From the Archives – Dying is Easy, Comedy is Hard

“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”

Truer words have never been spoken and handed down — except for maybe Donald O’Connor’s bit in Singin’ in the Rain with the segment, “Make ’em laugh, make ’em laugh.” The whole world really does want to laugh, especially in hard economic times.

The problem with comedy and/or humor is that humor is hard to do, and even harder to do well. As a writer, many of my more popular pieces have been comedic pieces. For those pieces that weren’t written for a specific market, those comedic pieces have often been my toughest sales because of the simple, subjective fact that what’s funny to one person isn’t to another.

To make comedy/humor work, the writer really does have to have a well-defined sense of natural timing and the balance of a tightrope walker to pull off the natural pacing of a good joke or pun without falling into either “unfunny” or, worse, “stupid”. Then, if the writer can manage that balancing act, the material has to hit the right editor at the right time. Unfortunately, that is simply luck and a different sense of timing.

Problems arise when, if the book/story/script is accepted and then touted as comic or “laugh out loud” funny, it goes out with certain expectations. Those can then fall quite flat if the author isn’t careful. In two cases recently, I was completely flummoxed by such labels. One was a book that has yet to see print that I edited for a small publisher. The other is Jonathan Barnes’ The Somnambulist.

The Somnambulist was actually a good book. I rather enjoyed it as I read the entire thing over Thanksgiving weekend while traveling. However, the first blurb on the back cover touted it as comedic. And though there were a few “cute” moment, it wasn’t all that funny. Odd and ironic, weird and unusual, yes — and I like weird and unusual — but from the blurb on the back cover, I went into the book with a certain expectation that was quickly shattered. Fortunately, the story itself kept my attention and intrigued me enough to keep reading.

Part of the interpretation comes not solely from a single person’s perception, but cultural issues. The Somnambulist is set and written in a British setting and culture. If there were funny bits, it may have been lost on an American reader. What I found was something more Gaiman-esque qualities, and though Neil Gaiman, as a person, is hysterically funny, I don’t categorize his writing as such. That’s how Barnes came off to me. Which then speaks to the subjective nature of comedy/humor.

Then there’s the other extreme. The non-fiction, anecdotal book I edited for a small press publisher was also touted as humorous looks into life lessons. And, in a completely subjective manner, I didn’t find it as such. In fact, if I hadn’t been paid to try to make it better, I doubt I would’ve finished it.

What I think the problem was in this case was a sense of “forced” humor. The author is probably a very humorous spoken-word storyteller. However, when the author put the stories on paper, the spirit of the story was lost in trying to be grammatically correct or something. Jokes fell flat. Analogies and plays on words meaning to be funny were, at times, insulting. Nothing was deliberate, but there’s timing and a flow to humor that just missed a beat or three with this set of stories. The sad part is that several even made the author look personally inept or incompetent.

I could see what the author was trying to do. However, I couldn’t believe the blurb that touted the stories as “laugh out loud”. Others might find them amusing, apparently the publisher did, but I didn’t.