How To Write Hilarious Humor: An Analysis of Professional Comedians' (and Comediennes') Techniques to Tickle the Funny Bone

Chapter 3: Metaphor, Hyperbole, Situational Humor

Like many chapters (and, sometimes, entire books), the chapter called “Catalogue Addiction” is based upon a metaphor which, as the title suggests, equates catalogue shopping with an addiction of some kind, probably one related to drugs or alcohol. The metaphor is extended with references to “treatment centers,” “a group of women with similar problems,” interventions, stashing catalogues as an addict stashes caches of drugs or alcohol, and “recovery.” However, as the need arises, for the sake of humor, the metaphor is occasionally abandoned in favor of the use of humorous techniques that are not related to or dependent upon the trope. For example, a shopping catalogue is personified as a stalker: “the company’s first final clearance catalogue made its way into my clutches three houses ago. It doesn’t matter how often I move; the catalogue knows where I’m living.” Likewise, a Victoria’s Secret catalogue is compared not to drugs but to “pornography,” as the addiction to the former becomes, as it were, an addiction to the latter. Exaggeration is used as well: the models in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue are endowed with such large breasts that their “bosoms” prevent the narrator from closing the publication: “The bosoms on the otherwise skinny women appear to be inflated. The last issue was so chock-full of overly endowed ladies, I couldn’t even keep the magazine closed.” Likewise, Radner employs hyperbole when she describes the mailman as having developed a hernia from delivering the many weighty catalogues that the narrator, like the other women in her neighborhood, receives on a regular basis.

In “Do It Again,” Radner’s humor comes not so much from a series of setups and punch lines or extended metaphors as from a familiar situation carried to extremes. The situation is continuous, from the beginning to the end of the chapter and is, as such, also the chapter’s main source of unity. As always, the opening paragraph establishes the situation in a few short sentences:

Because I was a child such a very long time ago and my contact with children until I had my own was so limited, I was entirely unaware of a child’s capacity for repetition.

Examples of the child, Molly’s, “capacity for repetition” follow, each of which will be likely to strike a familiar chord in reader‘s own experiences. First, a couple of shorter examples are supplied: the game of hide-and-seek, in which Molly continues to hide in the same place each time the game is played--or replayed--and her begging her mother to be carried upside down to the bathroom for her bath, just “one more time,” Then, a third, extended example fills out the rest of the chapter, humanizing the narrator as a mother who loves her daughter. At play at the beach, Molly finds a new way to hide. When the narrator fetches a seashell for her daughter, Molly hides behind her, turning as the narrator turns, so that the mother cannot see her. As a result, the mother is distraught, imagining that Molly might have wandered into the sea or been spirited away by an abductor. When the narrator finally discovers her daughter, the girl asks her mother whether she was “really scared,” and, when her mother confesses that, having imagined her daughter to be lost, she “really” was frightened, Molly, delighted, begs, “Let’s do it again,” her request providing the words of the chapter’s title and thereby bringing the chapter to a full circle.

Conclusion

A chapter’s humor can largely derive from the use of an extended metaphor or a familiar situation. However, as the need arises, either structural device is apt to alternate with other, secondary techniques for producing humor, such as personification, exaggeration, or repetition, with a line or a phrase of dialogue at the end of the chapter repeating the chapter’s title so as to bring the chapter full circle as the section of the book comes to a fitting close.