A few things to know about me:
1) I am an introvert’s introvert. I like staying home with my people, my dog, and my granny hobbies. I can, and will, venture into public. I can even get up in front of people to speak, but I am at my core happiest with few or no people around me.
2) I am married to a man and I have 3 sons. Until my mother-in-law moved in with us, I was the only girl in the house. I have decades of exposure to “boy humor.”
3) I do not like “boy humor.” I will give you a very cold, disdainful stare instead of a laugh in response to a poop joke. Every time.
Last month I signed up to attend the local chapter meeting of the California Writer’s Guild. It’s one of those things that has been on my I should do this list for years. The topic: “Infusing Your Writing with Humor.”
Ok, I think, humor is not really in my YA fantasy wheel house. Maybe that’s what I need to zhush things up a bit. Add some depth to my characters.
We met in a well air-conditioned meeting room at a local library branch. Maybe 12 people showed up, notebooks and pens ready. One man had an app on his iPad transcribing everything in real time and a multi-component screen and keyboard set up. We were a serious bunch.
The speaker was a very nice lady. She was about 70 years old (this becomes important) and she spoke with enthusiasm about the topic. She’d won a Reader’s Digest Award for a humorous story when she was just 22 and she’d been crafting humorous essays for decades. She had a PowerPoint presentation, she engaged with the audience, and she kept us interested. We learned about the three-part structure of joke writing. Set up, callback, punch line–if you’re curious.
And then…we had to do a group project. With strangers.
I would rather share something about myself with a microphone in my face than work on a group project with strangers. But I rallied. Until the speaker began to encourage us by giving us examples from old TV shows and comedians. From the early 1970s.
I looked around. At 61, I was one of the younger participants in the room. Ok, so we all get the references. We had all watched The Odd Couple on TV. We knew who Rodney Dangerfield was. The most recent example she used was from an episode of Seinfeld. The principles of humor writing should be the same.
But apparently we were so old as to be oblivious to what she really wanted us to do.
We were supposed to be writing a fart joke.
With strangers.
As a group project.
Reader, I died. In that freezing cold community room at the Rinconada Library on a Thursday evening, I shriveled from the inside out and expired on the spot.
The nice lady with the 50-year-old comedy touchstones couldn’t believe that we weren’t falling over ourselves with potty humor ideas.
I was dead, so I couldn’t help her.
The man with the multi-component iPad set up finally came through and proffered a punch line. Be assured it was a bad offering. Correction: it wasn’t just bad, it was baaaaad. Not even worthy of a groan.
I don’t remember the conclusion of the talk. I recall someone saying something about the “high quality of our club’s programming” before I dragged my corpse out of the room.
When I got home, resurrected and stunned, my darling husband asked me how it went. I started to explain, but couldn’t speak without laughing. The ridiculousness of the entire night, the awkward assignment, the absolutely terrible joke we’d been asked to write…I dissolved into an absolute fit of laughter. I couldn’t think about it for days without cracking up. I learned nothing.
So, no, I will not be infusing my writing with humor.
~ Jill