The joy is in the detail

One of my favourite pieces of humour is "The Solution to Saturday's Puzzle" by David Sedaris.  He's jammed next to a woman on a plane and refuses to swap places with her husband. As she insults him, he pretends to do The Times Crossword. Except he's filling the squares with his opinion of her: "W-H-O-R-E". She falls asleep. He sucks a lozenge, and, whoops, spits it out onto her crotch. It's an embarrassing moment and his options race through his mind....

It's a tiny incident but allows Sedaris to to paint a picture of embarrassment, fear, claustrophobia, self-justification and bitching. They're our traits as well as his, and we're trapped on that seat with him. As with a lot of great writing, a detail opens up whole world. Sedaris's persona is that of a waspish critical onlooker who nevertheless hates conflict as he negotiates a world of oddballs, delusionaries and aggressives.  The incidents seem trivial, but that's what's funny about them: the energy we put into coping with everyday stress.

The "doing the crossword" motif is a great bit of counterpoint, contrasting his inner fury with his efforts to seem in control. It shows us what he's thinking and adds 100% to the comic value.

Little things are big. The plum sauce stain on your shirt you're trying to hide can show more about the difficulties you're having with your dinner date than paragraphs of undramatic internal monologue.  The events in "The Solution to Saturday's Puzzle" probably only take place over half an hour. The core of the piece - Sedaris's panicked thoughts as he watches the lozenge in its landing place - is invisible to everyone but him. He still manages to spin an enthralling and hilarious story out of this. Virginia Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway" concerns one day in the life of Mrs D. And "Ulysses".... well, you get the drift.

Have fun with juxtapositions. By adding another stream, something a character is doing or with which they're fiddling, you can create humorous comment on what's going on by showing rather than telling. Say your husband and wife are arguing. If he's trying to fix the channels on his TV at the same time, it could tell us a lot about him, their relationship and how the argument is likely to turn out.

I spend a lot of time reading writers like Sedaris, P J O'Rourke,  Bill Bryson, James Thurber, S J Perelman, Miles Kington, PG Wodehouse. They're like oxygen to me. They act as compass points on the thorny journey of trying to be funny.

In this blog I aim to celebrate and analyse humour and share some of the things I've learnt in writing it. Come along for the ride, leave comments and add your own advice and experience. Share the love!

Don’t give up on your submissions

I’ve had a good writing start to my New Year. OK, calling it the New Year sounds SOOO  last January. I’ve achieved one of my longer term ambitions, which is my own humorous column. It’s called “The Blog of Samuel Pepys” and appears in local London paper The Greenwich Visitor. Our man is alive and well in contemporary Greenwich and causing havoc. It’s a chance to flex my character writing muscles, wallow in 17^th Century English and indulge in anachronisms. So far the editor hasn’t shot me so let’s hope this one carries on for a while.

Although I love writing humour, it can be tough finding a market for it. Many people think it's easy and don't recognise the skill it can take. Editors often use a staff writer whom they can trust, rather than chancing their arm (and circulation) with a freelance. It can be tricky adopting the right house style for a straightforward article: there are so many ways to come completely unstuck when you're trying to make the readers laugh. Blogging can be invaluable to showcase your ability to keep comedy going over the months. I'm sure it helped me.

Two weeks after that news came, the publishers to whom I’d sent a proposal for a how-to book on writing comedy came back to me and want to discuss it further. It had been five months in the pile and I was beginning to ponder where to take it next. Who knows what will happen with the idea? Since I started writing seriously twenty years ago, I’ve learned to accept the occasional “Hit” and live with the disappointments. Too much so: recent successes have been after I’d just about given up on the project.

What’s the lesson? Expect nothing, neither rejection nor triumph.  Just keep on researching your markets, writing, sending off, researching more markets, writing more and sending it off.  Reward your hard work, not your success or failure, with your favourite indulgence.

Mine’s a beer. Off to have one right now.

Speak soon!