The Funny Thing About Being Funny

After all the praise I gave the place, Barns and Noble goes and interrupts my Mojo.  What did they do?  They took away all my outlets!  Screwed nice little safety plates over the lot of them.  So now I’ve been forced to either buy a second battery for my laptop (which my fiancé is skeptical will ever get charged), or find a new place to get in the groove. 

I’ve spent some time at the library, but it’s just not the same…

Yesterday I found my groove in a remarkable place: my house.  Wow, yes, I wrote from home.

4,000 words, to be not-exactly exact (plus a couple dozen or so).  That’s an eye-popping amount for me.

However, it may or may not have been truly productive, as I was taking a foray into comedic sci-fi.  It’s my second attempt.  The first humorous short story I wrote ended up failing miserably because, frankly, it was far too serious to be funny.  This one I’m trying to keep light and ridiculous.  We’ll see how it’s received.

I think comedy is extremely challenging.  So much of it is flow and timing, which is hard to get right in prose.  In a regular story, it usually isn’t such a big deal if the reader doesn’t read a line (or group of lines) exactly as you intended it to be read.  They may naturally pause in a different place, or think the emphasis lies on a different word.  What sounds one way to you may sound totally different to them, but it doesn’t create real problems.  In comedy it does.  What’s funny to the author may be stupid to the reader, and not just because of the content, but because of how it flows.

I’m trying to get this first draft edited so that my first readers can have a shot at it tonight.  Because I feel like I’m on shaky ground with this genre I seem to be able to separate myself from it more easily.  Because I’m not as confident with it, I’m more willing to chop and splice things to get them right.  If the readers tell me something’s not funny, out it’ll go!  I’m not going to coddle the pages and say, “no, not my precious words!” like I sometimes do…  Actually, I’m pretty good at acknowledging when a reader is right about something, but I usually put up a big fight before conceding.  Not this time.  If it’s bad, it’s bad, no argument from me.

Of course, there’s plenty in it I’ll be sad to see go if they don’t find it funny.  The bigger jokes I’ll probably try and rewrite to get the timing down.

Of course, there’s always the possibility of squid-in-the-mouth.  I think most newbie attempts at comedy fall into this category.  They venture beyond strange into un-laughably grotesque and un-relatable.    

I think there’s a pretty big consumer market for comedy out there, but so few people to fill it because it really is difficult.  That’s why it’s sad that professionals always apologize when they give awards to works of comedy, as though by virtue of what it is it should be unworthy of high-praise.  Hey, I think if it was something everybody could do there would be a lot more of it out there.  Those who can pull it off deserve to be acknowledged.

So, anyway, that’s my newest writing exercise.  Have you ventured into any new territory lately?

~Marina