Writing Humor:

1. Writing Humor: A dull, witless, analytic explanation of how to make things funny.

2. Seven suggestions: • from Jan Hornung • I have no idea who she is, but she has an article on Writer’s Write, so she must know what she’s talking about.

3. 1 • Don't tell the reader that something is funny. Let the reader discover this for himself. Do this by painting a picture with words that the reader can relate to with all five of his senses. Describe the smells, textures, tastes, sights, and sounds. • If your character gets hit in the face with a lemon pie, with yellow, gooey blobs of meringue dripping from his chin and snowy drifts of whipped cream sticking from his ears, this paints a picture for the reader that is more likely to be perceived as whimsical. If the pie "splats" across his face, sending wafts of tangy-sweet lemon scent, along with a bit of graham cracker crust, up his nose as he sticks out his eager tongue to bring home the cheek-puckering flavor -- this is a hoot. Now the reader can smell, feel, taste, see, and hear that pie.

4. 2 • Use metaphors and similes that bring familiar images into your reader's mind. Used effectively, metaphors and similes say volumes with a few words. A metaphor is a figure of speech using a word or phrase that usually means one thing to refer to something else. • "his driveway doesn't go all the way to the street," • "we were wrestling around like two pigs in the mud, only he was enjoying it and I was just getting dirty,”

5. 3 • Blending description, metaphors, and similes with dialogue is another way for the writer to expand his medium. Metaphors in a dialogue can add a humorous flavor of their own to the story or character. • One character might comment using a metaphor, "The squeaky wheel gets oiled." The other character responds with another metaphor, "And the quacking ducks gets shot!” • Similes can be funny in their own right, and added to a humorous situation can make it even funnier, such as, "I'm happy as a mosquito in a nudist colony," creates a humorous image in the reader's mind.

6. 4 • Words that portray movement are yet another way the writer can paint a funny picture for the reader. A character that is moving, like an actor on a stage, has more potential for hilarity than one that is not moving. Using action verbs, the writer can create a jovial image and elicit amusement from his reader • a helicopter student learning to hover. "I madly made exaggerated corrections with the cyclic. We zigged crazily in mid zag, then zagged wildly in mid zig."

7. 5. Colorful adjectives help the writer paint the exact image he wants the reader to experience. Keep a dictionary and thesaurus handy to look up adjectives that will spice up your writing. If the writer describes "a cow," the reader is left to color in the cow on his own. Use adjectives to describe all five senses as you paint a picture with words. • "She was not just a cow but a sauntering bovine beauty with chocolate-bar swirls of milky browns and milk-shake white on a suede background -- the most delicious contented cud-chewer I'd ever seen."