Writing Prompts for Generating Humor

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Often, performing an exercise can be a way of generating humorous material. Envisioning humorous situations or occasions for humorous writing tends to get the creative juices flowing. To this end, I offer these writing prompts for humor.

Imagine an audience or an occasion. Perhaps you are giving a speech to a particular organization or to commemorate a certain historical event. Now, imagine that you are a well-known humorist—not a comedian (who performs, often in skits or in a stand-up routine delivering one-liners), but a humorist (who writes stories). With your audience or occasion in mind, write your humorous speech.

Rewrite a serious speech about a serious topic; make your rewrite humorous. Imagine “The Gettysburg Address” written not by Abraham Lincoln (who had a keen sense of humor himself), but by Mark Twain or Erma Bombeck.

Parody a great poem or one of William Shakespeare's soliloquies. Twain does just this, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which The Duke and The Dauphin butcher Hamlet's soliloquy to humorous effect.

 

Explain why a supporting character should be the star of a short story, novel, or screenplay. Imagine I Love Lucy with Ethel Mertz, rather than Lucy Ricardo, as the main character or The Beverly Hillbillies with Milburn Drysdale and his wife as the major characters.

Create an imaginary argument between two characters with opposing views on the same topic.

Offer absurd applications of cutting-edge technology. For example, list reasons as to why men or women (or both) should be replaced by robots.

We claim to argue facts, using reason, but, often, desire comes first , arguments in support of our desires second, if at all. Write an argument based on a desire for something insignificant or “forbidden,” using irrelevant and ludicrous “reasons” to support your claims.

 Explain why an honored person, real or imaginary, should be reviled or why a reviled person, real or imagined, should be praised. If the person is real, use two real persons; if imaginary, use two imaginary persons. If the persons are real, write about men and women from the fairly distant past to avoid lawsuits!) Twain was forever trying to secure donations to build a statue to Adam, humanity's common ancestor.

Add a humorous character to a “serious” novel or short story in the public domain. Twain was once interested in creating a fictitious cabin boy to accompany Christopher Columbus on Columbus' explorations.

Tell a story from a different, humorous perspective.

Update a classic, such as The Rape of the Lock, for example.

Imagine a comedian substituting for an actor in an established role: W. C. Fields as Sheriff Andy Taylor, for instance.

Role reversal is often a good source of humor. What if Lucy Ricardo were a band leader and husband Ricky was a stay-at-home husband who aspired to fame and fortune?

Create seemingly absurd, but pointed (and pithy) maxims. Twain does this in Pudd'n'head Wilson. Here's one: “Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.”

Be a team of one! Examine a topic from a variety of perspectives, writing as if you have multiple personalities, each one of which was humorous in his or her own way.

The Television Situation Comedy, or TV Sitcom

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

A situation comedy (or “sitcom”) involves a continuous cast of regular, recurring, and unique stereotypical characters in comedy that arises from a shared environment, from a specific set of circumstances, or from a particular situation that results in predictable behavior and rapidly resolved conflict. For example, The Andy Griffith Show portrays the life of small-town sheriff Andy Taylor as he interacts with his family, Aunt Bee and Opie, his deputy Barney Fife, and his friends, neighbors, and fellow townspeople.

Regular characters are those which occur in almost every episode of a sitcom series. Such characters include the protagonist, or main character, and the supporting characters with whom he or she routinely interacts, such as a spouse, a child or children, servants, friends, neighbors, coworkers, or roommates.
Often, a regular character is a foil to the protagonist, highlighting the main character’s personality traits by exhibiting traits that are opposite to the protagonist’s qualities. Often, when a foil is part of the regular cast, the sitcom will be filmed in a single location, in a relatively small space, such as an apartment, that the foil shares with the protagonist. Andy Taylor, the sheriff of Mayberry, North Carolina, is the protagonist of The Andy Griffith Show. As such, he is one of the show’s regular characters. Other regular characters include his Aunt Bee, his son Opie, and his deputy Barney Fife.

Recurring characters are supporting characters who interact less frequently with the protagonist or one of the other regular characters than do regular characters; recurring characters may include visitors, government officials or representatives, customers, out-of-town or distant relatives, or supervisors. Some of the recurring characters on The Andy Griffith Show are schoolteacher Helen Crump, Andy’s girlfriend; Thelma Lou, Barney’s girlfriend; barber Floyd Lawson; mechanic Gomer (and, later, his cousin Goober) Pyle; fix-it man Emmett Clark; city clerk Howard Sprague; Aunt Bee’s friend, Clara Edwards; and Mayor Pike.

Unique characters appear only once in a single episode of a sitcom series. The character who is portrayed by a guest star (a actor of some renown) is a special type of unique character. Such a character appears in an episode because the celebrity who plays this character has charisma or glamour that adds interest to the sitcom. A guest star’s appearance may coincide with “sweeps weak” or may occur during a decline in the show’s ratings, to increase the show’s audience. Other unique characters usually appear for a specific purpose, such as to fulfill the need of a particular plot.

Regardless of whether a character is a regular, a recurring, or a unique character, he or she is usually a flat character and a stereotype whose behavior is predictable. A flat character is one that is made up of only a few personality traits are present in most sitcom characters, and these traits can be identified by a short list of adjectives. Barney is a flat character, whose fictitious personality is summed up by such adjectives as “vain,” “sensitive,” “self-important,” “inept,” and “braggadocios.” A stereotypical character is one that fits preconceived ideas about the class of individuals of which he or she is a representative. The sitcom character also usually behaves as viewers imagine such a type of character would behave--that is, according to type. A rustic character is apt to be simple, unaffected, and gullible; an urban character, urbane, pretentiousness, and cynical. Therefore, such characters’ behaviors would be predictable. The simple rustic is likely to misjudge situations or people, underestimating them; provide overt indications of his or her true thoughts and feelings through his or her facial expressions, body language, and speech; and be deceived by unprincipled characters. Gomer is a good example of such a character. A trusting soul who gives everyone the benefit of the doubt, he sometimes chastises those he’s underestimated by shouting, “Shame! Shame! Shame!” at them after they have hoodwinked him with one unlikely story or another. On the other hand, the urban character is apt to see several more implications concerning a situation’s significance or several meanings concerning a deed that would escape the rustic character’s notice; to disguise or hide his or her true thoughts and feelings; and to dismiss good intentions or noble feelings as the motivations or causes of another character’s behavior. On The Andy Griffith Show, Mayor Pike comes the closest to such a character.

In some situation comedies, two or more characters share the same environment. In some instances, one of the regular supporting characters is a foil to the protagonist. Because of their diametrically opposed qualities, these characters are doomed to disagree and, often, to annoy one another. They see things altogether differently, often in opposite terms to one another’s perceptions, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or beliefs. For example, in The Odd Couple, Oscar Madison is a slob who shares his apartment with Felix Unger, an obsessive-compulsive neat-nik. Much of the show’s conflict--and comedy--stem from their attitudes toward cleanliness.

The shared space can be, and usually is, larger than an apartment. On The Dick Van Dyke Show, Rob Petrie shares an office with his fellow comedy writers Sally Rogers and Buddy Sorrel and his home with his wife Laura and their son Richie. Likewise, the entire community of Mayberry, including the courthouse, Andy Taylor’s house, Wally’s Filling Station, Floyd’s Barber Shop, Emmett’s Fix-It Shop, Weaver’s Department Store, and several other locations, make up the shared space of The Andy Griffith Show.

The sitcom situation is of an everyday sort, such as viewers themselves might encounter in their daily family or work lives or during their leisure time. Each situation gives rise to a commonplace conflict that is resolved within the span of the show’s duration--typically, thirty minutes (no counting commercial messages). Some of the conflicts that occur in plots for The Andy Griffith Show include Opie’s discovery of the harm to relationships that lying causes; Goober’s learning that pedantry is apt to cause others to feel contempt instead of admiration for know-it-alls; and Andy’s willingness to let others retain their personal dignity by taking credit for the good deeds that he has done.

The themes (or subject matter) of sitcoms suggest the type of topics that television audiences find amusing. Over the years, various types of sitcoms have aired on television, several of which types overlap:

• Offbeat comedies (The Addams Family, The Munsters, My Mother the Car)
• Comedies of the workplace (Alice, The Andy Griffith Show, The Bob Newhart Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Oh! Susannah, Laverne and Shirley, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Night Court, Our Miss Brooks, That Girl, Cheers, Home Improvement, Frazier)
• Comedies involving single-parent families (The Andy Griffith Show, Bachelor Father, The Courtship of Eddies’ Father, Make Room For Daddy, One Day at a Time, WKRP in Cincinnati, My Three Sons, Full House)
• Comedies involving merged families (The Brady Bunch, Eight Is Enough, Yours Mine and Ours, Please Don‘t Eat the Daisies)
• Colleges about roommates (Bosom Buddies, Three’s Company, Friends, Laverne and Shirley, The Odd Couple)
• Comedies featuring black families (The Cosby Show, Good Times, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air)
• Comedies focusing upon nuclear families (The Cosby Show, Good Times, Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Donna Reed Show, Married. . . with Children, Roseanne, Home Improvement)
• Comedies centering upon multi-cultural families (Diff’rent Strokes)
• Comedies featuring extended families (The Mothers-in-Law, Everybody Loves Raymond)
• Comedies about married couples (The Jeffersons, Ozzie and Harriet, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, I Married Joan, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners)
• College comedies (Dobie Gillis)
• Comedies concerning high schools or private postsecondary schools (The Facts of Life, Welcome Back, Kotter, Happy Days)
• Rustic comedies (The Dukes of Hazzard, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, The Real McCoys)
• Espionage comedies (Get Smart)
• Supernatural comedies (The Flying Nun, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeanie, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Girl with Something Extra, Topper)
• Military comedies (The Phil Silvers Show, F Troop, Gomer Pyle, USMC, Hogan‘s Heroes, M*A*S*H)
• Beach comedies (Gidget)
• Political comedies (The Governor and J. J.)
• Extraterrestrial comedies (My Favorite Martian, ALF, Mork and Mindy)
• Animal comedies (Mr. Ed)
• Comedies about a Servant (Hazel, Who‘s the Boss?, The Nanny)
• Comedies focusing upon musical families or groups (The Monkees, The Partridge Family)
• Comedies about superheroes (Batman)

Situation Comedy

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Like playwrights and screenwriters, television situation comedy writers often receive short shrift. They work behind the scenes, not on stage or behind the camera. As a result, many of them remain relatively anonymous. However, one can learn a tremendous amount from them as to how to write humor, even though their media are more visually than textually oriented.

There are too many situation comedies to review in anything less than several volumes, but we can learn much from considering the genre itself, its conventions, techniques, and some specific illustrations of each of these elements.

As the name “situation comedy” (or “sitcom,” as it is often abbreviated) implies, these stories emphasize comical situations, or sets of circumstances, over characters. As a result, their dramatic personae tend to be stock characters of the type which Durant identifies with respect to the ancient Greek’s New Comedy (“the cruel father, the benevolent old man, the prodigal son, the heiress mistaken for a poor girl, the bragging soldier, the clever slave, the flatterer, the parasite, the physician, the priest, the philosopher, the cook, the courtesan, the procuress, and the pimp”); which we have identified with regard to contemporary humor ( the country bumpkin, the con artist, the egghead, the fish out of water (displaced person), the hypocrite, and the blowhard); and which people the pages, as it were, of “An Excerpt of Character Writings of the 17th Century” (see Appendix A). These characters recur on a regular basis, often in a specific setting that reflects a location that is familiar with a wide audience. Homes and workplaces, schools and public places are frequently the settings for such comedies.

The sitcom tells a story, and, although the story is slight and often superficial, it is the occasion for the jokes, humorous anecdotes, and amusing situations that ensue. The story acts much like the string upon which beads or jewels are strung to make a necklace, with the beads or the jewels themselves representing the jokes, humorous anecdotes, and amusing situations. Thus, a sitcom is, at least potentially, doubly delightful: it offers both a comical story and plenty of laughs along the way. Sitcoms have been a major influence on modern humor, both in the United States and around the world, with hundreds and hundreds of them having been produced since their debut, which, arguably, was 1928, the year during which Amos and Andy was launched on American radio. Since their inception, situation comedies have taken on nearly every aspect of contemporary life, from domestic bliss to irascible bosses, from macabre neighbors and busybodies to sentimental slobs, from cute, precocious kids and rebellious teens to battling in-laws and quirky roommates. Therefore, anyone who is interested in writing hilarious humor needs to be aware of the conventions and techniques of the sitcom writer, for, even if one has no intention him- or herself ever of writing a sitcom, the genre has shaped and reshaped comedy and humor, changing audiences’ and readers’ expectations as to what should be regarded as funny. That doesn’t mean that a humorist must write only in the same vein as sitcom writers, but it does mean that the humorist should be aware of the major influence that sitcoms have had on humor in general and comedy in particular.

In The Comic Toolbox: How To Be Funny Even If You’re Not, John Vorhaus, a film and television writer with over 20 years of experience, offers tips concerning how to write speculation scripts, or “specs,” for television situation comedies. Some of his advice applies to humorists of every stripe. For example, Vorhaus advises his readers to “play to your strengths”: “Do you have a knack for gags? Then you want to spec a gag-driven show. Do you have ‘heart’? Then you want to write a sample for a show that has lots of ‘heartfelt’ moments. Can you write kids well? Write a kids’ show spec.” He also reminds his readers to remember that every sitcom has a “rule” that governs how the story will be told. A “rule” for Married. . . With Children, he says, is “that Al Bundy always loses.”

Likewise, “on Murphy Brown there’s often a gag, or even a running gag, about a secretary, but. . . the stories are never built around a secretary.” These rules, he says, affect every element of their respective sitcoms:

A show's rules extend to all aspects of that show. Which character gets the main story? Who gets the secondary stories? Is someone a straight man? Do characters tell jokes and make wisecracks, or do all the laughs come from the characters' comic perspectives? What sort of language do these people use? What topics are taboo? Do they make reference to the outside world, or do they live within a hermetically sealed sitcom bubble? Will given characters act the fool?

Vorhaus also offers excellent instruction as to how the typical sitcom is structured and how he himself applies the genre’s strict guidelines as to how such a comedy should be put together:

Situation comedies are structured either as two-act or three act tales. Mad About You, M*A*S*H and Married. . . with Children are two-act structures; Murphy Brown and The Simpsons play in three acts. Each act ends with an act break, a big dramatic moment which (one hopes) creates a sense of expectation and dread strong enough to hold the viewers' interest across the commercial break and bring them back for more. . . .

. . . In three-act structure, as in two-act structure, it's necessary for the moment before each commercial to have some real drama and urgency, to carry the viewer over the break. I like to think of my three-act act breaks in terms of trouble is coming and trouble is here. At the end of the first act, the characters know that a bad, bad thing is looming on the horizon. At the second act break, the consequences of that bad thing have been brought home. This second break corresponds roughly with the moment of maximum dread in traditional two-act structure. . . .

No matter what happens in your story, remember that situation comedies are essentially circular; things always end up more or less back where they started. If a
character gets fed up with his family and moves out of the house, clearly the act break is the moment when he leaves.

Just as clearly, the story will end with the character having moved back home.

Many sitcoms, Vorhaus points out, have a main story and a secondary, related story, the two of which may (or may not) be connected by their sharing of a common theme:

Many, though not all situation comedies slice themselves up into a-story and b-story. The a-story is the main story, the big problem, the heavy emotional issue with which a given half-hour of television reality chooses to concern itself. Typically, the a-story is given to the star of the show, the main character. Also, the a-story explores the theme of the episode. Whether that theme is, "tell the truth," or "be true to your school," or "don't do stupid things," it's played out in the largest, deepest, and most dramatic sense in the a story.

The b-story is much smaller and lighter than the a story. It usually involves secondary characters. It carries far less emotional weight and gets less screen time than the a-story. In a well crafted sitcom, there's a thematic connection between the a-story and the b-story, in which the b-story comments on and amplifies the meaning of the a-story.

Vorhaus also offers a “shortcut” for writing sitcoms that reveals the basic structure of this genre and provides the humorist with yet another tool for his or her humorists’ toolbox:

. . . I'd like to introduce yet another quick-and-dirty way to get a line on your sitcom story. To use this shortcut, think in the following terms: introduction, complication, consequence, and relevance. The introduction to a sitcom story is the thing that gets the trouble started or puts the tale in motion. An out-of-town guest arrives. An old girlfriend turns up. A first date looms. A driver's license expires. A party is planned.

The complication is the thing that makes the bad situation worse. If the introduction is one character taking cough medicine, the complication is another character bringing the boss home for dinner. If the introduction is one character running for school office, the complication is another character entering the race. If the introduction is a character weaving a lie into an English essay, the complication is that essay winning a major prize. If the introduction is Mr. Wacky going to the doctor, the complication is discovering he only has three weeks to live. The consequence is the result of the conflict created by the introduction and the complication. If two people are running for the same office, then the consequence is the outcome of the election. In the cough medicine story, the consequence is when the cough medicine blows up, so to speak, in the boss's face.

The consequenceof Mr. Wacky facing death is his coming to terms with his mortality, only to discover (since we'd like to run the series for another five years or so) that he's not actually dying after all. The relevance is simply a statement of the story's theme. Stand by your friends. Do the right thing. Don't fear the future. Stop and smell the roses. Accept your own mortality. Shower the people you love with love; that sort of thing.

Earlier, we identified some of the common stock characters of humor and comedy. Using the television sitcoms in which these characters appear as examples, we can get a better idea of how actual sitcoms were developed by referring to the summaries of these shows that are provided by the TV Land website.

The Beverly Hillbillies: Jed and Jethro (front seat); Elly May and Granny (back seat)
For our example of the country bumpkin, we used Jethro Bodine, a character on The Beverly Hillbillies. This show is based upon the premise that Jed Clampett, attempting to kill game he’s hunting near his mountain cabin in Bug Tussle, unearths an underground oil reserve, making him instantly wealthy. He and his family load up their truck and move to Beverly Hills, California, where life, for them (and everyone they encounter there) is decidedly different. TV Land describes the series as “always rich in the absurd”:

. . . The Beverly Hillbillies was chock full of lowbrow but hilarious situations. As sitcom humor would have it, Jed and his brood move next door to the greedy banker, Milburn Drysdale, who in an effort to make his financial institution the home of the Clampett millions, takes the fresh-off-the-farm family under his wing. Most of the early shows revolve around the impossible adjustments the poor mountain folk must make to city life, and Jed Clampett's backwoods brand of wisdom always wins out in the end. Despite their brand-new mansion with its cement pond and indoor plumbing, the Hillbillies stay true to their rustic roots. Many episodes center around
Drysdale's attempts to keep the Clampetts in good spirits in their big city setting (thus keeping their money in his bank). Enrolling Jethro in elementary school, buying Jed a movie studio, letting Granny open a medical practice and finding Elly May a beau are just a few of the silly but entertaining storylines.

Our example of the con artist, Mr. Haney, is taken from the sitcom Green Acres, in which attorney Oliver Wendell Douglas, wanting to get back to the basic way of life that he believes made America great, purchases a run-down farm, complete with ramshackle house and barn, from Mr. Haney, who is forever afterward selling the new farmer an assortment of junk that Douglas does not want or need. The show’s gags result from Douglas’ attempt to farm the unproductive land, producing sparse crops of miniature vegetables that are the laughingstock of his neighbors; the house’s lack of basic utilities, facilities, and utilities, such as a telephone, a closet, and dependable appliances; Douglas’ socialite wife Lisa’s ineptitude as a housewife and her longing to return to Manhattan; the Douglas’ incompetent employee Eb; zany neighbors; Douglas’ naiveté about country life; and his occasional trips to Hooterville.

TV Land describes the show:

Successful lawyer Oliver Wendell Douglas. . . longs to leave behind the complications of modern society and life as a Manhattanite, and despite the protestations of his glamorous, socialite, Hungarian wife Lisa. . . , Oliver buys a farm, sight unseen, from swindler Mr. Haney. The couple says “goodbye[,] city life!” and take up residence in Hooterville, U.S.A. While there is some debate amongst the show's fans as to the actual geographic location of Hooterville, one thing is clear; it exists in a state of mind-bending logic and hallucinatory natural laws, and is inhabited by an eccentric population that includes favorite son Arnold Ziffel, a multi-lingual, television watching pig. The farm Oliver has purchased is a shambles, the farmhouse in a state of advanced disrepair. Along with hired hand Eb, Oliver tries to make a go at being
a gentleman farmer.Meanwhile, Lisa settles in to her new surroundings despite herself, and attempts to bring gracious living and the finer things to the oddball residents of this off-the-map town.

The sitcom M*A*S*H supplied our example of the egghead character in the person, so to speak, of Major Charles Emerson Winchester III. This comedy is set in Korea, during the Korean War. It involves the medical and support personnel of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH. Commanded by Colonel Sherman T, Potter (who is later replaced by Lt. Col. Henry Blake), Dr. Hawkeye Pierce and Dr. John Francis Xavier McIntyre, who goes by the nickname “Trapper John,” are unconventional doctors who, despite their hatred of war (and the Army), do their best to save the lives of wounded soldiers by practicing “meatball surgery” under less-than-idea conditions. To maintain their sanity, they flaunt Army rules and regulations, play practical jokes on one another, and tease Major Frank Burns and his paramour, Major Margaret (“Hot Lips”) Houlihan, who, despite their affair with one another, insist that everyone else should do everything strictly by the book. Pierce and Honeycutt get away with their unorthodox behavior--keeping a still in their tent, wearing Hawaiian shirts instead of uniforms, and displaying a general lack of disrespect for their superiors--because their surgical skills are not only necessary but extraordinary. Besides Blake, Burns, Houlihan, and Winchester, other characters in the series include Corporal Maxwell Q. Klinger, who sports a dress and wears high heels and carries a purse in the hope of receiving a psychiatric discharged; Colonel Water Eugene (“Radar”) O’Reilly, a clairvoyant clerk who announces that casualties are “incoming,” even before he receives official word; and Father Francis Mulcahy, a Catholic priest.

TV Land describes M*A*S*H from the protagonist’s point of view:

For Captain Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, love and war, politics and
prose, collide at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. He was named Hawkeye
after a character in The Last of the Mohicans.

Hawkeye is originally assigned to work with Captain "Trapper John" McIntyre, the two become fast friends as they figure out a way to mix hi-jinks and humor with the stark reality of war. He forms a bond with seemingly psychic Corporal Walter "Radar" O. Reilly, Corporal Maxwell Klinger, who would do anything to be sent home, including dress in drag, and mild mannered Father Francis Mulcahy. After Trapper
is discharged Life at camp returns to normal for Hawkeye with the arrival of new best friend, Captain B.J. Hunnicutt. Growing more learned by war, through out his tour Hawkeye transforms from a wise cracking practical joker to a man of conscious; but perhaps his biggest strength is the ability to find humor, sanity and humanity in time of war.

We exemplified the fish out of water, or displaced person, character with Will Smith of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and with Jethro Bodine and the Clampetts of The Beverly Hillbillies. In Fresh Prince, Will, living in Philadelphia, starts to have trouble with members of a street gang, so his guardian aunt sends him to live with the Banks, well-to-do relatives who live in in Bel Air, California. In his new surroundings, as he is exposed to situations and characters he’d never dreamed of, Will struggles to develop a sense of identity that can include other people’s values, ways of life, beliefs, and concerns and to adjust to his new environment. He is changed for the better by his encounter with his uncle, a judge, his aunt, and their children, Will’s cousins dimwitted Hilary, pedantic Carlton, and young Ashley, just as they are changed for the better by him. Much of the series’ humor comes from Will’s struggle to fit in, from his encountering new ideas and situations, and from his conflict with his uncle and his cousins

Our examples of the hypocrite and the blowhard, Tartuffe and Sir John Falstaff, were taken from dramatic comedies, Tartuffe and King Henry IV, Parts I and II and the Merry Wives of Windsor, respectively, rather than from television sitcoms.

(Because sitcoms’ theme songs often provide a humorous way to introduce the concepts, or premises, of their respective shows, we have included the lyrics of several of them in Appendix C.)

Next: Standup Comedians

Types of Humorous Stock Characters

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

During the hundreds and hundreds of years during which humor has been developed, a number of humorous stock characters have been developed. We are familiar with many of them, not so much from the stage as from television situation comedies and stand-up comedians’ personas. An awareness of such characters can help us to people our own short stories, novels, scripts, and screenplays with the same types of humorous characters, giving them the special and unique twists that only we can provide, based upon our own personalities, backgrounds, and experiences.

Some of the more common humorous stock characters are the country bumpkin, the con artist, the egghead, the fish out of water (displaced person), the hypocrite, and the blowhard.

The Beverly Hillbillies, a television situation comedy, features perhaps the quintessential country bumpkin of modern times. Jethro Bodine is a nephew to Jed Clampett, the “mountaineer” whose discovery of oil on his property in Bug Tussle, Tennessee, allows him to move his family to a mansion in elegant Beverly Hills, California. As a result, the entire family--Jed, Granny, Elly May, and Jethro--become fish out of water.

Much of the series’ more obvious comedy revolves around Jethro. After twelve years in school, Jethro manages to pass the sixth grade, and, as a result, the others defer to him in matters of arithmetic and other academic subjects. He recites aloud mnemonics associated with division whenever he must perform this operation, and refers to arithmetic as “ciphering.” Possessed of a tremendous appetite, he loves Granny’s cooking of such delicacies as crawdad and ‘possum
stew.

He constantly seeks employment opportunities that would showcase his business and leadership skills--or those, at any rate, that he imagines he has. He becomes (always on a short-term and to disastrous effect) a brain surgeon, a Hollywood producer, and a bullfighter, and he joins the army, buying himself a tank for practicing drills, to impress women.

He considers himself quite a playboy, never suspecting that attractive women put up with his ignorance, crudity, and boorish behavior only because of his uncle’s wealth. He thinks, too, that topless dancers perform without wearing hats. The normal denizens of Beverly Hills or the businesses in which Jethro works, however briefly, are his foils.

Green Acres’ Mr. Haney is an example par excellence of the con artist. Not only is he the character who sells New York City attorney Oliver Wendell Douglas and his beautiful, scatterbrained wife Lisa a ramshackle farm outside the town of Hooterville, but he also returns, time after time, to sell Oliver a mind-boggling array of junk from his well-stocked truck.

His technique was as simple as it proved effective (Oliver almost always ended up buying whatever was being offered for sale): The fast-talking Mr. Haney would invent some absurd, polysyllabic name for a useless or broken item, assign it a purpose or use that it did not have and could not serve, indicate that it was of inexpressible value, and do his customer the “favor” or “service” of letting him purchase the invaluable object for the fraction of its true value that Mr. Haney was asking for it. His truck was equipped with a pull-down sign that displayed the very item of merchandise that Mr. Haney just happened to be selling. The gravellyvoiced, unctuous character fairly oozed with the oil of the Western frontier’s snake oil salesman.

Major Charles Winchester of the television situation comedy M*A*S*H is a good example of the egghead. An arrogant, pompous, and condescending airbag, the Army surgeon would come across as contemptible rather than humorous except for his genuine, if not readily apparent, compassion for his patients and his capacity to develop authentic friendships, over time, with his colleagues.

A sort of curmudgeon, he his humanity behind the façade of the misanthropic and superior aristocrat, pretending to be better than others and to know it all. His surgical technique was brilliant, but, he found, it didn’t meet the needs of the “meatball surgery” that his fellow surgeons found necessary to tend to combat injuries in the less-than-ideal conditions of a mobile Army surgical hospital, or MASH.

Through dramatic irony, the show’s writers often let the audience in on the secret of the doctor’s humanity by showing him contributing to a charity, feeling homesick, and treating lesser officers with dignity and respect rather than pulling rank on them or putting them on report for their often-unmilitary behavior, although Winchester‘s fellow characters often did not see him perform such actions. In addition, he did his utmost to save his patients and grieved over the loss of any of them. Despite his know-it-all attitude concerning surgery, culture, and the good life, Winchester endeared himself to audiences and to many of his fellow characters because of the compassionate and humane values and characteristics he displayed, if with occasional embarrassment and reluctance.

The television situation comedy Gilligan’s Island also featured an exemplary egghead in the character of Professor Roy Hinkley. Much of the professor’s time was spent in inventing bizarre contraptions, often of bamboo, that were intended either to facilitate his and his fellow castaways’ rescue from the island on which they washed up after their yacht, The Minnow, capsized, or to help them to become more comfortable on the island as they awaited rescue.

A character can overlap two or more types. For example, as we mentioned earlier, Jethro Bodine is not only a country bumpkin, but he is also a fish out of water, or a displaced person, as are the other members of his family, Uncle Jed Clampett, Granny, and cousin Elly May Clampett.

The fish out of water is a displaced person. He or she is out of place, emotionally or actually. He or she is taken out of a familiar environment. Then, this character is placed in unfamiliar surroundings. He or she is a stranger in a strange land. As such, the fish out of water has trouble functioning according to the new community‘s standards. He or she makes many mistakes. Some are errors in judgment. Others errors are due to miscommunication. Still others are caused by mistaken beliefs or false assumptions. This character usually tries to fit in. Often, he or she wants to belong. This character tries to play his or her assigned role.

The fish out of water often appears in sitcoms. This character may also appear in stories with more serious themes. He or she may be a foil to socially pretentious behavior. He or she may express other social criticisms. This character may replace someone who belongs in the position that he or she takes. Then, he or she can show what life is like in both sets of circumstances. This character’s use also lets writers look at familiar situations and themes in a fresh way.

Every fish out of water character has at least one (and usually several) foils, for it is by opposition that the displaced character is shown as different from the rest of the characters and how, specifically, he or she is different.

The Clampett’s vocabulary alone suggests their unrefined stature and ignorance. They refer to their estate’s swimming pool as a “cement pond.” Their billiard table is considered a “fancy eating table” for company dinners, and the cue sticks are believed to be used to pass pots across the table; sharpened, they become instruments for impaling meat. The family thinks flamingos are oversize pink chickens. Later, the Clampetts plow their front lawn to grow their own vegetables. Golf balls are the eggs of a mysterious underground “critter.” Elly May tried to cook some, after melting them, “shells” and all. Granny thinks an escaped kangaroo is a gigantic jackrabbit. Because of their dress, they are sometimes mistaken for servants, and they mistake a butler for a tenant of the rooming house they turn their mansion into in one episode.

The series’ humor (and social criticism) also results from the Clampett’s next-door neighbors, the Drysdales. Mr. Drysdale is Jed’s banker, and, consequently, he argues that admittance into the rarified strata of the upper class depends upon nothing more than one’s wealth, whereas his arrogant spouse insists that one must be born into the upper crust. To save money, Mr. Drysdale orders his bank’s employees to obtain their healthcare from Granny, who makes dubious home remedies from a variety of exotic substances.

The Drysdales--and their whole way of life--are major foils to Jethro and the Clampetts. When the banker advises Jed to invest in stocks, the hillbilly buys cows, pigs, and chickens to raise on his estate. When Mrs. Drysdale’s son, Sonny, leads Elly May on before jilting her, the Clampetts feud with the Drysdales.

Granny rides the racehorse Mr. Drysdale gives the Clampetts back and forth to the store and later buys matching horses and buggies for Mrs. Drysdale and herself so they can compete in races with one another.

A number of con artists try to part Jed from his money, always without success. In one instance, a con man attempts to sell him Central Park. Another tries to get Jed to buy a fan that is supposedly big enough to blow the smog out of Los Angeles. Still another get Jed to buy local landmarks such as the Hollywood Bowl and a freeway. Their behavior suggests how greedy, unprincipled men will take advantage of honest, though unsophisticated people. The Beverly Hillbillies’ use of Jethro and the Clampetts allowed the show’s writers to poke fun at both the upper and the lower classes, but, usually, Jethro and the Clampetts were portrayed in a more positive light than the Drysdales and other wealthy and successful business leaders.

Television situation comedy Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s Will Smith is another excellent example of a fish out of water. Will is a street-smart, if not exactly, street-tough youth from the inner city streets of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When he gets into trouble, his mother sends him to live with his aunt and uncle, Philip and Vivian Banks, their sons, Carlton and Nicky, and their daughter Ashley.

Will’s uncle is a judge, his aunt is a professor, and his cousin is a preppy who, according to Will, may not be quite “black” enough. The family lives in a mansion, complete with servants, in the exclusive Los Angeles community of Bel-Air. His newfound family and their lifestyle are everything that Will is not. Their wealth, politics, education, values, interests, and even their mode of speech, dress, and demeanor. Upon his arrival in their neighborhood, Will becomes a fish out of water. Much of the television series’ humor derives from Will’s trying to understand, adapt to, and fit in with his new environment. In addition, a good deal of the humor results from the opposition of Will’s character to those of such foils as Carlton and Ashley.

Since The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is a situation comedy, rather than a stand-alone story, we’ll dip into several episodes to compile a list of incidents and situations that showcase Will’s nature as a fish out of water character.

Will has preconceived ideas as to what it means to be black, most of which he acquired from his own experience as a resident of an all-black, inner city neighborhood, and few of which accord with the Banks’ lifestyle. When his notions don’t coincide with the realities of his new environment, he often defends his ideas against these new realities, claiming that there is something wrong with those characters, whether the character is Carlton, Ashley, or someone else, rather than with his own beliefs as to what should and shouldn’t be considered “black.”

His aunt and uncle are held up by his mother as examples of successful blacks, which implies that neither she nor Will are successful, since their lives are nothing like those of their wealthy West Coast relatives. Will has had trouble with the law, which his Ivy league-educated uncle, as a judge, represents. Uncle Philip’s Republican political beliefs and support do not mesh with Will’s political values.

Will has many more opportunities to learn about life and people in Bel-Air than he is likely to have had in Philadelphia. He works at a variety of jobs, including a part on a daytime soap opera, salesman at Mulholland Motors, a costumed waiter at the Brawny Deep, a waiter at Chelsea’s Touchdown sports bar, a yellow chicken for a television commercial, and a assistant on his cousin’s TV show, The Hilary Show. Will also meets such celebrities as William Shatner and Jay Leno. These experiences teach him that not everyone believes, thinks, feels, and acts as the acquaintances he left behind in Philadelphia and that life offers possibilities beyond basketball, street gangs, and rap music. Such incidents and situations also allow opportunities for gentle criticisms of social institutions.

Moliere’s Tartuffe offers a perfect example of the hypocrite. Hypocrisy results from a discrepancy between what one says and what one does. The action does not match the words. For example, a person who affects to be an honest man but who cheats widows, orphans, and the physically disabled is a hypocrite because he preaches honesty, as it were, but, by his actions, shows himself to be a dishonest person.

Tartuffe is supposedly a man of surpassingly great religious zeal. He is alleged to have the precepts of Jesus, as taught by the church, ever before him and to insist on a true and pious devotion to these teachings at all times. In reality, Tartuffe is a schemer and a fraud, utterly devoid of the attributes he champions and an absolute scoundrel who seeks to seduce a man’s wife and cheat the same man, Orgon, out of his wealth and property and to marry his daughter.

The rest of Orgon’s family sees through Tartuffe’s flimsy pretenses, but Orgon, the master of the house, remains deceived until it is too late and Tartuffe has stolen the other’s wealth and property. It is only as Tartuffe is evicting the family that he is arrested on the order of the king, who has heard of the hypocrite’s chicanery and has ordered that he be taken into custody. Moliere’s comedy offended many, causing him to write a defense of the work, which sheds light on the nature of humor and comedy:

The comic is the outward and visible form that nature's bounty has attached to everything unreasonable, so that we should see, and avoid, it. To know the comic we must know the rational, of which it denotes the absence and we must see wherein the rational consists . . . incongruity is the heart of the comic . . . it follows that all lying,
disguise, cheating, dissimulation, all outward show different fromthe reality, all contradiction in fact between actions that proceedfrom a single source, all this is in essence comic.

Another excellent example of the hypocrite is the Pardoner in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. A representative of the church, he sells indulgences to sinners while, at the same time, urging them to sin as much as they like, since he can and will as readily sell them the remedies to their transgressions, the indulgences which he hawks to them.

As a prelude to his offering of his stock of indulgences for sale to his listeners, he preaches against the sin of greed, but it is this very sin that motivates his every deed, including both his sermons and the sales of indulgences which follow them. In addition to the indulgences which he sells, the Pardoner also sells worthless pigs’ bones, ordinary metal, and other worthless artifacts, declaring them to be genuine holy relics. He openly delights in his ability to dupe the simple folk who gather around him to buy their way out of the punishments of purgatory and to ease their consciences and freely admits that he is unconcerned with the eternal fate of those who entrust their souls to him and to the worthless trinkets he sells them. His honesty about his dishonesty and his slight silliness make him rather an endearing character, despite the monstrous nature of his character as a hypocrite and a swindler without conscience or compassion. Obviously, Chaucer uses this character as a means to criticize the more blatant abuses of the church and its clerics at the outset of the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance. This critical dimension also makes the Pardoner a more acceptable, if not exactly likeable, character.

The blowhard is an annoying braggart, or one who bloviates or boasts, especially when he or she has little, if anything, about which to blow his or her own horn. One of the great blowhards is Sir John Falstaff, the obese, lying, conniving, drunken knight in William Shakespeare’s plays, King Henry IV, Part I, King Henry IV, Part II, and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

A companion to the carousing Prince Hal, he is both vainglorious and cowardly and prefers to spend his time feasting, drinking, and womanizing rather than fighting. Prince Hal characterizes the knight as “that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox.” He lies, swearing his falsehoods to be true; interprets Christian doctrine loosely or wrongly, often to his own advantage (as does Chaucer’s Wife of Bath), is openly sensuous and hedonistic, considers the idea of honor as worthless as a “mere scrutcheon,” and keeps a bottle of sack (wine) in his holster, rather than a pistol. A corrupting influence upon the young prince, to whose delinquency he contributes mightily, the eternal partygoer brags about every aspect of his service as a knight, as he does concerning his immense appetites for food, drink, sex, and other fleshly desires, telling Prince Hal that, to “banish plump Jack” would be to “banish all the world.” In this exaggerated estimate of his own worth, the knight is ironically telling the truth, for, in his carnal appetites, hedonistic nature, and zest for life and all its physical pleasures, if not necessarily its moral responsibilities, Falstaff truly does represent all that Christianity regards as “the world,” or “worldliness.”

Many other stock characters are common to humorous stories and comedies. Descriptions of many of them appear in “Appendix A: An Excerpt of Character Writings of the 17th Century.” In availing yourself of these character sketches, it’s advisable to translate them, as it were, into more modern terms, by which operation they shall be made more intelligible, and then to make such revisions as seem necessary or prudent so that they better fit these, rather than earlier, times. Here is an example; the original is provided first, with the paraphrase following:

AN AFFECTED TRAVELLER (ORIGINAL)

Is a speaking fashion; he hath taken pains to be ridiculous, and hath seen more than he hath perceived. His attire speaks French or Italian, and his gait cries, Behold me. He censures all things by countenances and shrugs, and speaks his own language with shame and lisping; hewill choke rather than confess beer good drink, and his pick-tooth is a main part of his behavior. He chooseth rather to be counted a spy than not a politician, and maintains his reputation by naming great men familiarly.

He chooseth rather to tell lies than not wonders, and talks with men singly; his discourse sounds big, but means nothing; and his boy is bound to admire him howsoever. He comes still from great personages, but goes with mean. He takes occasion to show jewels given him in regard of his virtue, that were bought in St. Martin's; and not long after having with a mountebank's method pronounced them worth thousands, impawned them for a few shillings. Upon festival days he goes to court, and salutes without resaluting; at night in an ordinary he canvasseth the business in hand, and seems as conversant with all intents and plots as if he begot them. His extraordinary account of men is, first to tell them the ends of all matters of consequence, and then to borrow money of them; he offers courtesies to show them, rather than himself, humble.

He disdains all things above his reach, and preferreth all countries before his own. He imputeth his want and poverty to the ignorance of the time, not his own nworthiness; and concludes his discourse with half a period, or a word, and leaves the rest to imagination. In a word, his religion is fashion, and both body and soul are governed by fame; he loves most voices above truth.

AN AFFECTED TRAVELLER (PARAPRASED)

He’s ridiculous, understanding little that he sees. Swaggering around in French or Italian clothing, he dismisses everything with a smirk or a shrug. Lisping, he speaks his own language with shame. He’d rather choke than admit that beer’s a good drink, and he customarily uses a toothpick to clean his teeth. He’d rather be considered a spy than a politician, and he’s a name-dropper. He’s a liar, and he talks with men individually; his speech is pompous but meaningless. Although he says he has important ancestors, he keeps low company. He makes a point of showing themedals he’s been given for his virtue, but, actually, he bought themin St. Martin’s; and, not long after having fraudulently declared themto be worth thousands, he pawns them for mere pennies. During festivals, he offers token greetings. At night, from a cab, he takes in the business at hand, assuming the casual air of one who’s financed everything. He tells men what’s important and then borrows moneyfrom them. His courtesies are meant to humble others, rather than toshow his own humility. He puts down anything he can’t have and prefers any other country to his own. He says he’s poor because he’s ahead of his time, not because he’s unworthy, and he leaves sentences unfinished to let others finish his thoughts. He worshipsfashion, fame; and praise.

Another way to compile a list of humorous stock characters is simply to review various situation comedies that you have watched and make note of, and describe, in some detail, the various other such characters that you have seen in such shows. For example, on Bewitched, Darrin and Samantha Stevens are plagued by nosy neighbor Gladys Kravitz and Gladys’ longsuffering husband Abner. In the persons, so to speak, of Samantha’s family of witches and warlocks, there is a cavalcade of eccentric minor characters as well, including Samantha’s vain and catty mother Endora, her aristocratic, womanizing father Maurice, her bumbling, perhaps senile Aunt Clara.

The Andy Griffith Show’s Deputy Barney Fife, as pompous as he is incompetent, is a classic example of the humorous sidekick (as is Cervantes’ Sancho Panza, page to the zany knight Don Quixote).

Household servants, whether lazy, wise, sarcastic, belligerent, or otherwise, are another humorous stock character, appearing in such diverse situation comedies as Hazel, The Jeffersons, The Brady Bunch, Family Affair, and Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Eccentric or irascible coworkers, such as those on Cheers, Taxi, Ally McBeal, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and Alice are tried-and-true humorous stock characters as well. (If you are not familiar with some of these shows, you can watch many of them, free, on the Fancast.com, Hulu.com, and other websites; doing so will enhance your understanding of such characters and how to create them.)



Next: Literary Humorists

The History of Comedy, Part 2

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Note: This post contains material that, dealing with adult situations, nudity, and sex, may be offensive to some readers but is, nevertheless, an important part of the history and development of comedy.

One of the Middle Age’s contributions to the literature of humor is the fabliau (plural, fabliaux), a narrative poem, the lines of which consist, most often, of rhymed couplets of eight-syllables each. Characteristically, fabliaux are satirical in tone, and often criticize arrogance, pomposity, and greed, especially among members of the clergy and the nobility. Women are frequently lampooned as well.

Fabliaux

Fabliaux are of a ribald character, emphasizing sexual situations and bawdy behavior. Frequently, an older, jealous, and possessive husband is cuckolded, his much younger, pretty wife committing adultery because she is sexually frustrated by her spouse’s impotence or intermittent virility. The protagonist is cunning, and he or she often outwits those with better educations and higher social standings. A famous example of the fabliau is Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale,” one of the stories that make up the anthology known as The Canterbury Tales. Other, lesser known examples are “The Butcher of Abbeville,” “The Three Hunchbacks,” “The Wild Dream,” and “The Ring That Controlled Erections,” all of which appear in The Norton Anthology of Western Literature.

“The Butcher of Abbeville”

“The Butcher of Abbeville,” a 588-line poem translated by Ned Dublin, recounts the story of David, a butcher from Abbeville, France, who visits a fair in Oisemont, to buy livestock. Finding nothing he likes, he starts for home, but, as night falls, afraid of highway robbers, he asks a local deacon, Father Gautier, to rent him a room for the night. Instead, the deacon turns him away.

Intent upon avenging himself for the deacon’s rudeness, David steals one of Father Gautier’s sheep, returns to the deacon’s house, saying he has bought the sheep at the fair, and offers to share its meat with the deacon if Father Gautier will, in return, allow him to spend the night. When the priest agrees, David kills and skins the animal, sharing the mutton with Father Gautier, the deacon’s wife, and their maid, who is also the deacon’s secret mistress.

Later, at different times, David persuades both the maid and the deacon’s wife to have sex with him in exchange for the sheepskin and his promise of discretion. The next morning, David visits the deacon at church, selling the sheepskin to him. The butcher has now avenged himself three times upon Father Gautier, committing adultery with the deacon’s wife, seducing his mistress, and selling the clergyman his own stolen animal’s sheepskin.

At the priest’s house, the wife and maid argue with one another concerning which of them is the rightful owner of the sheepskin, both claiming it as her own. When he returns home, the deacon hears both parties’ stories before insisting that he himself is the rightful owner of the sheepskin, which he’s purchased from the butcher. When the maid tells him what she did to earn the hide, the deacon accuses his wife of also having had sex with the butcher.

The narrator, Eustace d’Amiens, leaves it to his audience to determine for themselves which of the three claimants has rightful title to the fleece.

“The Three Hunchbacks”

The three hunchbacks of the poem’s title are traveling minstrels; the protagonist’s husband is also a hunchback, so, all told, there are four, not three, such characters in the story.

The husband is wed to a beautiful young woman who does not like being married to him. Jealous, he maintains a wary watch upon her. They seldom have visitors except for the purposes of business, but the husband allows the traveling hunchbacks to spend one night under his roof. The next day, the minstrels leave, and the husband keeps watch on his house from a bridge over the canal beside his residence, lest they return in secret.

The wife bids the minstrels to come back to her house so that they can sing to her. When her husband returns home unexpectedly, she hides the hunchbacks inside her spare bed’s three drawers. Her husband doesn’t stay long, but, when his wife opens the drawers to release the hunchbacks, all three are dead.

Revealing only one of the hunchback’s corpses, she hires a passing porter to assist her, and he dumps the body into the canal. While he is about this task, the wife removes another hunchback’s body, and, when the porter returns to collect the fee she’s agreed to pay him, she says he’s only pretended to dispose of the hunchback’s body. As proof of her claim, she shows the porter the second hunchback‘s corpse.

Supposing the dead hunchback to be “the Antichrist,” the porter lugs it to the canal. Upon his return, the wife plays the same trick on the porter, passing off the third hunchback’s body as that of the first. Believing himself bewitched by the dead hunchback, the porter also dumps the third body into the canal, declaring that he will strike the body on its neck, should he meet with it yet again.

Returning for his fee, the porter sees the wife’s husband approaching the lady’s house. The porter strikes the husband upon the head as the hunchback with a club as the husband approaches the top of the stairs, thereby killing him. The porter dumps the body in the canal, and, afterward, receives payment from the wife.

“The Wild Dream”

In the 213-line fabliau known as “The Wild Dream,” a wife is anxious to have sex with her husband, who is returning home after having been away on business for three months.

During dinner, she gets him drunk, but, instead of becoming amorous, he falls to sleep (or passes out) soon after they retire. She sleeps, too, dreaming of a fair at which a merchant sells a variety of penises and testicles. She buys the biggest penis she can find, but when, pleased at her purchase, she slaps hands with the merchant, she accidentally awakens her husband.

She apologizes, telling him of her dream, and, as the couple hugs and kisses, he becomes erect and inquires of her what price she might have paid the merchant for an organ like his. She replies that it is too small to have interested her or any other women at the fair. However, she agrees with her husband that a real, flesh-and-blood penis, of any size, is superior even to the most gargantuan of imaginary phalli, and the couple test her theory.

The last lines of the poem identify its author, Jean Bodel, who heard the story he reports in the story as a result of the husband’s unwisely having mentioned it to a poet who was compiling an anthology of fabliaux.

“The Ring That Controlled Erections”

A poem of 50 lines, “The Ring That Controlled Erections” recounts the embarrassing dilemma of a bishop who finds a cure that’s worse than the condition (erectile dysfunction) from which he suffers.

A horseman, dismounting at a stream to bathe, removes his ring, setting it aside. When he leaves, he forgets the ring, leaving it behind.

A bishop rides by, sees light flash on the ring, and, retrieving the lost jewelry, puts the ring onto his finger. At once, he has an erection of such huge dimensions that it drags upon the ground, even when he is on horseback. His erectile dysfunction is gone, replaced by satyriasis, and, to his horror, he finds that his erection will not subside.

The bishop dispatches messengers to locate someone who can help him, and the original owner, learning of the bishop’s plight, offers to help, provided that the clergyman gives him his rings and a fee of 100 pounds.

The bishop agrees, and when he gives the man the ring that controls erections, the clergyman’s erection subsides. In a sarcastic aside, the narrator suggests that that the bishop is as glad to be rid of his temporary, and bothersome, manhood as the ring’s original owner is happy to regain his own sexual virility.

Other Fabliaux

The Middle Ages offered many other fabliaux, including “The Four Wishes of St. Martin,” in which a wife wishes that her husband were all over penises; he wishes she had as many vaginas; the wife wishes away all their sex organs; and the husband wishes them restored to their original conditions.

In “The Partridges,” a wife eats both of the partridges that her husband has killed for their supper and covers up her misdeed by claiming that she’s keeping the birds warm until their guest, the local priest, arrives. Her husband sharpens his knives so he will be prepared to carve the partridges. When the clergyman arrives, the wife again lies to cover her transgression, frightening off their guest by telling him that her husband is sharpening his knives because he intends to castrate the priest. Then, she tells her husband that their dinner guest ran away with the stolen partridges.

The titles of some fabliaux indicate the nature of their plots. Often, the titles are themselves obscene, for the incidents that they narrate are usually bawdy and, often, irreverent, sacrilegious, or even blasphemous.

Situation Comedy

Perhaps the greatest contribution to humor of contemporary times is that of the situation comedy, which is discussed in a later post.

A Handbook to Literature,10th edition, by William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman draws clear and helpful distinctions among a variety of specific types of comedy, including high comedy, low comedy, farce, burlesque, realistic comedy, sentimental comedy, romantic comedy, court comedy, the comedy of manners, the comedy of morals, the comedy of humors, the comedy of intrigue, and the comedy of situation. However, in general, the authors define comedy as “a dramatic or literary form that, . . . striving to provoke smiles and laughter, uses both wit and humor,” and contend that,

In general, comic effect arises from a recognition of incongruity of speech, action, or character. The incongruity may be verbal, as with a play on words; or bodily, as when stilts are used; or satirical, as when the effect depends upon the beholder’s ability to perceive the discrepancy between fact and pretense exhibited by a braggart. . . . Viewed in another sense, comedy may be considered to deal with people in their human state, restrained and often made ridiculous by their limitations, faults, bodily functions, and animal nature. . . . Comedy. . . has always regarded humans more realistically than tragedy and drawn its laughter or satire from the spectacle of individual or collective human weakness or failure; hence, its tendency to contrast appearance and reality, to deflate pretense, and to mock excess. . . (109-110).

To simplify things, we might say that humor is whatever makes us laugh and that, in general, humorists try to effect laughter through means other than dramatic enactments of skits, whereas comedians, like comedies, usually (but not always) rely more upon such skits or other dramatic situations as the basis of their routines. In short, humorists tell jokes, whereas comedians enact them. Of course, in reality, the situation is much more complex and humor and comedy, like humorists and comedians, practice many of the tricks of their counterparts.

Next: Types of Humorous Stock Characters