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

Chapter 4: “Kiss ‘Em, Kick ‘Em, and Kiss ‘Em,” Climactic Sequences, and Tone

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

If, as a humorist, you’re going to trash someone--a friend (or future former friend) or a family member (before he or she has disowned you forever), perhaps--you don’t want to look, to your reader, like the shark that you are. You want to look like a nice guy or gal. How do you accomplish this miraculous feat?

In trashing her deceased mother, in the “Oh, Mother!” chapter of her book, Radner faced this very problem. Her solution? Prior to the trashing, say some nice things about her target. Use the “kiss ‘em, kick ‘em, kiss ‘em” strategy, wherein one lauds the soon-to-be butt of one’s jokes, then savages him or her, and then again praises the poor soul. Radner devotes two, albeit admittedly short, paragraphs to praising her mother:

It’s my contention that the things you remember about your childhood govern the way you raise your own children. Even though my other died when I was thirteen, I find myself constantly remembering the little things she did for me as I spend time with my daughter.

Kindness was my mother’s finest attribute; cooking was her downfall. Luckily, I was not a picky eater. Most of the things she cooked for me I found delicious.

Her chapter’s title, “Oh, Mother!,” by the way, is a play on words, recalling the exasperated cry, “Oh, brother!,” and sets the tone of the chapter--the narrator’s expression, mild and humorous, though it may be, of her exasperation with her mother’s lack of cooking “talent.”

Now that Radner has set up the chapter’s basic situation, she, through her narrator, presents the standard humorous examples to support and develop the chapter’s topic (her mother’s abominable cooking):

. . . Her most successful culinary creation (and my all-time favorite) was spaghetti mixed with ketchup and a semi-melted lump of butter. My second favorite was what I called Campbelled rice. This paired instant rice with Campbell’s Vegetarian Vegetable soup. Not only was it delicious, it was also educational (if not entirely sanitary), as I would spell out different words on the kitchen table with the gummy letters.

A technique for creating humor, seen in this paragraph, as previously in Radner’s book, is to mix categories, such as cuisine and education. The unlikely pairing is not only surprising, but amusing, for it brings together a ludicrous association that, despite its absurdity, nevertheless, in some way, seems to make sense. Radner’s use of this technique also taps into the familiar, because many adults are likely to remember playing with alphabet-shaped rice or pasta letters in their soup, just as Radner describes herself, as a girl, of having done. Absurdity mixes with familiarity to get a laugh. She then extends the humor by describing how her mother extended any leftovers from this meal to create another dish, employing, once again, a strange mixture of two disparate items, “soup,” a serving of food, and “Spackle,” a sealing compound used in construction:

If there was any Campbelled rice left the next day, the mixture would be poured into tomato soup, thus creating yet another unique variation: Campbelled tomato rice paste. It was midway between soup and Spackle.

Radner’s next paragraph begins with a list of items in a series which have no apparent relationship to one another. However, a link between these disparate items is formed by Radner’s identification of them as her “mother’s three most spectacular failures”: “My mother’s three most spectacular failures involved a can or corn, a duck, and matzo balls.” Having created a Lucy Ricardo-like caricature of her mother as an inept cook and having cited a couple of previous examples of her mother’s culinary incompetence, Radner has interested her readers in learning more about the poor woman’s “culinary failures.” Because of the nature of comedy, in which humorous anecdotes or jokes move steadily toward a crescendo, or climax, of mirth, readers also expect that the quips and gags will be funnier than the previous ones were, although these newer ones will be topped, in turn, by even funnier ones, until, at last, the climax of the series is reached.

Sure enough, Radner’s mother doesn’t disappoint, for she next turns a can of corn into a bomb; cooks inedible, rubbery matzo balls; and reduces the duck, which she seeks to cook as if it is chicken, to an unrecognizable, gelatinous mass that even the daughter, who is “not a picky eater,” refuses to sample, in any form (whether as a roast duck, a salad ingredient, or a sandwich filler). In detailing these “culinary failures,” Radner spices her descriptions with more than a dash of hyperbole:

I don’t know what prompted her to put a closed can of Niblets into the searing oven; I just remember the explosion. . . . I was in charge of picking bits of corn off the floor while she climbed the ladder and tackled the ceiling.

[Trying to consume the matzo balls] was like eating dried Silly Putty. We were fearful of breaking the garbage disposal, so the leaden bits of dough were finally tossed in the trash. . . .

I remember her taking the duck [that the narrator’s mother had prepared as she’d supposed a chicken should be cooked] out of the oven and encountering a sea of grease that in my brief life I had never seen emanate from a chicken. It was so slimy that as my mother served it, the poor bird almost slid off the plate.

Having “kicked” her mother--or a caricature of her mother--Radner now has her narrator “kiss” her again, as the chapter comes to a close, in a paragraph which, for humorous books, is unusually long, and which is followed by a shorter, final paragraph that rounds out the chapter. The longer paragraph begins, “Along with my mother’s lack of cooking talent, I also remember her remarkable personality. I remember the light in her eyes whenever she saw me. I remember her kind voice and her forgiving, patient nature. . . .”

Conclusion

Sometimes, a humorist may savage a friend or family member--or, actually, a caricature of such a person. To prevent alienating him- or herself from the reader, the humorist should adopt the “kick ‘em, kiss ‘em, kiss ‘em” strategy of first praising the victim-to-be, before verbally assaulting him or her with outlandish exaggerations of a defect, real or imagined, and then, once again, lauding the savaged party before concluding the chapter with a short, often single-sentence expression of appreciation for his or her overwhelmingly positive personality traits and behavior patterns, such as Radner does in the closure to her “Oh, Mother!” chapter: “Cooking aside, I only hope I’m half as good a mother to my daughter as my mother was to me.” This concluding comment will leave readers with an “awwwwwww” reaction, rather than a feeling of disdain for someone who would savage a friend or family member (even a caricaturized version) simply to get a laugh. In this chapter, Radner uses several devices she’s used before, including exaggeration, or hyperbole; ludicrous examples; conflated, absurd comparisons; and climactic sequences in which lesser jokes and gags are followed by greater jokes and gags. Her title, “Oh, Mother!,” is a play on words, recalling the exasperated cry, “Oh, brother!,” and sets the tone of the chapter--the narrator’s expression, mild and humorous, though it may be, of her exasperation with her mother’s lack of cooking “talent.”

Next: Chapter 5: Juvenalian Satire

How To Read A Novel Without Really Reading It

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Professors don’t have any mercy on students. If they did, they wouldn’t make them read at all, much less a whole novel (or even several of the damned things). Haven’t these old fossils heard? We’re living in the Digital Age! Books are passé, as dead as the slaughtered trees from which they’re made. If they have to be printed (and they don’t), they’re best used as doorstops, not educational resources.

 

But, for good or ill, professors, like books, are here, it seems, to stay, and since they had to read the same books they’re forcing their students to read (payback is a bitch!), they’re not about to let any of their pupils off the hook.

 

What’s a student to do?

 

I have a few tips on how to read a novel without really reading it. Hence, my essay’s title, “How To Read A Novel Without Really Reading It.” (Always put the titles of articles or essays in quotation marks.)

Follow these easy steps, and the pain associated with reading, although it won’t go away completely, will be reduced to manageable proportions. 

1. First, read the blurb. A blurb is the text on the inside of a hardback book’s flyleaf (the paper cover in which hardback books are usually wrapped) or on the back cover of a paperback. I know, I know, you’re asking, Why would I want to read even more text than I already have to read? The damned novel is way more than enough already. No doubt, you’re also thinking, This is the stupidest advice I’ve ever run across for avoiding reading! Don’t quit reading! Not yet. Give me a chance to explain. You’ll see there’s a method to my madness. There’s somewhere between 200 and 250 words in the typical blurb. That sounds like a LOT of “extra” words to read, I know, but, by reading them, you’re saving yourself from having to read maybe fifty, or even 100, PAGES of the novel itself, each one of which can contain 400 word or more, so, conservatively, that’s a savings of between 20,000 to 40,000 words! (Aren’t you glad you didn’t quit reading my essay.) It gets better. As a result of having read the blurb, you will know certain facts about the novel that you can use in your book report, lit crit essay, or whatever the hell your professor’s making you write. For example, you will know the main character’s name. (In your essay, refer to him or her as the “protagonist”; professors are windbags, and they like to read, as well as speak, long words.) You will know the setting. You will know the basic storyline, or plot. You will probably learn the inciting moment. You may also learn the names of lesser, supporting characters. All this for only 250 words or less!
2. Realize that a chapter can be summarized in one sentence. Then, read the chapter only until you can summarize it in one sentence. (Unfortunately, a “Prologue” and an “Epilogue,” if they are part of the novel, must also be read and summarized.)
3. After each chapter, write a sentence that summarizes what it presented. Here are examples, summarizing the prologue and the first two chapters of Lincoln Child’s novel, Terminal Freeze (always italicize the title of a novel): (Prologue) A Native American shaman’s attempt to appease the gods for a woman’s careless violation of a taboo fails, requiring him to take the woman southward, to a mountain, where a greater violation of a different taboo has occurred. (Chapter 1) The face of a melting glacier falls away, revealing the mouth of an ice cave. (Chapter 2) Scientists exploring the cave find a monstrous beast frozen in the ice. (When you finish summarizing each chapter of the novel, you will have summarized the whole book. For example, there are 53 chapters, a “Prologue,” and an “Epilogue” in Terminal Freeze. Therefore, the whole damned thing can be summarized in 55 sentences. Not bad.)
4. Keep a list of characters’ names, brief phrases that identify them, and the names of the places in which the action takes place. Here are examples from the first three chapters of Terminal Freeze: (Prologue) Usuguk (shaman), Nulathe (woman who violates taboo), Koukdjuak the Hunter (god); igloo village in an “arctic desolation”; (Chapter 1) Evan Marshall (protagonist; a paleoecologist), Gerald Sully (research party leader)., Wright Faraday (evolutionary biologist)--they work for Northern Massachusetts University in Woburn and are researching global warming in Alaska’s federal Wildlife Zone; their base is at Mount Fear Remote Sensing Installation, which they’ve rented from the government; (Chapter 2) Penny Barbour (fourth member of the scientific research team, a computer scientist), Ang Chen (graduate student)
5. Most of the text in a novel is unnecessary. It’s filler, the rambling philosophical musings, existential questioning, and self-indulgent wishful thinking of the author, or descriptions of various persons, places, or things, including, believe it or not, the weather, little if any of which has any bearing on what is actually happening in the story itself and may be ignored without any ill effect on your grade, so SKIP IT. Instead, read just the dialogue (the words supposedly spoken by people--the characters--who don’t even exist). By reading just the dialogue, you will be able to keep track of the story well enough to summarize it (remember,. Each chapter can be reduced to a single sentence!). Only dip into the descriptive or expository (explanatory) blocks of text when you need to do so to reestablish a sense of continuity and context--maybe twice or so every four or five chapters. You will find that you are skipping entire pages of the text and still know what’s going on, kind of like returning to a movie after a bathroom break, which just goes to show you that most of a novel is unnecessary padding.
6. After reading and summarizing each chapter and updating your list of characters and settings, stop! You are done with the book. Do NOT return to the novel. Close the cover! You are finished! Do not second guess yourself, wondering whether you missed something (you didn’t) or whether your summaries are detailed enough (they are). It’s a novel you’re reading (or, if you follow my guidelines you are not reading, not the Bible or the Koran of the Bhagavad Vita or even the Kama Sutra. How important can a book of fiction be, anyway? (Not very!) You’ve done more than enough, so quit already!

That’s all there is to it, six simple steps. Now you have all the information you need to write your book review or your lit crit essay, or whatever the hell your professor’s making you write. What you do with the information is up to you.