Funny Moments
Why did the writer cross the road?
To get to the multi-story building on the other side
What do you get if you cross a cereal grain with an informal expression of thanks?
A rye-ta
Okay, I’ll stop there before I have you all fleeing for the hills like a belligerence of bellicose buffaloes. I wouldn’t want that. I’m sure you’re all a little more discerning when it comes to the things that make you laugh. So, I’ll skip over my poor attempts at humour (hopefully the humour I’m weaving into my novel-in-progress is a little more nuanced than the humour I’ve come up with here!) and get straight into the wagyu beef fillet of what I’m waffling on about this month, namely funny moments, namely eleven and a half things to add a slice of humour into your writing.
Funny sounds
I would argue that we should pay attention to sound in any sort of writing. I would also suggest that word sound (and how to use it) is something that most writers undervalue. Sound creates tone. Tone sets the mood of a piece. And if we’re aiming for humour then sound can be a good place to start. Some words just sound funny. In How to Take a Vacation: A Guide for Medieval Women (Maria Poulatha | Okay Donkey), I love the carefully-chosen list of French words in the seventh segment – “parapluie, pantoufle, choufleur.” Those words all make use of (a) plosive sounds (sounds which are forced out our lips like Ps and Bs, Ts and Ds), (b) consonant clusters (two or more consonant sounds grouped together like PL, CH or FL) and (c) long vowels (the OU in both “pantOUfle” and “chOUfleur, and the EUR in “chouflEUR”); “parapluie” includes a diphthong, which is a sound that both sounds funny and has a funny-sounding name. Similar words can be found in English – “aubergine”, “buffoon”, “bungalow”, “fluorescent”, “bucktoothed”, “duplicitous”, “floccinaucinihilipilification” all have similar qualities to that list of funny French words. This is where a thesaurus comes in handy. Mostly, I caution against going synonym searching, but when leaning into the humorous, the thesaurus is your friend.
Funny alliteration
Just before that list of French words, Poulatha makes use of alliteration in “feel faint at the French words”; and there’s another run of F sounds earlier in the section in “funds from friends and family.” Again, this is making use of sound in a way that heightens the humorous. Alliteration (repetition of word-starting consonant sounds) works well. Assonance (repetition of in-word sounds) also work well, especially when it leans into internal rhyme as in “his hAIR was bEAR-like, vERy cOARse and vERy brown.”
Funny groups of three
There’s an interesting overlap in the techniques that work well for lyrical writing (use of sound, use of alliteration, use of rhythm, use of repetition) and the techniques that work well for humorous writing; and one of those techniques is grouping things into threes. When it comes to rhythm, three is a magic number. The rule of three is seen in everything from “veni, vidi, vici” to “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” to “Snap, Crackle and Pop”; and in humour, it’s referred to as the “comic triple.” We see one of these in the fourth section of “How to Take a Vacation”: “Learn new songs, see the world, and abet some despicable crimes.” The first element (the set-up) is expected, the second (the anticipation) continues the list in a similar fashion, but the third (the punch-line) lurches the sequence into the humorous and the unexpectedly bizarre.
Funny shifts
Lurching into the unexpected is often a great way of eliciting a humorous response. In The Pelt Collector (Gaynor Jones | MoonPark Review), we can find these sorts of moments throughout. There is one of those comic triples in the second sentence (“You asked me what I liked and I said nature, walks, everything I’d seen on your profile”). Then we have the unexpected weirdness of the man taking out a clam in place of a ring box. And just below that, there’s the unexpected lurch in “otters were hunted for their pelts, but also for their penis bones.”
Funny clichés
Another thing that can be shifted into the unexpected is the much-maligned cliché. Writers are often advised to steer clear of clichés. We are mostly in the game of looking for more original ways of describing the world. But clichés can be un-cliché-ed by taking them somewhere unexpected. If I say, “all that glitters”, most of you will automatically complete that phrase with “is not gold.” But what if we shift it instead into “All that glitters is not microplastic…” In a similar fashion, you might change “through thick and thin” to “through thick and thinning hair” and “ignorance is bliss” might become “ignorance is blisters.”
Funny word play
A lot of humour comes from that sort of playing around with words – “blisters” for “bliss”, “thinning” for “thin.” That second example makes use of a word family, words that share a common root but are either (a) different parts of speech (i.e. “to play” [verb], “a play” [noun], “playful” [adjective], “playfully” [adverb]) or (b) extended through prefixes (i.e. “UNplayful”) or suffixes (i.e. “playDATE”). These word families are used in a technique called polyptoton where the same root word is used in a variety of ways. Again, this is something which is often used to create lyrical writing, but it can also be used for humorous effect. For example, “Mrs Hall was UPSTANDING. She was always STANDING UP for her right to blast disco music at eleven o’clock at night.”
Funny mistakes
Word play leads me to spoonersims, a general silliness named after the Reverend W. A. Spooner who supposedly got his words in a muddle, or his “murds in a woddle” as he would no doubt say. A spoonerism involves the transposition of the opening sounds of two adjacent words so that “funny bone” become “bunny phone” and “doing the chores” becomes “chewing the doors.” There are also kniferisms (switching the vowel sound in the middle of a word) so that “hypodermic needle” becomes “hypodeemic nerdle”, and forkerisms (the end of a word gets switched around) so that “the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge” become “the Duch and Dukess of Cambridge.”
Funny voice
Using spoonerisms will certainly lend an interesting tone of voice to whatever you’re writing; and tone of voice, for me, is often key to unlocking the humorous. Consider the rye tone of both “How to Take a Vacation” and “The Pelt Collector”; I equally love the tone of voice that Lindz McLeod evokes in Harald Hardrada Intensifies (Lindz McLeod | FlashBackFiction). It makes use of those plosive sounds I mentioned above (see “Buoyed by battle-rage” or “plummeting hawk, piercing his throat”) as well as alliteration, internal rhyme and rhythmic mirroring (“A true king. A fallen fool.”) which is yet another lyrical technique that works well in comedy.
Funny asides
One of the techniques that brings the voice to life in “Harald Hardrada Intensifies” is the use of humorous asides. A great example of this is “Hardrada—not one of humanity’s natural philosophers—felt his palms itch for a weapon.”
Funny similes
Another technique that McLeod uses to create the humour in her story is analogy. In the fourth-from-last paragraph, the setting sun is described as “swollen like a festering wound and just as scarlet”, an image that has been pushed so far, it becomes absurd and adds to the other elements of humour all around it. Similarly, see “poke out our eyes like a Vaudevillian stage performer” in Send Us Your Stories (Paul Riker | SmokeLong Quarterly) which is another piece I love for its humorous tone of voice.
Funny exaggerations
Mostly, the humour in “Send Us Your Stories” comes down to the way these submission guidelines are an exaggeration of what writers will be familiar with from less tongue-in-cheek guidelines. Anything that is familiar to your target audience can equally be pushed in this way – Kik Lodge does similar in Third-person Bio (Kik Lodge | Ellipsis Zine). In “Send Us Your Stories”, there are lists pushed to the extreme, there are similes and other analogies pushed to the extreme, there is imagery pushed to the extreme. There are also lyrical techniques in here (“grow and grow and grow”, the use of epizeuxis, being another technique to add to our ever-growing list). There is alliteration and word play and shifts into the unexpected. There are groups of three. There are funny words. Basically, everything I’ve waffled on about above. And then to round things off, we have a slice of “anesis” – a sentence attached to the end of a passage (or in this case a whole piece) to diminish the effect of everything that has come before. After all of that exaggeration, we get the exact opposite. We get the mundane. We get the instruction that “Simultaneous submissions are fine.”
Taking things further
Are there other things you could try? How about “acyrologia”? How about “adnominatio”? How about “antanaclasis”?
Acyrologia. The substitution of a word by one of a similar (but inappropriate) meaning or of a similar sound often with a comedic effect. For example, “my perishable enemy” instead of “my mortal enemy”, or “Mrs White has a genome in her garden” instead of “Mrs White has a gnome in her garden.”
Adnominatio. Assigning the literal or homophonic meaning to a proper noun. For example, “Mrs Hall was not, in fact, the most accommodating of women.”
Antanaclasis. The repetition of a word or phrase but with a changed meaning, often for comedic effect. For example, “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” (attributed to Benjamin Franklin)
You can find other humorous techniques on my big list of literary terms.
Want to read more humorous stories? Here’s a list for that as well.
And if you don’t already know about them, I’ve got a whole raft of other free resources available to download from my website.
Recent publications
beyond (Frazzled Lit)
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Scrawl Place)
Recent interview
Matt Kendrick answers questions from Laura Cooney (Frazzled Lit)
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