Humor in Fiction

I need to start this with a disclaimer. I have no formal exposure to creative writing nor can I claim to be any expert in the various forms of writing fictional humor. All that I know of writing, including humor, comes only out of the reading I have done. So, it is quite likely that the names I give for the forms of humor that I explain here may not be the names given by the creative writing professionals. It is also likely that the list may prove to be less than comprehensive.

The order in which I present the various forms of humor writing is in the increasing order of difficulty for me. I make no claims that the ones that come first are easy for anyone to write nor do I intend saying that the order is in the increasing order of quality of humor. Ease of writing is more a question of the way one’s mind works and quality is a matter of taste. I shall use the exercise of writing the story of “Troy” humorously as well as the entries that have come in to explain what I mean by each of the terms I apply to the types of humor fiction.

The first type of humor is the spoof. A spoof is normally a caricature of an existing story or an existing genre. So, you can spoof a story like Troy or spoof a genre like detective fiction, as in the Pink Panther series. When an existing story is being spoofed, one can choose to stick only to the major highlights of the story while spoofing the characters and their actions. Jaish’s story is this version of a spoof which stays true to happening – like the abduction of Helen, death of Hector etc. – but spoofs the characters as well as the manner in which these things happened – as in Hector dying of Achilles’ body odor or Achilles being killed by a fly-swatter. When the spoof ventures into such a wild departure, it is also construed to be slapstick. Not that it is necessarily bad – Mel Brooks’ “History of the World” is a spoof of this sort and a phenomenal success of its times.

You can also spoof a story by introducing incongruities into the story. Rajrupa’s story belongs to this category when she introduces modern social media interactions into the story of Troy. Incongruities, in fact, form the backbone of Humor in my opinion. When the incongruity enters the storyline itself instead of only the narration, it qualifies as spoof.

What then would be an incongruous narration that is not a spoof. I will attempt an example of this for Troy.

“When Agammemnon took away Briseis from him, Achilles felt like a player who had won the match single-handed and had his Captain snatch the man-of-the-match award away from him. So, he decided to sit out the tournament. For the Greeks, Achilles was like Chris Gayle was to the RCB – so without him they were not confident about their prospects. It surprised them to have Paris challenge Menelaus for a duel – sort of super-over, you know. Paris challenging Menelaus was like the 11^th man challenging a top order batsman and the Greeks thought they would win. Midway, however, the Trojan big-hitter Hector came in and slaughtered Menelaus – literally. After all, it was a battle, dude, not just a cricket match.”

The narrative above is like a cricket-crazy guy telling the story of Troy to another person. Note that the incidents of the tale are not tampered with nor are the characters. The incongruity is only in the similes and metaphors used by the narrator to tell the story.

A variant would be to introduce incongruity in deriving fictional consequences from out of the events of the tale. For example

“When Agammemnon took away Briseis from Achilles after Achilles had single-handedly taken the beach of Troy, he lost his best man. He failed to understand the importance of giving incentives like ESOPS for retaining his best people in his company – huh – army. The other problem was that he had not realized that he could not have his soldiers suddenly striking for bonuses in the middle of the war and had failed to put in rules relating to mutiny. Both the corporate world and the military have learned a lot from the consequences of his behavior.”

We have seen that a spoof caricatures the entire story. One other narrative option is to caricature the people of the story. In a spoof, delineating the characters of the players has far lesser importance and is normally subordinated to the need to write spiffy lines. Both the narrative options of ‘incongruity’ above would require characters to be distinct. The caricature option that I will now explore actually depends upon characterization and exaggeration of a stand-out characteristic of the characters – much like a cartoon.

“Menelaus knew how to get a beautiful wife but not what to do with her. Paris knew what to do with other people’s beautiful wives. So, when Paris visited Menelaus along with his brother Hector, it was a harbinger of trouble. Things may still have been all right if only Paris had been as good at leaving women as he was at loving them. How bad he was at the former became apparent to him only when he set sail from Sparta and found that Helen had stuck like a limpet to him.”

One of the types of writing that is also considered humorous is the sort of fiction that has a lot of funny lines but an otherwise serious story and narrative tone. I consider this sort of writing more on the lines of a serious piece of fiction with a soupcon of humor rather than humorous fiction. Oscar Wilde’s “Picture of Dorian Grey” is a case in point as, perhaps, would be most of Bernard Shaw’s plays. Given the basic tragic nature of Troy, one would more often than not find this sort of writing when someone attempts humor in this story line.

One can consider ‘Black Humor’ as another version of the incongruity. The incongruity here is in seeing humor in what people would consider as despicable or tragic.

“Everyone has their hobbies. Achilles’ hobby was to lop off people’s heads poke sharp things into people’s guts and drag dead bodies behind his chariot to vary the monotony.”

The ‘Joke’ is yet another version of humor fiction. In this version, one depends on the punch-line at the end for the humor. I am not too good at this nor am I a votary of the ‘Joke’ as fiction. For one, the punch-line has to be both very good as well as unexpected for it to succeed. This, in effect, means that it is good for only one read since it shall not be unexpected the second time round and anything that is not interesting to read again does not count as great fiction. Also, the ‘Joke’ sort of fiction needs to be short – you cannot have too long a gap between the opening and the punch-line. Who has ever enjoyed a joke that took an hour to tell?

With an existing tragic story-line it is next to impossible to essay a good ‘Joke’ style of example. The following may be only seen as illustrative.

“That is the problem with Cassandra. I mean what can one make of a prophecy like “Troy will be destroyed by a woman with round heels, a man with weak heels and animal droppings”?”

……

The Greeks dropped out of the wooden horse in the dead of the night and rampaged all over Troy.

I suppose one can consider that Troy was destroyed by a pile of horse-shit”

The ‘woman with round heels’ is possibly archaic now – it used to mean a woman of loose morals.

All of the above are possible given the fact that one has an existing tragic story to be re-written humorously. The last type of humor fiction that I shall talk about can be written only when you are free to do the plotting yourself. It will take a creative genius on the lines of PG Wodehouse to adapt a story like Troy to write fiction where the conflict and the resolution are also laid out on humorous lines in addition to the narrative. In a way, if one could write a very humorous narrative of the “Joke” option above, it is possible that it may serve as this sort of fiction.

I hope I have successfully illustrated the types of humor even if I have not managed to make them humorous. The central idea in writing humor is to see incidents and people in an off-beat manner or from a kinky view-point. Once that is mastered all the rest is merely English!