Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (18 page)

Here’s another case in point, from Sharyn McCrumb’s
Paying the Piper
. Describing her boyfriend, the viewpoint character says:

“. . . Cameron’s heart is
not
in the Highlands; it is probably
not attached to his brain; it may even be in a jar of formaldehyde in an Edinburgh University biology lab.”

The Robert Burns line about “My heart’s in the Highlands” is used as a jumping-off point for reversal, exaggeration, incongruity, and unanticipated manipulation of words. Yet the result is plausible enough, applicable enough, when viewed in the right light—which is to say, the proper mood of openness to fun via drollery.

Finally, scan these lines from Marissa Piesman’s
Unorthodox Practices:

Nina stared at the heading on the Chinese menu. Pork. Chicken. Beef. Seafood. Noodles. Each gave her a little thrill. Nina felt a certain way in Chinese restaurants. A way she felt nowhere else. The way an old-time alkie must feel in a broken-down gin mill. A sense of familiarity and comfort tinged with guilt. Only around Chinese food did Nina drop even a semblance of vigilance and eat like a pig. Like Aunt Sophie at the Viennese table at a bar mitzvah. Like Albert Finney in
Tom Jones.
Like the girls in the dorm on a heavy marijuana night. There had been a lot of magazine talk lately about comfort food. Cookbooks written on mashed potatoes, chicken pot pie, and macaroni and cheese. Shrimp with lobster sauce was Nina’s comfort food. It certainly tasted better than anything her mother had ever actually cooked.

The unanticipated, yet applicable, alternative to the
should
abounds here. The stereotyped norm is under fire from all directions. Thus, people are supposed to
order
from a menu, Chinese or otherwise, not
thrill
to the items listed. Her state of mind is compared to that of an alcoholic in a decaying bar, so that she develops a “sense of familiarity and comfort tinged with guilt.” Fastidiousness is replaced by such gross gluttony that she eats “like a pig,” or even her Aunt Sophie or Albert Finney. The whole passage is a paroxysm of exaggeration, warped analogy, and compulsive food fetishism, and the picture it paints gives Nina a dimension of which we were previously unaware, even while it provides amusement.

How does all this add up to laughter? Let’s take another look at our original hypothesis:

Laughter is the noise a person makes when he or she attains release from the tyranny of the “should.”

What is this
should
I talk about? How is it a tyrant?

Life gives us our answer: The world is
supposed
to be a certain way. People and things
should
act as expected, stay consistent to their established specifications and characteristics and behavior patterns, with fire forever hot, ice cold, guns lethal, and kittens playful.

Now you and I know, however, that
should
and
is
very well may prove to be miles apart, and we have the Kinsey and Hite reports to prove it. But from Socrates and Galileo on down it’s been treason to suggest such. In the view of most people, most of the time, anything that contradicts the way things are assumed and anticipated to be is potentially dangerous. Those who deviate from the foreordained idea constitute menaces to society. And this is the case whether the issue be physical, intellectual, or moral.

In a word, the
should
becomes a tyrant to enslave us, rule our lives. We’re brought up in the belief that we
should
behave according to set standards and convictions of our culture because, implicitly, not to do so may prove disastrous. What started out as rough rule of thumb, a crude map scratched in sand to guide us, now burgeons forth as ironclad law.

Entering any situation, therefore, you’re to a degree alert, which is to say tense—muscles at least a fraction contracted in preparation for potential fight or flight in case danger looms. Awareness of new experience always creates this tension. If you perceive no hazard, no departure from the way you feel the situation
should
be, your tension eases.

But now suppose that what you discover, far from fitting into the preconceived scheme of things dictated by the
should
, is an extreme and unanticipated deviation from what you expected.

If the discovery comes abruptly enough, and if elements of similarity between anticipated and unanticipated may be observed clearly enough, and if the new state of affairs, though startling, plunges you into no real danger and does you no real damage, and if you’re in the right mood, then your tension may be released suddenly in that succession of rhythmic, spasmodic expirations with open glottis and vibration of the vocal folds that we call laughter.

That is, you’ve met the unanticipated, the deviation from the
should
, and it hasn’t proved disastrous. The shock of discovering it ridiculous instead of dangerous has triggered release of your pent-up tension in a muscular paroxysm, pleasurable instead of painful. You’ve attained release from the tyranny of the should.

In other words, you laughed.

Or at least smiled.

And if you didn’t—?

Odds are that it’s for one or more of seven reasons . . . seven key points at which anyone’s attempt at humor may go astray:

1. You didn’t start with a clearly defined
should
. . . a way things are supposed to be.

Humor begins with assumption, anticipation. Further, this assumption must be one held by or at least familiar to your readers. If you have no mental image of a standard, how can you be aware of—let alone appreciate—deviations from that standard? For a sweet little old lady’s inappropriate behavior to be funny to you, you must first have a picture in your head of just how sweet little old ladies
do
or
should
act. We must have expectations where they’re concerned. Same for cops, robbers, lovers, mothers-in-law, shipwrecked sailors, and all the other traditional comic figures.

Including
unique, individual story people of your own creation!

The same principle applies to situations, places, things. Funerals are supposed to be solemn, hospitals quiet, cars mobile, and so on.

Here, however, we need to bear another key fact in mind: People laugh at
reaction
rather than action—and situations and places and things don’t react.

Consider, for example, the man who turns on a faucet. Instead of the normal flow expected, a great gush of water spouts forth, drenching him. When onlookers laugh, it’s at the man’s actual or imagined startlement/outrage at the unanticipated turn of events, rather than the event itself. The faucet is only a means to an end. The victim’s reaction is the issue.

Same way, a major reason people like anecdotes is because they’re interested in seeing how the central character
reacts
to danger or adversity or embarrassment or the unanticipated.

Often, of course, especially in jokes, the reaction is implicit. The reader or auditor visualizes what the central character is anticipating—and the shock with which he’ll respond to the unantici
pated. You don’t have to actually
see
someone’s pants fall down in order to know that it will discomfit the person to whom it happens.

Humor of character frequently is based on emotional reactions inappropriate or incongruous to a given situation. The unique personal approach the character takes is manifested in overreaction, underreaction, or unanticipated reaction. Thus, naive calm in the presence of a man-eating Bengal tiger . . . extreme upset over a burnt piece of toast . . . responding to the butterfly perched on a nude girl’s knee rather than to the girl’s nudity . . . all these are productive of humor, and all are based on the idea that there is a set and accepted way of reacting to such dilemmas and situations.

The
should
in language is equally obvious. Its roots lie in our assumption that there is a standard of grammar, of structure, of definition, and that proper people will bow to the rules. Then, along comes dialect, warping all the regulations in the name of the foreigner’s unfamiliarity with English, and we collapse in gales of hilarity. Or a pun harmlessly punctures our pretensions of knowledge, our mental image of the applicability of a given word, and we laugh at how neatly it fits into the unanticipated context.

A factor which also enters here and in much other humor is inflation of ego—the feeling of superiority that comes when actual or potential ridicule focuses on a character. We know how something’s supposed to be said. When Character reveals his ignorance, we automatically glory in the fact that we know better.

Process,
especially, offers unlimited possibilities for this kind of ego-boo, with a whole series of
shoulds
linked together. This is why so much slapstick comedy centers on someone trying to hang a screen or paper a wall or bake a pie. One funny twist acts as springboard to another; mirth mounts; repetition of a bit (the so-called “running gag”) intensifies the effect, and the audience rolls in the aisles.

And so it goes. The thing to remember is that one way or another, implicitly or explicitly, humor always is predicated on a
should
. That’s why it’s so often claimed that there are only a dozen or so basic jokes. It’s not that just drunks or taxes or politicians or stinginess are funny; it’s that
our attitudes
are clearly set where such subjects are concerned. They’re the areas with the broadest, most familiar
shoulds
. The rules in relation to Ornithischia or nuclear theory or theosophy may be every bit as rigid, but not as many people know about them. So, the chances of a general reader
reacting to humor built around them are likely to be slim.

Does this mean you must abandon such subjects?

On the contrary. It merely demands that you build up a picture to knock down . . . create an image of a
should
.

After which, it might be to your advantage to take an even harder look at the alternatives that it implies.

2. The alternative isn’t far enough removed from the
should
.

There’s a thing called subtlety. In humor it can very easily be carried too far.

Contrast is the issue.

What is contrast? It’s the exhibition of noticeable differences between things when they’re compared or set side by side.

For most of us, it’s difficult to distinguish instantly between a 1988 Ford and a 1989 Ford. The contrast between them isn’t marked enough, in our eyes. Same way for perfumes, mentholated cigarettes, women’s hats, and old crime movies on TV.

If you’re reasonably literate, you’ll be amused by such student boners as “An epistle is the wife of an apostle,” or “An unbridled orgy is a wild horse,” or “Ambiguity means having two wives living at the same time.” But there also are segments of the population that will greet such sallies with blank stares.

The conclusion for you to draw from this is that if the issue is humor and you’re in search of a wide audience, you’d better select an alternative markedly different from the chosen
should
. So different, in fact—in content or presentation or intention—that it
can’t
be taken seriously.

Sometimes direct reversal is the answer here—the Texan who buys his dog a boy, the village where nothing happens every minute, the cannibal who walks into a restaurant and orders a waiter. But more often if suffices—especially in non-joke humor—merely to examine common assumptions about your subject, then deviate as far as your imagination will allow.

Thus, scientists are supposed to be brilliant. Deviate slightly, and we get an inept scientist—and because he’s merely inept, he’s likely to prove more painful or piteous than funny. Difference from the accepted
should
is insufficient. It must be different to a degree that reduces the
should
to absurdity.

Suppose, then, that instead of just making our scientist inept, we picture him as impossibly stupid—a bumbling little man, a labo
ratory janitor, with incongruous pretensions to being a scientist. At once, he takes on comic overtones and everything he does holds the potentiality of humor.

In the same way, a person with a vestigial tail is victim of a minor physical handicap, to be remedied by surgery as soon as possible. Give the entire human race long, bushy tails and you have an unanticipated alternative to the
should
of accepted human development that H. Allen Smith built to book length in that wild volume entitled
The Age of the Tail
.

How many young women have dated sailors? Ruth McKenney multiplied the situation by five Brazilian naval cadets in a classic of yesteryear,
My Sister Eileen
. It made her a fortune.

All of us daydream of transcending physical law. Marcel Ayme translated that fantasy into
The Man Who Walked Through Walls
. Care to try to imagine an alternative farther from its
should
than that?

3. The alternative to the
should
lacks applicability.

To have humorous applicability, an alternative must epitomize the contradiction between
should
and unanticipated deviation.

Applicability means that a sort of implicit analogy exists between assumption and alternative; a clearly recognizable parallel between what we expect and what we get. The two situations, though not the same, have certain key points in common.

If such a parallel doesn’t exist, we have difference, but not necessarily humor.

Take, for example, a cartoon in which a stenographer enters a room where a man lies immersed in a bath. The man says, “Excuse me for not rising, Miss Glutz.”

The humor in this, such as it is, centers on the fact that for the man to rise would violate our society’s nudity taboo—a strong, sexually oriented
should
. When he says, “Excuse me for not rising,” he calls attention to this issue with a familiar phrase entirely acceptable to closely analogous situations. And this, of course, pinpoints the contradiction, the contrast between alternative and
should
.

Suppose, instead, that the punchline had been delivered by the stenographer: “Shall I take those letters now, Mr. Glutz?”