Nuts & Bolts

Humor Writing

By Doug Hecox, Special to Washington Independent Writers

On August 22, 2006, I spoke to members of Washington Independent Writers about my experiences as a humor writer. As I explained after the energetic 90-minute presentation, I neglected to use any of my prepared remarks. At the suggestion of one of the Pubspeak's attendees, I've provided the intended remarks.

Thank you for inviting me to be a part of your evening. I am hopeful that tonight will give me the chance to say funny things and explain how difficult it is to be a humor writer in D.C. After all, 535 members of Congress are flooding the market with their humorous writings, and even Vice President Cheney is getting in on it. Earlier this year, he wrote in Braille "I am a bad shot" in an old guy's face.

[Laughter/applause]

Being a comedian is just like being a writer. In fact, many of the funniest writers I know come from comedy backgrounds. Sadly, many of them refuse to write for publication making it a squandered natural resource. Comedians rely on the ability to write humor that others find entertaining. If the laughter isn't there, the paychecks aren't either. It's like singing for your supper, only funnier.

But humor writers learn a lot, too. Years ago, in one of my first newspaper pieces, I wrote about all the typos in the Constitution being the result of the Founding Fathers having been homeschooled.

That's when I got my first hate mail. It came from homeschoolers in my hometown, of all places, and their letters had no typos whatsoever. That's the first thing I checked. Every time there is a spelling bee, it's a homeschooler who wins—suggesting that they can spell anything, except "sense of humor."

What I learned is that not everyone shares my sense of humor. In fact, many people don't believe words should be funny in a newspaper. I call these people "editors." Too often, editors and publishers believe that any humor in the newspaper should be reserved for the comic strips.

What I have consistently tried to do is bank on my journalism degree, and blend news with humor. More and more people are leaving newspapers in favor of CNN or other televised news, and a growing number of those are relying on Jon Stewart as their primary source of news.

I'm not competing with Jon Stewart, nor am I with the Onion or with countless other entertainers out there. I am simply trying to help people smile while they are being informed. It's far easier to inform someone about the latest developments in tax reform through jokes and metaphors. Thankfully, I haven't needed to because there haven't been any developments in tax reform. So during the slow news periods, I get a little more latitude to write things I think are more funny than newsworthy. For example, I recently wrote a piece about "Snakes on a Plane," a movie that, for two hours, underscores the continuing problems with TSA. In June, when Kim Jong-il was threatening to fire nuclear missiles at America, I suggested that maybe his problem is that he needs a girlfriend. He wouldn't be so focused on America if he had a girlfriend, so I set up an account for him on eHarmony. Maybe some of you have seen it? "Are you the Pyong YIN to my Pyong YANG?"

[Hold for laughter/applause]

Some jokes work better in print but that too is a lesson. Not everything that is said is funny. In my opinion, humor must be written for the eye, not the ear. While I'm too close to what I do to accurately categorize the type of humor writing I do, I think it's probably more satire than anything.

Experts might say I verge on parody or lampoon, but it's probably more satire than anything—the special breed of humor that tries to make a point.

Will Rogers was right—you CAN be funny by just reading the news and reporting the facts. Some items are funnier than others but the daily newspaper is full of possibilities. I just have to cherry pick the topics I think have the greatest potential and, to the extent possible, mix it up each week.

By not being predictable, I am free to write about whatever and have my readers not complain too much about it. If George Will started writing about his favorite vacation spots or holiday recipes, his readers would freak out. I never want to find myself limited by my readers' expectations.

So long as I'm funny, people will continue to read me—but if all I wrote was political humor, I would be trapped just as much as George Will or Ann Coulter.

Also, I should add that political humor is the hardest to write. I don't mean that it takes extra work to do—if anything, it's half written for me by the newsmakers. What makes it the hardest is that it is not timeless. It is very dated very quickly, making the need to constantly write bigger for political humor than for any other kind.

I am working on a book right now that is a showcase of some of the non-political humor I do that hopefully will be as funny 25 years from now as it is today. Erma Bombeck wrote this kind of "general humor," as does Dave Barry, Garrison Keillor and Roy Blount. I don't know if Christopher Buckley's "Thank You for Not Smoking" will be funny 30 years from now, since all smoking will have been outlawed and lobbying to protect smokers will be seen as very passé. Political humor shows its age very quickly. Anyone remember Al Franken's book Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot? My point exactly. I'd love to write a book of Rush Limbaugh's pick-up lines so any guy could date a girl like Daryn Kagan. I think that relationship is one of the great mysteries of our time ... like David Copperfield and Claudia Schiffer. When Limbaugh was busted earlier this year for getting Viagra without a prescription, I felt a little bad for Daryn having to read that on the news.

[Laughter/hoots of agreement]

Stories about family, youth and even relationships—the human qualities—are timeless. Lewis Grizzard, who is also one of my favorites, wrote hunting and recreational stories about guys being stupid when girls aren't looking. People will be able to relate to that for centuries.

Regardless of the type, humor writing is a delicate and difficult thing, and I will try to share what little I know.

I worry that the interest many have in humor writing is taken advantage of by the writing industry, and by so-called instructors who suggest humor can be taught.

Humor cannot be taught. It is like rhythm, or musical ability. You either have it or you don't, and the worst music comes from those who think they have the special gift that the audience knows they don't. We all know the guy, or gal, at work who thinks they are funny—but aren't. Or the person in church who loves singing, but shouldn't. Humor is very much a genetic gift and, while we all appreciate it, we can't all do it. Humor can't be taught.

However, humor WRITING can be taught. To the extent that I can, I will try to explain what I mean and how to help you maximize your success as a humor writer.

Of all the writing genres, I maintain that humor writing is the most difficult of them all. Not the writing part—it's relatively easy, mostly because it is enjoyable. You, the writer, may find yourself chuckling along as you type, or laughing out loud after something particularly humorous emerges from the blank space on your page. It is engaging and immediately gratifying.

Even if no one ever reads it, or publishes it, you the writer had a good time writing it and that's the most important part. It's the truest definition of art—when the artist does it for its own sake, regardless of third-party opinion.

Because it is so enjoyable a pursuit, there is no shortage of humor writers—or those who think they are. When there is such a surplus, demand drops. For magazine writers, the outlets for humor writing are fairly scarce. Unless you want to write for Mad Magazine, you've got relatively few magazines interested in running humor for humor's sake. Instead, the bulk of writing work goes to fiction writers, reporters or reviewers.

Everyone thinks they are funny, even if they're not, making everyone a critic. This makes it even challenging. Any poet can peddle his or her written work, whether it rhymes or not, and be regarded as an artist. If the poem is no good, the listener often blames himself for not "getting it"  ... not because the art is unworthy.

Humor, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite. If the joke doesn't work, the audience—whether reader or listener—never bashes themselves for not getting it. They say the writer is not funny.

That is perhaps the biggest hurdle of any humor writer, whether comedian or not. Everyone is a judge, and, ultimately, is a better gauge of your ability than you are. If the audience—whether reader or listener—isn't laughing, you're not funny enough. Funny is relative.

I should add that, in a country that founds its literary pantheon on the work of Mark Twain—a humorist—you'd think there would be more outlets for written humor. The irony is not lost on me that America's arts and humanities crowd delights in naming Poet Laureate after Poet Laureate—the White House does, and nearly every governor does too—but there is no Humorist Laureate. Instead, there is only one prize for humor writers. It is called "payment." We have a Surgeon General, who represents the scientific and medical community as their best and brightest ambassador, but where is America's Humorist Laureate? At best, we have Dave Barry but then what?

I am hopeful that Congress will pass a law creating the position of Humorist Laureate. With all the comedians IN Congress, it seems like there would be no shortage of candidates each year.

But America's repeated claims that it prides itself on its sense of humor and that humor is the hallmark of freedom fall short. Book critics and reviewers rarely, if ever, review humor books. Humor writing is the red-headed stepchild of literature. Everyone says they like it, but never seems to like it enough to take it home and introduce it to the neighbors.

When was the last time any of you saw the size of the humor section in a bookstore? I believe that humor books are being printed on trees from the Amazon rainforest, because that's how few humor books there are anymore ... unless you consider Garfield, a cat who eats lasagna, funny. Or another Truly Tasteless Joke Book. Or a You Might Be a Redneck book or something by Larry the Cable Guy. Or yet ANOTHER Dave Barry book.

Dave Barry is less a humorist than a deforestation project.

[Laughter/gales of applause]

I read an interview where Dave Barry spends so much time working on his pieces that, by the time they are done, he no longer finds them very funny. On the other hand, I am literally bouncing off the walls until I get some feedback from people who agree with me that it's funny. I can't wait to share mine—I am a literary version of the proud parent who annoys everyone with pictures of his kids.

That need I have is probably just the comedian in me. Stand-up comedy is great for a humorist, because you write your little humorous pieces—some no longer than a sentence—and then you INSTANTLY get feedback. They either laugh, or they don't laugh. It's a focus group for your material, and helps to direct some of your writing. That is, when an audience laughs at something, you tend to write more of that. When they don't, you don't.

So, for anyone who wants to write humor, here are my Seven Tips on Humor Writing:

You don't have to be a comedian to write funny.

Most of the funniest books ever written were not written by comedians. Everyone thinks John Kennedy O'Toole's Confederacy of Dunces is the funniest book ever written. I disagree, but that's beside the point. He wasn't a comedian. David and Amy Sedaris—also not comedians. Bill Clinton's autobiography, on the other hand, was pretty funny—if you're into fiction. I'd heard that the audio version of that book was up for comedy album of the year, until I learned the nomination was made by Tom DeLay. Richard Nixon's "enemies list" is another example of great humor writing by a non-comedian. The only joke he ever told was "I'm not a crook." It was a good joke, but it wasn't enough to make me think of him as a comedian. It was enough to get him on "Laugh In," though.

Know your audience.

In a comedy club, every audience finds something different funny. Some folks like that folksy, homespun stuff. Some like dirtier or more provocative material. Readers are the same way, but since one never knows who will be reading, the writer really must strive to be of interest to the widest array of people possible. If I mock a politician, he/she should be well-known. I don't want readers to feel like I'm talking over them. It's kind of like being invited into someone's home ... you must include them in whatever the conversation. It's just polite. If you talk over them, like Ann Coulter, George Will and Maureen Dowd sometimes do, you select out a large readership.

Don't pander

Don't try to predict what your audience will find funny. Odds are, if you think it's funny, they will too. Writing to your audience is far less satisfying than writing FOR your audience. Part of what I dislike about some humor writing—which more often appears on TV than in print—is humor geared to a specific audience. "Saturday Night Live" does so much humor based on other TV shows that it feels lazy to me. They do spoofs of "Jeopardy," or reality shows, or Bill O'Reilly, or Chris Matthews ... and they're funny, but it feels like low-hanging fruit.

Make it relatable

If the reader doesn't know what you're talking about, fine. Most readers read because they want new insight or knowledge, but they won't find it funny if they can't relate to it.

In 1998, when I was calling around to various newspapers trying to get them to pick up my column, one of them asked if I did "ag humor." Agricultural humor—cows, horses, ranching—and because I'd heard "no" a lot that day, I said "Yes I do!" They had just lost someone, and needed a new writer for an existing column that strove to find humor in the ranching lifestyle.

I don't know much about ranching, but I knew that the readers of this rural

Idaho newspaper would never believe the writings of a guy who was single and living in Washington, D.C., a block from the Capitol. So, for the sake of the readers, I invented a fictional world where I had a wife, two kids, 400 head of cattle and in-laws I am not wild about.

I had to do research into issues affecting ranchers, so I could be funny without making fun OF the ranching people reading. Those readers wouldn't care about my humorous thoughts on the Farm Bill or the latest hanky-panky in the Ag committee hearings. The many years I wrote this "ag" column served as the basis for my second book, Graze Expectations. (My apologies to Charles Dickens, who is probably spinning like a lathe in his grave for my misappropriation of his title.)

Make it unpredictable.

Nothing is funny when you know what is going to happen. The man slipping on a banana peel isn't funny if you know it ahead of time ... though you might watch just to see his expression as he goes down. Never telegraph the joke. Make it a pleasant surprise and move on to something else surprising.

Make sure it's funny.

Readers and audiences alike will forgive pretty much anything, if it's funny. I told John Kerry jokes to Democrats on Election Night 2004, and I told George "Dubya" jokes to Republicans. Funny is funny, which is why I actively test certain things out on my friends and family to make sure it gets the right reaction before I send it to the papers.

When I'm writing pieces about the evils of Amber Alert, paying off the national debt with pay-per-view wino races, or why Britney Spears is a redneck in denial, things that could obviously strike someone wrong unless it's couched just right, I focus group most of my pieces to make sure I'm saying it as humorously as possible.

Also, my goal is to make sure it's funny, but not necessarily to avoid offending someone. I have no problem offending people—provided that it's funny.

I won't offend people I know, and I don't go after racial or ethnic differences ... not because of enlightenment on my part, but because I just don't find it funny. Religious differences are fair game, and I obviously like to find humor in the bad decisions of our elected officials ... but to be funny is to commit oneself to the humor of it, and not to water it down to be less abrasive.

I'm all for political correctness, but not at the expense of the humor of a piece. The writer must either be willing to offend everyone, or be afraid to offend anyone. British dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan said, "There is no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature; the malice of a good thing is the barb that makes it stick." In humor, the writer is bound to write something that either fails to deliver or, worse, is misconstrued and taken the wrong way. That's the risk, and that's part of what makes it exciting.

You're only as funny as your next joke.

Never rest on your laurels. Fiction writers can write one piece, and ride it for the rest of their lives. Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone with the Wind, only wrote that one piece. She was afraid she could never top it or so it is said, but it's okay. If you only wrote Gone With the Wind, people would still applaud when you walk into a room. Humor writers get no such free pass. Humor writers are only as funny as their next joke.

HERE ARE THE ANSWERS TO A FEW QUESTIONS THAT I THOUGHT MIGHT BE ASKED (BUT, IN REALITY, WEREN'T).

Who are your favorite humor writers?

That's like asking what is my favorite Halloween candy. I like it all for different reasons. Richard Armour is probably the most important one to me, since it was his book It All Started with Eve got me started in humorous speeches and, later, into stand-up. His style of humor, with short sentences and a LOAD of puns, is something I still strive for.

Philip Roth for Our Gang—I've read many of his other works and, while they are good, they are clearly not humor. Our Gang is very funny and I could read it over and over and like it for the same reasons I liked it the first time. It is a mean, and accurate, assessment of Nixon. I don't want to ruin it for you, but he ends it by Nixon eventually going to Hell ... and then running for Satan.

Will Rogers for making it not only acceptable to publicly mock politicians but expected. Groucho Marx, whose comedy act never made me laugh, but his writings did. He is an excellent writer who actively tried to be funny all the time, and in every way. He was a superb humor writer.

I like Lisa de Moraes and Joel Achenbach of the Post—I know Joel is known for his humor writing, but Lisa has some well-crafted wit she reveals once in a while. She could be a good humor writer if she wanted to be.

Bathroom graffito writers—those guys are constantly writing. Everywhere I go, there they are. And it's not like they have good distribution—they have to go and physically write everywhere they want their readers to read. It's like life before the Gutenberg press. I always worry about behavioral conditioning. If you know anything about Pavlov's dogs, who salivated when hearing a bell, I always wonder whether bathroom graffitists have to be near a bathroom when writing their Christmas cards.

I like Garrison Keillor not only for how natural he makes his writing sound, but also for the volume of it. I'm not as wild about his books but the playwriting he does for the show—from the mid-1970s until the late 1990s—he wrote the whole thing himself.

Greg Nagan, who used to write a column—briefly—in Chicago for the work he used to do on a historical website called "The Morons Almanac." It's written very much like Richard Armour, and like mine-it's very good, and if he was still in this country, I'd buy him a beer. He moved to Scandinavia to be with his wife, so now he's writing sort of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court series of pieces on his transition to Scandinavian life.

The Onion, obviously, and Dave Barry for keeping a withering genre alive and healthy. No one is doing what he does as well as he does and, as a professional courtesy, I hope someday he'll say the same about me!

From where do you get your ideas?

It would be very funny if I said "voices in my head," but the truth is the voices in my head aren't saying anything because they know I'm listening. They wait until I go to sleep to talk.

I read the newspaper, and watch CNN, CSPAN and anything else. I'm a voracious reader, and with all that information speeding through my brain, you can't help but find some humorous elements. It's like panning for gold. Some days are richer than others, but there are always flecks of gold in there somewhere.

How do you deal with writer's block?

I go through slumps once in a while—periods of absolute creativelessness. This answer is proof of that. I also go through periods of hypergraphia, where I'm writing like a fiend and everything comes out well. I try to stockpile as much as I can to help me get through the slumps. I've also found that creative slumps are often the result of too much routine. Routine is the enemy of the creative mind.

For my money, the best way to end a dry spell is to break out of the routine—do something unusual that you wouldn't otherwise do. Eat something new. Wear your shoes on the wrong feet and walk through a mall. Try going a whole day speaking with a German accent. You may not win any friends this way but you'll definitely break out of your rut.

Ironically, I've been trying to write a book about how to combat writers block, but I can't figure out how to start it.

[LAUGHTER/SATISFIED APPLAUSE]