Making funny funny

“Lady, if you can get the dog to do that, I’ll buy the pogo stick!”
–Paul R. Dubois II, lead singer and songwriter, The Trees of Mystery

What makes funny funny? Why do we laugh at the things we do?

Paul Dubois, San Francisco singer, songwriter, and fiction author, is one of the funniest people I’ve ever known. I’ve been privy to literally hundreds of his howlers over the years. But I don’t think he’s ever encapsulated the elements of humor quite as succinctly as he did in this 1989 answering machine message, in which he tackled the most basic element of all humor: the unexpected and—sometimes—completely inexplicable.

I don’t claim to be an expert on humor writing. Like the quintessential art-lover, I just know what cracks me up. But below are three brief essays by the authors of some of the first literary mash-ups we received for the Literary Mash-Up Extravaganza, throwing a little light for all of us on the craft of writing comedy—the simple art of making people laugh.

And stay tuned: tomorrow we’ll start posting entries for the Literary Mash-Up Extravaganza. Due to an amazing response, we’ll be posting 10 or 12 a day until we run out. So keep sending!

Thinking Funny
by Jack Shakely

Analyzing how to write funny is usually about as productive as reading a book on how to ride a bicycle. Listening to someone explaining what’s funny can be like listening to your college professor explaining the elements of hip-hop. We can learn about the set-up, the turn and the punch, but the best way we learn to write funny stuff is to write tons of not-so-funny stuff, stuff that we thought was hilarious when it came off the keyboard.

Trying to be funny on the written page already puts one strike against us. We lose the wink, the Jack Benny pause, the Groucho leer. Ellen DeGeneres has developed such a delightful persona, she can make me laugh just brushing her teeth. Read her stuff cold, however, and you may find yourself wondering what must have been in that drink when you were watching.

But what written humor gives up in pie-in-the-face sight gags, it can make up in surprise, absurdity and misdirection. The mash-up book and movie titles that Victoria is asking you to try your hand at is a good exercise in all three. My recent ante into that humor pot was “To Kill a Jonathon Livingston Seagull—Scout runs amok at Eselon.” That adorable little Finch girl a murderer? Absurd.

The master of the absurd misdirection was, in my opinion, Henny Youngman. Having developed the persona of the barely-funny Borsch Belt seltzer-down-your-pants funny man, he’d take your own anticipation of his too-predictable punch line and misdirect you. “I was so ugly when I was born,” Youngman said, “when the doctor saw me, he slapped my mother.” Great misdirection, and a perfect sense of that other thing, um, what is it? Oh, yeah, timing.

Have fun with the mash-ups. One of the best parts about writing humor is that it may be the only time when you can laugh uproariously at your own stuff without having someone think you’re nuts or slapping your mother.

Words on Funny
by Gary Presley

Funny is a tough gig. Even clowns get a bad rap. I have a friend who goes bonkers at the sight of Bozo.

Writing funny is even tougher. It’s a calculated enterprise and requires, I think, the ability to write about the world on a fun-house mirror, scribbling mightily with pens dipped in surrealism and cynicism, hyperbole and devilment.

Some are masters. Dorothy Parker, who turned words into stilettos. Ring Lardner, the man who wrote the funniest sentence ever: “Shut up,” he explained.

Others are wizards. Robin Williams on a flight of verbal fancy. Dennis Miller, referencing and sub-referencing quixotically amongst windmills of irony.

When the mash-up contest began, I knew my left-handed but normally useless ability to see off-kilter concepts might provide both a moment’s entertainment and one more of the Look at Me opportunities writers crave.

Both are essential ingredients in most comedic endeavors.

Here is one of my first, a fender-bender between Finnegan’s Wake and Fahrenheit 451:

Finnegan’s 451
Reader’s Digest condenses James Joyce’s seminal work.

Seeing the two titles together immediately brought to mind Joyce’s legendary verbosity and the intelligensia’s nose-up attitude toward the popular magazine’s mcdonaldization of the written world.

The next collision hit me as I bumped into a reference to a book written by Ayn Rand, one of the philosophers whose work eventually gave birth to The Monster Who Ate Your 401k:

One Flew Over the Atlas Shrugged
Randle P. McMurphy reads Rand to his detriment.

Why do I think this mash-up funny? Kesey’s hero of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, McMurphy, is lazy rather than crazy, but acting on his laziness (Rand’s “rational self-interest”) earns him a lobotomy.

Too sub-referentially dennismillerian for you? What can I say? Funny to you might not be funny to me. After all, I’m not afraid of clowns, but mimes give me the shivers.

Being Funny in Time
by Elwood P. Gray

Two things, that’s what it takes. Two weird things that shouldn’t have anything to do with each other, but for some reason actually do. An accident of language and logic.

You know, the character I’m best known for, Earl Grey, started out as a joke. My name’s El Gray, and I couldn’t come up with a decent name for the guy when I made him up, so I used my own name as a kind of placeholder until I could think of something better. Then some other character misunderstood and called him Earl (why are mystery detectives always English aristocrats? is it because they’ve got so much free time?), and someone else misspelled his last name. I sure wish I could remember the exact sequence, but my copy is on a high shelf and I’ve got this sciatica. . .anyway, it was something like that. The next thing I knew, I was using Earl Grey, like the tea, as an in-joke to amuse myself (and the other characters, who just wouldn’t let it go). After awhile, I couldn’t go back and fix it; it was a part of his personality. So it turned out the joke was on me.

If you look at a really good classical joke like Groucho Marx’s, “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend; inside of a dog it’s too dark to read,” you get two different things: a regular old aphorism and a concrete fact about canines. What do they have in common? Nothing but Groucho Marx.

I’m joking; they’re both about dogs. One figurative, the other literal. It’s the unexpected leap from figurative to literal that’s so funny!

I went after these literary mash-ups the same way, first by thinking of two book titles that share a common word and then sticking them together to see what I got. It was almost always funny, just because I didn’t see it coming. It was even funnier if the two books were totally different from each other. And if I could throw in an extra element at the end, after you got done laughing at the first joke. . .You know which one I mean.

We all have limited tenure in this mortal coil, and I hope to spend as much as possible of mine laughing.

So give it a whirl! It kept me out of my wife’s hair for days! Maybe it’ll have the same effect on you.

Jack Shakely is co-host of the Literary Mash-Up Extravaganza and the author of The Confederate War Bonnet.

Gary Presley is the author of Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio, the comedic elements of which are viewed from a boob-high perspective of the world.

Elwood P. Gray is the author of the 1960s sci-fi cult classic Earl Grey time-travel series.