Humor

Apr 1, 2021

I taught a college course in humor writing years ago to make myself read more humorous writers, analyze how they achieved their effects and share it. I needed examples to stimulate my students in their own humorous writing.

Today we're going to discuss something more of us need.

It's called humor, a five-letter word you might be familiar with.

Some writers seem naturally gifted at writing humor.

The rest of us have to work at it.

I taught a college course in humor writing years ago to make myself read more humorous writers, analyze how they achieved their effects and share it.

I needed examples to stimulate my students in their own humorous writing.

For that, I read and collected passages and stories from Mark Twain, Art Buchwald, James Thurber, E.B. White, Erma Bombeck, Ring Lardner, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Garrison Keillor, H. L. Mencken, Ambrose Bierce, Fran Lebowitz, Dave Barry, Russell Baker, Woody Allen, Lewis Grizzard, Roy Blount Jr., Scott Adams and many others.

In a search for clues to their gifts, I found that many of them had grown up in hard times, in orphanages and foster homes, and survived combat and severe illnesses.

Many of them wrote for newspapers and learned that, through humor, they could endear themselves to their readers.

The best lesson this taught me was that there is a vein of harsh reality behind humor. It laughs despite the pain.

Here are examples from one of my favorites, Art Buchwald, who wrote from Paris for the New York Herald Tribune and the nation’s capitol for the Washington Post.

  • There isn’t a child who hasn’t gone out into the brave new world who eventually doesn’t return to the old homestead carrying a bundle of dirty clothes.
  • This is not an easy time for humorists because the government is far funnier than we are.
  • You can’t make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you’re doing is recording it.
  • An economist is a man who knows a hundred ways of making love but doesn’t know any women.
  • The things that matter most are not things.

Another favorite is Erma Bombeck, a syndicated newspaper columnist who found great humor in her family’s life.

  • Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
  • If you can’t make it better, you can laugh at it.
  • Never have more children than you have car windows.
  • When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me.’

Another newspaper humorist, Lewis Grizzard, used his life story to write a series of books with long, funny titles.

In books about his health and wife problems, he titled them:

  • Elvis Is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself
  • I Took a Lickin’ and Kept on Tickin’
  • They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat
  • If Love Were Oil, I’d Be About a Quart Low
  • When My Love Returns From the Ladies Room, Will I Be Too Old to Care?

Teaching the course became an amazing experience.

I began to look at life’s travails differently.

I became less serious, more mellow and learned to take little daily punches the way boxers shrug off jabs.

If you want to learn something, teach it.

I hope this helps and Mom will kiss your boo boos.

This is from my new book, The Art of Compelling Writing.

It will be out this year – if I ever finish writing it.

Jerry Bellune is chairman and editor emeritus of Lexington Publishing in Lexington, South Carolina.