Funny

Anyone who has been in a writing workshop has seen someone distort his gift by trying to make his writing funny. This always fails. The writer might be able to eke out a yuk or two, but you can tell when someone is exerting all his will and all his intelligence toward comedy, and the feeling of self-consciousness, of forcing, is murder to a joke. For some people the anxiety of this extends to all areas of life; others are funny in conversation but their writing is serious. Anyway, it's a terrible bind to want to be funnier than you are.

I always felt I had kind of dodged this bullet. I have a quirky sense of humor I would describe as weird but square, which amuses some people a lot and most others not at all. I'm usually fine with that. Unlike some of my friends, I've never felt like a failure because I'm not, you know, told I should do stand-up or something (god forbid! even the thought makes me queasy). I'm not a funny writer and, with the exception of a few one-offs and occasional poems or whatever, I've never tried to be.

But recently I've been (squarely) thinking about humor and writing, and thinking that it may be necessary after all. Not for the reasons usually associated with funny writing--rebellion, truth-telling, etc.; as a square, I don't like trickster-type figures, and I think "Fuck you, society!" is a dumb thing to say. I like my humor inclusionary, as far as that's possible.

What I've been thinking is that humor may be the only way to leaven a bleak worldview without conceding anything to consolation. If meaninglessness is the precondition of your writing, it's easy to end up in nihilism, and this is both irritating and boring. Humor avoids nihilism because it is of the tangible world, but it operates outside belief systems: the feeling you get when someone slips on a bananna peel doesn't suggest that there's any explanation for anything, that suffering has any purpose or reward, that we will all be reunited when we die. But it's still a nice feeling, an empirical feeling--it tells you you exist and that something outside of you exists. There are other pleasures like this, but they are physical, sensory, abstract--humor is the only one that does it in language and in connection with other people.

To laugh makes you feel alive. To be alive is tragic. As one of my writing professors (I forget which one) used to say, you can take that to the bank.