How to Write Killer Prose (8)

The funny stuff

The secret to being funny as a fiction writer can be conveyed by an equation:

Character + Situation = Humour

It really is that simple.

But easy? No. Because both character and situation have to be established for their collision to make you laugh. There really is no short cut. It's a typical writer's paradox. The best jokes, one-liners or absurd events - the material that seems to fly spontaneously from the page - are almost always the result of careful planning. The set-up is everything. That's not to say that some of the funniest stuff doesn't occur spontaneously. But when it does, it almost always springs from earlier work on character and situation (which in practise you can't fully separate, as each generates the other).

An example. Your situation is a funeral, a sombre event. Your character is a friend of the deceased, but doesn't know the family. Nevertheless he's been asked to say a few words at the grave-side. Unaccustomed to public speaking, he's fortified himself with a few stiff drinks. As he launches his speech, by then quite drunk, it becomes clear to everyone except him that he's at the wrong funeral...

That scenario's just off the top of my head, and neither the character nor the situation is intrinsically hilarious. There's nothing about a funeral or a self-conscious man that is funny per se.  But when you bring the two together with skill, clever timing and a suffiency of preliminary spadework, the payoff is comedy. A great set piece.

So how do we actually do this? How do we make sure that the whole joke doesn't fall flat, as it very easily could do? What are the ingredients that need to be in place?

Let's zoom in.

For this set-up, I might establish the guy as someone quite controlled. A shy, self-effacing type who gets extremely anxious at the thought of speaking in public, but has nevertheless agreed to do so. He might also be someone who usually drinks very little, so that he's unable to judge how much will loosen him up, and how much will make him flat-out drunk.

.The guy's anxious. He paces around his room. The funeral's likely to be an emotional affair. Has he bitten off more than he can chew in agreeing to speak? Will he choke? He prepares a short, conventional address, the minimum he can decently get away with.

The event's getting closer. Our guy has a quick belt of vodka to loosen him up. He's still nervous, so he has another, and a third. The booze doesn't seem to be working, so he goes for a fourth.

Time to go. The Uber's outside. He straightens his tie and gets in. It's only when he reaches the cemetery that he realises he's left the speech at home. But by then the vodka's kicked in, and he thinks: what the fuck? That speech was so boring. I should speak from the heart.

He sees a funeral in progress and joins the mourners. Grins woozily at the politely bemused faces, and... you get the picture.

Of course this is a creaky, clichéd scenario, but the point I'm making is that for potentially funny stuff to work, the relevant character traits have to be soundly established. Generating events to establish them will provide you with plot strands going forward. Can you use the fact that, tomorrow morning, our guy is going to wake up with a hangover? Perhaps he'll run into someone from that funeral later on. Perhaps his girlfriend's father was there. Cheesy, but you get my drift.

Imagine a pyramid, with your funny moment at the apex. From a broad narrative base, everything narrows towards that moment. We've established a shy, abstemious, self-conscious guy, and created a situation (public speaking at a solemn event) where his character is going to be acutely challenged. This gives us tension (how will he cope?) and the tension is ramped up when he decides that hitting the vodka bottle is the way to go. With this double tension driving the story forward, we engineer the by-now anticipated collision of character and situation, and the resulting pile-up gives us our payoff.

Very few people are funny as themselves. I've met a number of comedians over the years, and very few of them are funny when they're not doing their professional thing. A lot of journalism tries to be funny. Ingratiating columnists endlessly trot out the same tired old blah about their supposedly slatternly behaviour, unrequited lust, fan-girling, beta-male incompetence and the rest of it. The problem is they're writing as themselves, and the results are cringe-making. Professional comedians know that all comedy springs from character, which is why they tend to present hyper-versions of themselves - as grumps, ditzes, drag queens or whatever.

In everyday conversation, people who aren't funny often feel impelled to try to be. They typically fall back on recycling ancient catch-phrases ('Does my bum look big in this?'), and even though no-one finds that joke funny any more, listeners tend to laugh, or at least smile, because they're afraid they'll look cruel if they don't (my advice: go for it, look cruel). In the TV series The Office (UK version), Ricky Gervais uses the absolute not-funniness of people who think they're funny as the driver of many of the series's funniest strands. 'Finchy', for example, thinks he's a king of banter, but we know he's just an asshole.

Humour is tricky. No one is more embarrassing than the relentless striver after laughs. But when it works - when a well set-up moment erupts like Vesuvius - it can be glorious. But everything goes back to character. Building up to a funny moment is much more calculation than inspiration. Build up your character, create a situation rich in challenge and tension, bring the two together, and you're laughing. And hopefully, so are we.