Where Comedy Comes From

I love comedy. Making people laugh and smile is the only thing I want to do in life. And yet, I find it ironic that the large majority of my writing isn't very funny. How come I can speak clearly and concisely about a topic, but not make people laugh while I do it? Where does comedy come from?

From my experience, comedy comes from one of two places: extreme comfort and extreme discomfort. Imagine that you're talking about the subject that you know better than anything else on earth. Imagine that you've talked about it more times than you can count and the explanation never changes. You get bored. Eventually, you'll start cracking jokes while you talk to try to stave off that boredom. The subject is so comfortable that saying silly (or weird) things is the only way to spice it up.

Now, imagine that you have to give a speech on a subject you've never studied and barely know exists. You're trembling, your mouth is dry, and the note cards you're holding are all blank. What are you going to do? In all likelihood, you're going to start with the subject, hem and haw for a couple of minutes, then start playing around with the words of the subject (as opposed to the meaning of it). For example, if your speech was on the difficulties of establishing Green initiatives, the first thing you might say would be, "If I've learned anything from the lessons I learned as a child, it's that it ain't easy being Green." It's the worst kind of groaner, but it's better to get that than boos or silence.

Between these two extremes, there lies everything else. And everything that isn't comedy is drama. So if the extremes yield comedy, then everything between them yield drama. That's why drama is so much easier than comedy; it's not extreme. Drama, or seriousness, comes when you know something about a subject, but not absolutely everything about it. It comes when you are trying to explain an idea you just learned or when you are writing about a subject you're confident of, but for the first time.

When you write, be aware of when you're funny and when you're serious. If you're funny, is it because you know exactly what you're talking about or is it because you have no idea what you're doing? If you're being serious, is it because the piece is serious in nature, or because you are unconfident or inexperienced?

If you stick with a field or genre, make sure you write in the appropriate tone. Hard-bitten detectives don't do shtick, but they will if you start getting bored of writing serious stuff. Zany Saturday morning cartoon characters don't study the mentality of serial killers, but if you have no idea what they should be doing, you may not be able to think of anything else.