Ultimate Tips to Writing the Best Humour
Every writer wants to engage their readers and using humour is a good way to have them coming back for more. But if you have been writing serious stuff all along and want to infuse some levity in your blog posts/articles/books, you need to begin with an understanding of the different types of humourous situations and ways to ease them in your writing.
What’s your Humour Style
First up, identify the kind of humour that /appeals to you as a reader. Is it subtle, witty, sarcastic, satire, slapstick, dead-pan, self-deprecating, ridiculing others, scatological? What you enjoy reading, you can learn to write by observation and practice.
Observational/Situational Humour
This involves finding humour in mundane, everyday situations. Think a goofed up attempt at cooking a gourmet meal or absentminded errors while doing a routine office job.
Anecdotal Humour
This involves mining personal stories for humor. Think a train journey where you met the man who snored a bit too loudly and kept the entire compartment awake. Your stories could be partly true and embellished.
Dark (or gallows) Humour
Finding humor in darker, more unpleasant circumstances or aspects of life, like death, suffering, and unhappiness. This one needs sensitivity so that you don’t gross out your readers.
Self-deprecating Humour
This involves you, the writer, making fun of yourself for laughs. Most of the humour is directed at the protagonists, with the narrator taking the lead. This endears you to your readers.
Satirical Humour
Using faults of individuals, organizations, or society and mining them for hunour can be one way to introduce satire in your writing.
With or Without pay off
The humourous incidents that you incorporate in your story may be one-off to lighten the mood of your story or to provide comic relief if things are getting too serious. These minor details may be simple enough to bring a smile to your reader or have them laugh out loud. Think about using metaphors that are a little absurd or using words that are considered funny or use a cliche and play around with it. This is using humour in your writing that does not have a big pay-off.
Another way is to have a story element that’s humorous and later plays an important part in the plot. Since it becomes crucial, this humour element has a pay-off. Think about planting a little joke that leads to something central to the plot later on.
Now that we have given you an introduction to introducing some laughs for your readers, keep your humour feelers alert when you are reading other authors or even watching a funny sitcom. Try to understand the ‘why’ and the timing of the joke and experiment in your own written pieces.
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