Nuts & Bolts
Business of Freelancing
By Mary Collins, WIW Board Member
“Mom, your hair looks like the Everything Bagel,” my 10-year-old
daughter said, which was funny, at least I thought so initially, until
I realized that most Everything Bagels are covered with lots of white
salt.
I hadn’t planned to write a humor column about whether or not
I should color my hair now that I am in my mid-forties, but people kept
saying the most unfortunate things about my hair.
So I started keeping a file. A year went by and I had enough anecdotes
to pen a 1,000-word first-person essay, complete with the Everything
Bagel quotation, which wound up in the middle somewhere near a reference
to the color of uncooked chicken breasts.
I sold the piece to The Washington Post StylePlus page, a great
place to submit if you like to write light humor about things in everyday
life.
In my classes I try to convince my students that they can do the same
thing: Keep a file of funny things that relate to one specific topic
and then pull it together in a short essay. Of course, most people tell
me with a very straight face, “I’m not funny.” Of course,
well, I believe them.
But should I? Every few semesters I have a funny class where we spend
a third of our time finding everything incredibly hilarious (especially
the writing process). When I think of funny student Holly Smith (who
published her work in Salon and had an essay reprinted in The
Best Contemporary Humor: Mirth of A Nation) immediately comes to
mind.
She’s not convinced that a person can “learn” humor.
“You might be able to get him to suck the gravitas out of his
work here and there, but it probably won’t feel very good to him,” said
Smith.
So funny is born not made.
“I think its overall rhythm almost needs to be felt. It’s
kind of like poetry that way,” Smith said. “It’s also
like poetry in that humor writers can generally be found in the unemployment
line right behind the poets.”
The fiction students I queried felt a bit more optimistic. When I asked
Fiction Advisor Mark Farrington to name some funny students,
he mentioned Dave Housley, who told me via e-mail that
he thought people could learn “some elements of humor.” He
suggested writers read people who do humor well, like Aimee Bender and George
Saunders.
“I just read a great interview with Aimee Bender where she said
it’s just much more fun to write from the point of view of somebody
who is unlikable or at least a little crazy,” Housley told me. Housley
himself likes to play with oddball narrators, which is probably a lot
like putting together a file of clips for a nonfiction writer: a deliberate
step that shapes your material in ways that will force it toward something
offbeat, witty, satirical or even flat out funny. Housley mentioned the
journal Swivel, which publishes funny writing by women, as a
potential market.
After 15 years of teaching, I lean toward Housley’s point-of-view
and believe some level of humor can be learned just like any other aspect
of the writing craft. For some people it comes more easily, because they
already have a Smith frame of mind (I won’t explain that), but
for others, they have to work at it and be willing to take a few risks
with their voice or even their subject matter.
Smith wrote some off-color laugh-lines into the eulogy for her mother’s
funeral.
“The minister was horrified, but it’s not like this particular
scenario will ever play out again. Just don’t expect him to make
idle chitchat with you after the service,” Smith remarked.
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