Writing Advice from the Bookshelf: Donald Maass on Humor in Fiction

Excerpt from Chapter 7, “Hyperreality,” in The Fire in Fiction by Donald Maass

It’s one thing to crack a joke or be occasionally witty; it’s another thing altogether to be funny for four hundred pages. But that is what it takes. Humor is cumulative. Laughter builds. Have you ever enjoyed a comedian’s routine? When do you laugh the hardest, at the beginning or the end? Toward the end, of course, because the comedian’s outrageous outlook takes a while to overwhelm you.

So it is with fiction. For humor to come through in a novel, it needs to be bigger and more relentless than most authors realize. You can crack yourself up at the keyboard but barely raise a smile on your readers’ faces. To slay those readers, you need to hammer their funny bones like Noah nailing the Ark.

The malnourishment of comic manuscripts is a shame, too, because the methods of mirth are so plentiful. They’re even free. Here are a few of them, on me:

hyperbole

wit

biting comment (think insults)

ironic juxtaposition and reversal

escalation of the mildly ridiculous

being extremely literal (“Who’s on first?”)

funny name and word choices

deadpan delivery of dumb remarks

deliberate misunderstanding

unlikely points of view

extreme personas or voices

stereotyping

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Work Cited:

Maass, Donald. “The World of the Novel” in The Fire in Fiction: Passion, Purpose, and Techniques to Make Your Novel Great. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s Digest Books, 2009. 169. Print.