10 Tips for Writing Humor

Every novel should contain humor, as it creates endearing characters, lightens tense situations, and enhances the reader’s experience. While humor is subjective and difficult to pin down, some of the tips below may help you create meaningful humor in your work-in-progress. Remember, practice makes perfect!

• Generally, humor boils down to unpredictability, so don’t let readers know where the punchline is.

• Play on the knowledge the audience knows but some characters don’t. Let’s say one of your characters just killed a demon, making him miss his curfew. His mom asks him why he was late and he says, “I was ending world hunger,” or “I was protesting the experimentory use of cosmetics on living creatures.” Either response is unexpected and far from what he was really doing, so readers find it amusing.
• Contradictory traits or actions from your characters can be humorous. Let’s say your main character is a jock who bullies the geeks at school. Maybe one day his mom walks in on him watching Star Trek. Or perhaps one character curses using types of flowers (carnations, daisies, petunias, etc.), and one day he swears using a prime rib steak.
• Ask yourself what a normal human would do in the situation your character is in. If a normal human was chased by savage aliens, maybe they’d scream like a little girl or accidentally run into a tree. If you were a bystander, maybe you’d flail around like a runaway plastic bag.
• Humor comes from sources of conflict: between characters, settings, and plots. For example, put two bickering characters together and let them spar with words.
• Word choice matters. If a character is on fire, don’t say he’s thrashing, say he’s flopping around.
• Something is funnier when it happens to a friend, not a stranger. A bystander walking into a glass sliding door is less funny than a friend doing it.
• Humor can highlight what’s wrong with a normal situation or emphasize a universal truth. For example, in the novel Antsy Does Time by Neal Shusterman, the protagonist compares life to a bad haircut. Both involve tough situations that straighten out eventually. The analogy is unexpectedly spot on, making it funny.
• Use analogies. Compare one tough situation to another: painting a dog’s nails, catching a fly with chopsticks, teaching a blind man to drive, etc.
• Readers physically feel suspense, so look for ways to break the tension and add awkward realism with humor.

When writing humor, try not to:

• Use one-dimensional comic relief characters. If a character only speaks in one-liners, he’ll be predictable and unfunny. Just as all people have unique senses of humor, so do all characters.
• Make fun of groups of people. If people agree with the truth behind the joke they laugh, but if they don’t you’ll offend them.
• Don’t desperately try to be funny - incorporate the joke well.
• Don’t make all of your jokes in-jokes as this alienates new readers from series.

While humor is important, a reader’s experience with a book depends on the quality of character development, worldbuilding, and plot advansion. Thus, focus your energy on those things and add a characterization, setting, or plot-developing element to any jokes to advance the story.

How do you add humor to your stories? Let me know in the comments!