Eric Puchner: How to Be Funny When Writing a Novel

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.

Is anything more embarrassing than trying to be funny and going splat? I sometimes think there’s an inverse relationship between trying to be funny and actual funniness. This is especially true in literature, I think. When you think of great comic novels and short stories—True Grit, Mrs. Bridge, On Beauty, anything by Joy Williams—you think, above all, of their effortlessness, how what’s funny about them is inextricable with their, well, novel-ness. They can’t fail to be funny, because they hardly seem to be trying to. They don’t strain after jokes so much as evoke the inherent funniness of life.

The philosopher Henri Bergson talks about “mechanical inelasticity”: something is funny when a person—or, I suppose, an animal—fails to adapt to a change in their surroundings. Think of the unsuspecting fellow who tries to sit down on a chair that’s been pulled out from under him. We expect someone to act a certain way, one that conforms elastically to the situation they’re in, and it’s funny when they don’t. As Simon Critchley puts it, in his book On Humor: there’s a disconnect between “expectation and actuality.”

This isn’t just a nifty, somewhat incontrovertible theory of humor. It’s a nifty, somewhat incontrovertible theory of what makes a novel or short story work. One might even say that a disconnect between expectation and actuality is the essential element of fiction. A young man wakes up as a beetle and yet worries more than anything about getting to work on time (“The Metamorphosis”); a wealthy couple insist on finishing their dinner at a country club, despite the fact that a tornado’s approaching and everyone else has fled to the basement (Mrs. Bridge). When my students complain about writer’s block, that they have no idea what to write about, I often encourage them to think of something funny that’s happened to them: not because I want their readers to laugh out loud—though there are far worse things a reader might do!—but because something that meets the criteria for funniness also meets the criteria for engaging fiction. The sound of laughter is the sound of a story succeeding.

This is often how my stories and novels begin: with a comic situation. It’s the first thing that comes to me, and I still remember the ah-ha—or ha-ha—moments when I thought of a premise that cracked me up inside. A carjacker tries to steal a car at gunpoint from a gas station, and yet it’s full of driver’s ed students learning to drive stick, none of whom know how to do it (“A Fear of Invisible Tribes”). Or a man carrying a kid in a Baby Bjorn goes to a party and, unable to bend over, ends up snorting coke off the napping infant’s head (“Heavenland”). In the case of my new novel, Dream State, I knew I wanted to write about a wedding I officiated in which half the attendees had Norovirus: a flower girl puked on her way down the aisle; the groom, green with nausea, had to sit down during the vows. The entire novel—which spans fifty years in the lives of three friends and is about, among other extremely unfunny things, the environmental devastation of the West—sprang almost entirely from there.

Of course, you can have the funniest idea in the world for a scene and flub the delivery. I’ve done this myself in many a first draft. As with a stand-up routine, timing is everything. Timing—and, I would argue, restraint. The easiest way to ruin a comic moment is to overexplain or, worse, point out how funny something is. This is a tonal issue as much as anything. What makes, say, a Stephen Wright joke funny has everything to do with delivery, with his seeming to take his absurdist thought-experiments seriously, as if they’re a matter of life and death (“I bought some powdered water at the store, but I don’t know what to add”). In fiction, too, it pays to take the absurdity of what your characters say or do as seriously as possible.

Tom Drury, author of The End of Vandalism—for my money, one of the funniest American novels ever written—is a master of this. Here’s a passage from the book in which a woman, engaged to be married, talks to her pastor about scheduling the wedding at his church:

“Will you be around in May?”

“Oh, probably.”

“Because we were thinking about May.”

Pastor Matthews jumped up and crept to the window.

“Shh,” he said. He picked up the shotgun. A pigeon flew from the roof. “Come back here,” he said. “Look, May is fine.”

“O.K., great,” said Louise.

The minister shook her hand. “Congratulations, Louise,” he said. “I must say I’ve always been attracted to you, mentally and physically.”

What makes this funny isn’t simply that the pastor is behaving in ways un-pastorlike (hunting pigeons with a shotgun, coming on to a woman who’s just asked him to schedule her wedding), but that it’s delivered in as understated a way as possible. The minister’s distractibility, his clear disinterest in the wedding itself, the earnest formality of his pickup line (that “mentally and physically” kills me) are played utterly straight. Most crucially, Drury elides Louise’s reaction to the come-on completely: she simply goes on with her day, as if it were a perfectly normal thing for a man-of-the-cloth to say. It’s this incongruity, between the blasé tone and the absurdity of the situation, that makes the scene funny.

When literary humor falls flat for me, it’s because it loses credibility or emotional truth, often by being hyperbolic or—sigh—“wacky.” I like wackiness in certain contexts—The Ministry of Silly Walks!—but for the most part, prefer fiction that doesn’t pratfall or make funny faces. Above all, there needs to be a sense of narrative consequence: things are only funny in a rule-bound universe, one that operates by a consistent logic. In a world where anything can happen, the absurd becomes banal and, well, boring. (For this reason, people’s dreams are rarely funny.)

I’ll make some enemies here, but I recently tried to read a Douglas Adams novel to my son and gave up after a single chapter, baffled by why a supercomputer that can’t make a cup of tea is meant to be hilarious. It wasn’t so much the un-funniness that bothered me—tea humor isn’t my, well…—but that the comedy felt like it was coming from a jokebook, an authorial nudge-nudge, rather than from the characters or situation.

So my magic formula for making something funnier? When in doubt, leave the reaction out. Humor—like most of what makes fiction interesting—exists in the space between sentences. And unless you’re making a specific, unfunny point, don’t show your characters laughing. It’s akin to laughing at your own joke. Most importantly: Don’t be ashamed to be funny. There’s nothing “light” or “unserious” about comic fiction. It’s just good writing. Writers like Beckett and Joy Williams understand that comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin: they’re both expressions of the absurdity of existence.

You could argue, as Critchley does, that comedy is the higher art form: that it’s in fact darker than tragedy, that it more honestly portrays the human condition, since it doesn’t offer the snake oil of emotional catharsis. (What could be a better example of “mechanical inelasticity” than our refusal to adapt to climate change?) We’re all going to die, sooner than we’d like, and everything we love and cherish will disappear… ha ha! What on earth could be more ridiculous than that?

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Dream State by Eric Puchner is available now via Doubleday.