Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (19 page)

Unanticipated deviation from the norm? To a degree.

Funny? Not very.

Why? Because the
should
that surrounds conditions under which stenographers may take dictation is much less rigid than the one governing nudity. Hence, there’s less contradiction to epitomize; hence, less applicability of alternative to
should;
hence, less humor.

In other words, applicability, like almost everything else in this world, is a matter of degree, with some alternatives riotous, others tired or dreary, others complete washouts.

Now let’s try another switch. This time, we’ll leave the punch-line the same, “Excuse me for not rising, Miss Glutz.” But we’ll replace the stenographer with a sexy-looking blonde in a negligee.

Applicability: nil. Humor: nil.

Why? Because we no longer have an applicable alternative. Girl in negligee plus man in bathtub equals a sex-oriented situation. So even though the man’s line is unanticipated, it comes out banal instead of funny, because it expresses no real contradiction, no true conflict between
should
and
is
. It does
not
call attention to the point of the gag, because no point exists.

In contrast, consider Charles Addams’s famous panel that shows ski-tracks on a snowy landscape. There’s a tree in the foreground. The tracks indicate that one ski went on one side of the tree, the other on the other.

Here our assumption, our
should
, says that trees are something you go around when you’re on skis. With
both
skis on
one
side.

Unanticipated alternative: In this particular case, one ski goes on one side, the other on the other, in direct violation of physical possibility.

Which
can’t
be—but here it is—only how—?

Contradiction epitomized. Reality contravened. An alternative so applicable yet unexplainable that the cartoon sticks in your memory for years.

In summary, then . . . the unanticipated alternative must hold strong elements of the familiar . . . must have clear-cut points in common with the
should,
so that it may capture and pinpoint the ridiculousness of the situation, the absurdity of the contrast between what’s shown or described and what’s supposed to be.

Naturally, alternatives that fill such a bill of particulars are ever so easy to find. Ask any humor writer along about 2:00
A.M.
some morning, when he finally gives up hunting for the apt phrase and
deft twist and heads for the nearest bottle because he’s too frustrated to go to bed.

But at least now you know just what it is you’re hunting!

4. The differences that distinguish alternative from assumption aren’t sufficiently emphasized.

Earlier, we said that contrast lies close to the heart of humor. It’s rooted in the disparity between assumption and alternative,
should
and
is
. But it’s one thing for a disparity to exist; another for your reader to recognize and laugh about it.

Your two most useful tools for bringing this disparity into focus, and thus sharpening your humor, are
exaggeration
and
incongruity
. The one throws a spotlight on the point at issue. The other places that point in a situation where its difference from the norm stands out.

Exaggeration means overstatement, understatement, distortion. You may exaggerate situation, character, reaction, language—you name it. Exaggeration of anything, carried to an extreme, equals reduction to absurdity.

You overstate when you refer to a woman after a Cub Scout den meeting as a “broken figure.” Or when, as an example of her husband’s penuriousness, you say that he expects their children to make all-day suckers last a week. You understate when you claim a girl’s figure makes a fencepost’s look good, or that you need a job so bad you’re willing to pay the boss to let you work. You distort when you give a man’s Adam’s apple inordinate attention, or emphasize a dowager’s pouter-pigeon bosom to a ludicrous degree, or otherwise overstate or understate part of a whole.

Incongruity, in turn, strikes a jarring note between elements with which you work. It’s the beautiful girl with the 96-pound weakling as a favored suitor; the prospector boiling the beans who offers his partner a menu; the rabbit riding in a kangaroo’s pouch. The inappropriate, the inconsistent, the contradictory, the paradoxical, the reverse English twist—all are incongruous and, hence, help to intensify our awareness of contrast, deviation from the norm, and humor.

5. Awareness of the contrast doesn’t come abruptly.

A joke is like a scorpion. The stinger belongs in the tail.

Similarly, in non-joke humor, timing is crucial.

What do we mean by timing? We mean that you present a key fragment of material at the moment when it will achieve maximum humorous effect.

When is that moment? It’s when the shock of contrast between assumption and alternative is most marked, most clearly defined.

In other words, the thing you need to strive for is to throw the elements with which you’re working into juxtaposition in such a way and at such a time as will enable your reader to see for himself, instantly, that the result is funny, as illustrated in examples earlier in this chapter. Failure to do so will put you in the position of the speaker who forgets the point of a joke.

6. The subject is too serious, too disturbing emotionally to your reader or audience.

“The most valuable sense of humor,” someone once observed, “is the kind that enables a person to see instantly what it isn’t safe to laugh at.”

When we say that a story is the record of how somebody deals with danger, we must remember that dangers fall into three major categories. The first, basis for much of melodrama, may be termed the threat to life. The second category, foundation stone of less sensational drama, is the threat to happiness. Finally, we have the threat to vanity, from which springs most comedy, most humor.

Vanity is based on ego, conceit. Our basic vanity lies in the implicit assumption we all make that the world is the way we see it, and that others view us as we ourselves do, and that what we anticipate will always come to pass; that reality will conform to our picture of it.

Humor punctures vanity, by revealing that we may not always be right in these assumptions. We laugh when, abruptly and in an unanticipated manner, it comes to our attention that it’s possible to find applicable yet ridiculous alternatives to our picture of reality.

But the moment an event moves out of the category of threat to vanity, and over into that of threat to happiness or threat to life, humor ends. A fat man slipping on a banana peel is funny—until, in the fall, he breaks his back. Drunks are amusing, but not alcoholics. Race, marital infidelity, war, crime—our view of each changes any time it’s brought into focus as a real problem.

Especially is this true when we find ourselves in the center of things. There are no good losers, only good actors, as the saying
goes. Or, to quote the late Will Rogers, “Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else.”

So, we appreciate the puncturing of vanity best when it’s the other fellow’s ego that takes the beating. Step into a mudhole that fills your shoes with slime and water, and most of us register irritation. Watch someone else do the same thing, and we double over with laughter.

The man whose insecurities force him to build his feelings of self-worth on vanity rather than achievement may prove completely devoid of a sense of humor; or, he may do all his laughing at others . . . fly into a rage when anyone laughs at him.

Is it possible to make even the serious funny? To a degree, yes.

a.) Avoid the viewpoint of people too emotionally involved in the subject’s tragic aspects.

A mother whose child has just been killed by a hit-and-run driver is hardly in a position to deal with the event lightly.

b.) Limit and de-emotionalize attention devoted to the unpleasant side of things.

A flood may be a disaster. But it’s always possible to ignore the floating corpses or the heart-broken old couple whose life savings have been swept away, in favor of a man and three cats stranded high in a tree.

c.) Focus on the ridiculous side—especially the behavior of the people involved.

Observe the discovery of a body, a la Sharyn McCrumb in
Bimbos of the Death Sun:

Louis Warren tried the door handle. It wasn’t locked, so he eased his way into the room, wondering whether Dungannon was present, and about to hurl a lamp at his head, or absent, or planning to have him arrested for breaking and entering. Perhaps he ought to leave a note.

The only sound in the room was the clack of the printer. Warren looked at the unmade bed, the row of bottles on the window ledge, the cowboy hat atop the computer monitor, and finally at Appin Dungannon, seated in a chair by the desk.

He looked much as usual: bulging piggy eyes, gargoyle face, unfashionably long hair. . . . The pallor was a change from his usual boozy redness, though, and the stain on his
shirt was definitely not Chivas Regal. . . . Louis Warren kept staring at the body, idly wondering if he had two more wishes coming.

Finally the shock wore off of it, and he stumbled back into the hall, nearly colliding with a tall, dark-cloaked vampire. “Excuse me,” murmured Louis Warren. “I wonder if you would know anything about death?”

And so it goes. Murder isn’t funny. But, upon occasion, writers like Craig Rice and Frank Gruber and Fredric Brown have certainly made it seem so!

7. The final key to why humor may go astray is that a playful mood hasn’t been established at the beginning, which leaves the reader unprepared to laugh.

Listen to how Gillian Roberts begins
Caught Dead in Philadelphia:

At 7:58
A.M.
on a wet Monday morning, twenty-seven hours after giving up cigarettes and a green-eyed disc jockey, I was not in a mood to socialize. Facing myself in the bathroom mirror had exhausted my conviviality. Choosing a sweater and skirt had used up my intellectual reserve.

Here’s Robert Barnard starting off
The Cherry Blossom Corpse:

“Oh look, darlings, cherry blossom,” said Amanda Fairchild, as we sped from the docks into the center of Bergen, and towards the bus station. She added, with a cat-like smile: “Especially for me.”

I didn’t tell her it was apple, and I didn’t ask why it should be thought to be especially for her. I’d already had Amanda Fairchild up to
here.

Or consider the first line of Jim Stinson’s
Truck Shot:

Filmmaking is always nine parts boredom, but staring for hours at a pregnant goldfish was threatening to push tedium across the threshold of pain.

The issue here, of course, is that if you propose to write humor, for heaven’s sake put your reader in a mood for it
from the start
. Unless you do, he may never get around to laughing at all.

In point of fact, without the right mood, humor is as likely to irritate as entertain. Remember your feelings of frustration when that banquet speaker suddenly, in mid-address, brought in an allusion which could have been intended as funny—but could, equally well, have represented pure ineptitude? You have to be in a playful frame of mind to enjoy being tickled; and humor is a mental tickle!

The solution, obviously, is to follow the trail broken by past experts. From your first line, show by selection and exaggeration, incongruity and irony, metaphor and situation, that you intend to amuse as well as excite. You can begin, “The hair Elsa twisted about her finger had all the sheen and life of a tangle of wet fishline.” Or you can start out, “Elsa’s hair hung limp and lustreless.” But the smile for which the first prepares your reader can very well pay off in heartier laughter later on . . . and the lack of that same smile in the second may prove the reason why your best efforts at achieving a light twist failed to touch the reader at the climax.

It’s one thing to analyze the other fellow’s humor, another to coax smiles from readers with your own.

How best to start? Cultivate a sense of the ridiculous. Hunt for chances to laugh. Open your eyes to incongruity and contradiction. Twist. Distort. Exaggerate. Draw absurd parallels.

Then, write.

Any don’ts?

1. Don’t try to get by with a weak story.

Would-be humorists tend to think that laughter alone will carry the ball. They’re wrong. Start, always, with a yarn strong enough to stand alone if written with no attempt at the amusing.

2. Don’t fail to establish your humor as humor.

If you’re writing a funny story, let your reader know it by using humorous metaphors and phrasings from the beginning—and that means right from the very first line.

As part of this, it won’t hurt a bit if you give the humorous character amusing traits in keeping with his personality, dynamics, and background. Is he the kind of person who’d get out of the pool into which he’d fallen with a remark about “those goldfish being too darned fast,” or at a dinner party would he observe that his host or hostess must be subsidized by a diet clinic?

The thing to remember, always, is that attitude (yours and Character’s) and content determine whether a line is straight or light. Whatever goes on, it’s important that you focus on the way Character sees things and what he says or thinks about them, whether he views what’s happening as dead serious or amusing.

Thus, Hero discovers that his ex-con contact, conditioned by years in prison, keeps cockroaches as pets. His comment: “Lively little devils, aren’t they? Though I really prefer the big ones you get down in Panama.”

Contrast this with a “straight” handling: “Edwards’ stomach turned. The insects’ movements had the slowly roiling quality of water just beginning to boil. ‘You mean, you can eat with these things on the same table?’ he choked.”

Or again: “Linda asked, ‘Don’t you ever get lonely?’ ‘Not unless I’m with people,’ Carl answered wryly,” as contrasted with “Carl looked away. He didn’t answer.”