0 comments/ 7440 views/ 0 favorites Phunny Is As Phunny Does By: Cal Y. Pygia Writing humor isn't easy. Maybe it can be taught, maybe not. Who knows for sure? Opinion is divided. However, one can always try, both to teach and to learn. Therefore, in this essay I am going to try. . . to teach (and, maybe in the process, to learn) a thing or two. First, nothing is funny in itself, although some people seem to believe that some--maybe even most--things are. Humorists and comedians know the difference. Writing humor is hard. To be funny, the writer has to find that which is humorous about a person, place, or thing. Appearance? Attitude or belief? Behavior? Circumstances or situation? Condition? Eccentricity? Level of experience? Location? The type of obstacles that the person, place, or thing creates for others or which others create for him, her, or it? The reactions of others, especially those who observe him or her? His or her relationships with others? His or her personal values? See? The humor must be identified; then, it must be brought out, or extracted, and readers must be shown (but seldom, if ever, told) both what is funny and why it is so. Which brings us to our second principle: how to make with the funny. One way is to use juxtaposition. By placing the unfunny next to the funny, the funny will, first, appear to be funny, and, second, appear to be even funnier than it probably is. That's why comedy teams typically involve a straight man (the unfunny one) and the comedian: Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Mutt and Jeff. Another way to make with the funny is to combine something important with something insignificant. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xander Harris says, "I mean, the dead rose! We should at least have had an assembly." Such an effect is humorous because it unexpectedly skews our perspective. One can also say or describe something incongruous, incompatible, or absurd. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cordelia Chase, after running over another girl during Driver's Education class, remarks, "It's the worst day of my life, and she's trying to make it about her leg!" Such a technique works because it characterizes the speaker, making her so monstrous in her narcissistic self-regard that we simply must laugh. (As these two examples show, it helps, in learning to be funny, to watch others, who have already learned how to inject humor into situations, themselves be funny.) Describing one thing in terms of another--using a metaphor or an analogy, in other words--can be humorous, if the comparisons mix the ridiculous with the sublime. (Erma Bombeck often uses this technique to great effect in her books, comparing human with animal behavior, for example, in All I Know About Animal Behavior I Learned in Loehman's Dressing Room.) Likewise, comparing courtship to hunting can produce belly laughs aplenty. Ludicrous evidence in support of an argument, which, in itself, may or may not be absurd, is another tactic of humorists. Mark Twain uses this approach in The Innocents Abroad, when he says he is going to report his own personal experiences and thoughts about the places he visits on a pleasure excursion, rather than simply having his sensibilities informed by canned travel books' reports. Treating fictional characters as if they were real, flesh-and-blood people gets laughs, as Mark Twain knew: he chronicles Adam and Eve's adventures in The Diaries of Adam and Eve. Likewise, treating fictitious places as real locations can provide material for humor. Twain mines the land of the hereafter for laughs in Captain Stormfield's Visit to heaven. I myself have attempted to make Literotica's readers laugh in a number of essays. Two examples are "Anatomical Characterization" (in which, tongue in cheek, I suggest that writers can learn how to characterize by following the example that Edgar Allan Poe sets in his caricature [as opposed to character] sketches in "King Pest") and "Animal Penises," in which, describing the extremely bizarre male appendages of various animals (and an insect or two), I argue that "what's good for the goose is good for the gander." In "Build Me a Woman," I lay out absurd specifications for the design of the "Perfect Woman," as seen from the perspective of a chauvinistic, sexist, and misogynistic male narrator; in "Bump and Grind," I recount slogans which actually appear on automobile bumper stickers, which allows me to argue that the messages that these advertisements bear represent a sort of poor man's dating service ("Bumper stickers can help you date your mate"); and, in "Courtship Disorder," I advise readers how they may "have" their "hair pie while "eating it, too." "Dirty Words" is an investigation of "our lascivious lexicon"; "Do Boobs Prove Intelligent Design?," as "a dissertation on the theological implications of breasts," is a takeoff on, and put-down of, the cosmological argument, or the argument from design; and "Dream Girls," is a suggestion that women, of a certain type, have "cum a long way, baby." "How to Flash Your Tits, Cunt, or Ass" satirizes both process analysis ("how to") essays in general and flashing in particular; "How to Talk Like a Slut," another satire, also parodies teenage girls who affect a sluttish manner; "Painting the Barn," represents a not-so-gentle satire concerning the lengths to which aging women are willing to go to pretend to be young, glamorous, and sexy, despite all those wrinkles and all that sagging skin; and "Phunny Munny" is a satire on the economy as it existed and exists (sort of) under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. "Public Nudity, or Decent Exposure," is a critique, of sorts, of exhibitionists' exhibitions; "Random Thoughts on Tits" is a curmudgeonly, but, hopefully, funny, commentary, or diatribe, about breasts such as Andy Rooney might have written, had he been a humorist; and "The Lexicon of Humorous Erotica" is a treatise on what makes some words funnier, if not sexier, than others. "The World's 10 Greatest Inventions" discusses sex toys; "Thoughts on Pussies" explains why we love them; "Tits: A Hands-Off Topic" is a satire on political correctness; "Underclothes Make the Man--or Woman" lampoons the dress-for-success mentality and pokes fun (pun intended) at the idea of binary gender; "Writing Humor Dos and Don'ts," is a tongue-in-cheek guide to the funny, as is "Writing Humorous Erotica"; and "Write Your own Captions" is a rather ill-conceived, ill-received effort that serves as an excellent example of how not to be funny. I'm not suggesting that I'm Erma Bombeck or Mark Twain, but I am suggesting that I have learned a thing or two about being funny. I've identified a few of the techniques for doing so (there are lots of others), but, more importantly, I have recommended a bunch of examples (my own!) of the art, so that you can study them on your own, learning to discern the tricks of the trade, as practiced by yours truly, many of which techniques, of course, I've stolen from much better humorists, such as Erma Bombeck and Mark Twain. Literotica has a Richter's scale of sorts which seeks to measure the magnitude of reader delight (or disgust) at writers' works. Five is considered exceptionally delightful, 1 exceptionally disgusting. By positing this numeral as the numerator (i. e., the actual number of points awarded by readers) and using five as a constant denominator (i. e., the total possible number of points that could have been awarded by readers) and dividing the former by the latter, one can obtain a percentage, which some readers (and writers) might prefer to a 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 approach to quality assessment. Percentages can also be associated with letter grades (100 - 90 = "A"; 89 - 80 = "B"; 79 - 70 = "C"; 69 - 60 = "D"; 59- 0 = "F"). Applying this system, at the time of the writing of this essay, to the humorous stories I've written, I come up with this index: "Anatomical Characterization" = 4.00, or 80%; "Animal Penises" = 3.62 = 72%; "Build Me a Woman" = no data; "Bump and Grind" = no data; "Courtship Disorder" = 2.38 or 48%; "Dirty Words" = 4.00 or 80%; "Do Boobs Prove Intelligent Design" = no data; "Dream Girls" = no data; "How to Flash Your Tits, Cunt, or Ass" = 3.46 or 69%; "How to Talk Like a Slut" = 2.73 or 55%; "Painting the Barn" = 1.60 or 32%; "Phunny Munny" = 3.33 or 67%; "Public Nudity, or Decent Exposure" = 4.00 or 80%; "Random Thoughts on Tits" = 4.48 or 90%; "The Lexicon of Humorous Erotica" = no data; "The World's 10 Greatest Inventions" = 4.21 or 84%, 3.73 or 75%, 3.93 or 79%, 4.00 or 80%, 4.29 or 86%, 3.81 or 76%, 3.62 or 72%, 4.2 or 84%, 3.56 or 71%, 3.71 or 74%, respectively; "Thoughts on Pussies" = 2.50 or 50%; "Tits: A Hands-Off Topic" = 3.83 or 77%; "Underclothes Make the Man--or Woman" = 3.00 or 66%; "Writing Humor Dos and Don't's" = 3.00 = 66%; "Writing Humorous Erotica" = no data; "Write Your own Captions" is an ill-conceived, ill-received that serves as an excellent counterexample of how to be funny = 3.62 or 72% and 3.0 or 66%, respectively. ("No data" indicates a lack of votes, probably because I turned off the voting option for these essays at the time that I posted them.) Seeing one's efforts numerically evaluated in such a brutal fashion is illuminating in several other ways as well. Whether one, as the author of the essays, agrees with the readers' assessments of his or her work is irrelevant. The numbers are what they are, emotions be damned. As such, they provide writers with a way of seeing which of their essays or stories readers like most and which they hate, allowing writers a chance to discern what their readers want and to respond accordingly. Indeed, this system even allows both readers and writers to rank an author's individual works according to the works' respective degrees of reader-reported delight or disgust. (In my case, among my humorous essays, "Random Thoughts on Tits" comes out as most delightful, and "Painting the Barn" as most disgusting [maybe because it disses grandma?]) Since writers write for publication, what readers want and like is important, whether writers agree or disagree on a personal level. Therefore, such considerations are helpful, and readers' opinions, no matter how wrongheaded and asinine (just kidding, of course), should be taken into account. By considering what worked and what didn't from readers' point of view will help writers to become better writers and readers to become more satisfied readers. Readers are writers' masters, and we authors, as mere servants, must constantly attune ourselves to our betters' desires, continually learning from them how better to serve and service their pleasures and needs. A word of parting advice: in evaluating your work, don't think a 70% grade (C-) is bad; it's not. Readers, like any other masters, are hard to please. But remember, a good servant can be better--always!