They say laughter is the best medicine. Though that phrase predates the development of penicillin and Ozempic so I’m not sure if it’s true anymore. Still, humor certainly is a tool that can get you a long way in life. In my experience, funny bosses can get away with skirting labor laws, funny boyfriends can extend relationships that should’ve been ended a long time ago due to infidelity, and funny mentors can convince you to do things that would definitely violate your existing moral code.

Of course, if you’re watching this video, I’d say there’s a good chance you’re a pretty funny person. Almost all of you were relentlessly bullied as children and therefore you needed to develop a coping mechanism. For those that didn’t turn to food, I’ll bet humor was your refuge. But there’s a good chance you’re either not using humor at all in your writing because you want to be taken seriously as an artist, or that you are using humor but not implementing it in the right way.

Now, I’m normally a pretty serious guy. I take my writing and this advice channel as seriously as my duties as a husband and father. But in my 27 years of writing experience, I realized you don’t have to be a hilarious stand-up like Bill Cosby to disarm and knock your reader out using the power of relatable and gut-busting comedy.  

We’ll double check that we’re not punching down at minorities and other powerless groups on this edition of Stories’ Matter.

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Now some of you might be thinking, John, I’ve got this: I make people laugh all the time in real life. They laugh when I hurt myself, they laugh when they see unflattering photos of me, they laugh when they hear my name. Well, being funny in real life is a bit different than being a humorous fiction writer.

Unlike you, your reader can’t “see” the characters in your fiction. So often they won’t automatically know if they should laugh or not. With the following tips, hopefully you can write a funny story that doesn’t totally undermine your character arcs or audience immersion into the world you’ve created.

Tip 1 – Don’t Hop Onto Trends, Choose What you Find Funny

It’s only natural to be inspired by the world around you. Even if you’re writing fantasy or historical fiction, it will be heavily informed by your personal experience. And sometimes it can be successful, like when I wrote a medieval mystery that alluded to my impregnation of my business partner’s wife.

But be wary of referencing very topical things when doing humor, even if they are very hilarious. Instead, choose things that are true to you. That authenticity will shine through. Think about humiliating events from your own life. So if you were my business partner, for example, you’d write the same story I did but from his perspective.

Tip 2 – Get Your Head out of the Gutter, Maybe

You need to decide early on what tone you want in your fiction. You probably won’t get away with lots of “fucks” and “shits” and “cocksuckers” in your young adult mystery unless you publish the book yourself. And even then I wouldn’t recommend it.

You have to keep timeliness in mind here, too. Sure, when I wrote “The Dusk of Man,” in the very early 2000s, I meant it as a satire of where radical feminism was going to lead us. But today, the raunchy humor comes across more as wish fulfillment and just general male desire.  

Tip 3 – Avoid Punching Down

There’s a lot of reasons you might want to punch down in real life: to inspire the lower classes to pull themselves up by the bootstraps so that one day they can be the boss who punches down, to release some stress after your second wife’s new husband threatened you with legal action if he sees you hanging around their house again. But in general, this won’t work in fiction.

This is another type of preaching that I warned you about in this video. Readers want to draw their own conclusions about why certain races or genders or religions are the way that they are.

Tip 4 – Be Careful About Feedback                                      

Comedy is a subjective thing, like fashion or age of consent. We all have different ideas of what that means. You might write a killer joke only for it to be rejected by a beta reader with a very different sense of humor. In my early days, I removed a lot of great jokes about Belgians from my stories just because one of my beta readers had a Belgian grandmother. My readers lost out on a lot of great laughs just because of one person who couldn’t see past their own biases.

Tip 5 – Word Choice and Structure Matter Immensely

Sometimes a great joke doesn’t fail because it was a bad idea or wasn’t insightful or didn’t connect to character in an interesting way. Sometimes it was simply how the joke was told. This holds true in real life as well. I realized my employees didn’t like my jokes not because they were bad but because they lived in such deep fear of my reprisals that they could only muster nervous laughter.

Try swapping out boring words for words with “k” sounds. Use your funny observations during scene transitions instead of during key dramatic moments. Try to end your sentences or paragraphs with a punch line instead of just ending on a dull note.