by determined confrontation with a set of feeling states that are essentially tragic in nature: grief, shame, disappointment, physical discomfort, anxiety, moral outrage. It is not about pleasing the reader. It's about purging the writer...Another way of saying this would be that the best comedy is rooted in the capacity to face unbearable emotions and to offer, by means of laughter, a dividend of forgiveness."

Almond asserts that humor is the result of being able to look at understand the wider picture, and that's why comedy can be so rooted in politics and current events. he acknowledges that what's funny is not objective, and concludes by saying,

"The real question isn't whether you can or should try to be funny in your work, but whether you're going to get yourself and your characters into enough danger to invoke the comic impulse. Literary artists don't write funny to produce laughter...but to apprehend and endure the astonishing sorrow of the examined life."

my thoughts are centered around the practicality of comedy writing, by which i mean to answer the question, but how do you be funny? and talk about what i'm calling "comic intention." (note, i came up with it just now and so i'm still Thinking on it, and my thoughts may be half-baked.)

my thoughts

this essay put me through all five stages of grief. i feel very personally called out in a paragraph about how, in a story when the stakes get too high, or as Almond says, "reaches a point of unbearable heaviness" the comic impulse is to make it funny. and i do that. and i'm so delighted by how clever and hilarious i am (sarcasm. see? he's right), and i value comedy so highly, that i'm always hesitant (or i even straight-out refuse) to change it. and he's right also, ultimately, that the impulse comes from a place of trauma, of habitually defusing. once, i was dating a guy who pulled a knife on me, and i said, "if you get my blood everywhere you're not going to get our security deposit back."

i read a certain sentiment by comedic literary authors over and over again: early in their careers, they stifled their own comic impulse in an effort to be taken seriously. they were inspired by hemingway and wanted to write dry prose of the very sober, somber variety. Almond admits this in the essay, and says the same of Vonnegut, and once i went to a lecture by George Saunders who said literally the same thing. and i'm like, what is wrong with you people? why in god's name would you ever take yourselves seriously enough to want to be taken seriously?

for me it was the inverse. it took me years to even want to take my work seriously, to think of it as anything other than fucking around and finding out. and i also take umbrage a little at the idea that comedy writing is fundamentally unserious. but then again, i revere comedy. to me being funny is the highest ideal. i believe if you can do comedy and do it well, you can do anything. comedic actors can almost always do drama, but not all dramatic actors can do comedy. one of the reasons breaking bad and better call saul are so successful is that they play on the charisma, wit, and insanely funny talent of two comic actors (Cranston and Odenkirk). they're the most serious shows you could ever watch, but they're still funny.

there's a difference i think between being serious and taking yourself seriously. the gravest creative sin, to me, is taking a story too seriously. if it's apparent the writer can't see the inherent potential humor of all things, even if that humor isn't played upon, even if no one's laughing, i am immediately ejected from a story. comedy is a wider breadth of understanding than the material offers. Almond makes this point too, and uses conservatives as an example, saying that Republicans aren't funny and that's a sign that they don't understand jackshit about anything.

i don't believe everything should be funny. but everything should acknowledge its own potential for humor.

okay so here's my big thought:

my reaction to this essay is a huge "yes, but..." i agree with Almond on nearly everything he says, except there are the nuts and bolts of joke-making to consider. and that happens in only two possible places: on the line level, the setup and the punchline; or the situational level, the concept of a story. a sitcom is a situational comedy, which means that the premise of the story itself must in some way be comedic. when writing comedy, these are the only two tools you've got. sentence and concept. that's it.

the show Barry (HBO) is, to me, the greatest example of comedy writing i've ever seen. situationally, it's hilarious: a hitman wants to be a famous actor. and on a smaller level, what it does exceptionally well is acknowledge that every character no matter how frightening or serious or tragic can be the comedic relief. this blew my mind and changed my entire understanding of character. and with that understanding, my work has become a lot funnier. my characters (i like to think) are more interesting and complicated, because any of them at any point can do either the setup or the punchline. when you have serious characters and a comedic relief, the serious characters can only do the setup, and the comedic relief does the punchline. and i believed that for a long time. i would look at the cast of characters in a given story and think, who's the funny one? and now, they're all given the power of comedic relief.

i guess if i had to define my "yes, but" response to this essay, i would say that yes, there's comic instinct, but there's also comic intention. it's having the guts to be outside the joke looking in, to consciously and at the risk of ruining the joke for yourself, engineer the funny thing. i would say comic intention begins with instinct. you have to understand the rhythm and cadence of a setup, the right timing and pacing of the punchline. in your first draft you have to see where your setups have naturally been built and in your second draft you nail the punchline.

when i edit comedic stories, that's all i do. i pay attention to the rhythm of the piece and i find where the setups are or could be, and i make a little margin note that says "punchline here."

comedy writing, to me, is basically math. and that's the least funny thing there is. but if i don't acknowledge it, if i don't approach it with intention, i never get to the punchline. and intention itself is delicate--people expect comedy to seem effortless, so if you look like you're trying to be funny, you're not funny.

all comedy is about expectation. the basic setup of a joke is setting an expectation, and the punchline is doing something with that expectation. if you want to get funnier, start thinking about the unexpected. start thinking of details in pairs. your character is standing in an elderly woman's kitchen. situationally, this might be funny. maybe your character is a deadly assassin, and the elderly woman has invited him in for a coffee. or, at the line level, what's the most unexpected thing to be in that kitchen, based on the collective knowledge of what an elderly woman's kitchen looks like? your character opens the cutlery drawer and finds a glock. or a dildo. or a human molar. what's important is acknowledging that the elderly woman's kitchen is the setup of a potential punchline. the task is pivoting the punchline against the expectations of her kitchen.

even if you don't do this comedically, the practice of finding these pockets of potential will improve your writing, because what's in that woman's cutlery drawer can help us understand who she is as a character. what does it say about her if her junk drawer is a mess versus if it's meticulously organized? if she has thirteen owl-themed clocks? a wall of harley-davidson paraphernalia? what will your evil assassin character do if her dentures are in a cup and the cat is about to paw the cup off the table?

for those who also want to become better editors, one of the greatest skills you can learn is to read something and see what's not there, instead of just what is.

overall, i really admire Almond for writing earnestly on this topic, when sincerity can often threaten comedy. he acknowledges that insecurity is at the heart of every joke (the drive and the need to make someone laugh) and so the greatest fear of a funny person is to ruin the joke.

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#cead #comedy #comic impulse #comic intention #meaning making

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