In Fiction, Being Funny Is NOT Easy

I’m going to share something with you that makes me look…not good.

Actually, that’s not quite true. It makes me look like a gigantic, sexist, racist asshole.

I am not proud of it. I tried to be funny, and failed in quite spectacular fashion. The best I can say about it is that it is a mistake that did not happen in public—it cropped up in an early draft of one of my books, and didn’t make the next rewrite. It was only because I had access to people much smarter and more aware than I was that I got rid of it before it could do any damage. For the absolute avoidance of doubt: it is a joke that I regret ever having written, and I have firmly resolved never to write one like it again. I’m not sharing it to shock. I’m sharing it for two reasons: one, because I think you can learn lessons from fucking up, even if the fuck-up only happens in private, and two, because it really reinforces just how easy it is for humour to go badly wrong.

And look: if you find racist and/or sexist jokes triggering, then you should absolutely skip the next couple of paragraphs—you’re not going to miss anything crucial. I certainly won’t complain.

Here goes. In an early draft, two of my characters (a gay Mexican man, and our narrator, a white American woman—who are, for context, best friends) have the following exchange.

It’s going to take way too much effort to climb out of the van. I just sit there, staring out the windshield, too exhausted to give much of a shit about anything.

Carlos puts a hand on my shoulder. Speaking very gently, he says, “I’ll make you coffee if you give me a blowjob.”

I can’t help but smile. “Sorry. I don’t like Mexican food.”

“You break my heart. You want some or not?”

I mean: yiiiiiiikes.

I cringed just copying and pasting that from the draft. It’s awful. And yet, at the time, I didn’t think so. I made the joke—and if you think my reasoning is bogus, please be assured that I am embarrassed enough for both of us—because to me, it seemed like the kind of jokey exchange two close friends would have.

There is, it must be said, some basis for this. Two or more people who have been through some shit together, whether friends or partners, can often say things to one another that would shock the hell out of the people around them. I’ve been with my wife for eighteen years and counting, in three countries, through multiple injuries and crises and a pandemic etcetera etcetera. By now we’ve developed a way of talking to each other that combines affection with often horrendous insult that, if used in public, would make an audience gasp. Between the two of us, though, it just makes us laugh. You’ll find this dynamic everywhere—walk into a professional kitchen sometime, and listen to how the line cooks talk to each other.

(On second thought, maybe don't. Cooks can be prickly. And it's generally not a good idea to surprise people who have immediate access to sharp knives and boiling liquids.)

Unfortunately, in writing this particular joke, I forgot one very important aspect of all of this. If you're not part of the group that is making the joke, then the joke doesn't work. It stops being funny and becomes just awful. What is absolutely hilarious to the person writing it can fall flat on its face, even if the reader likes and accepts the characters. Fortunately, this particular lesson is something I learned early on, and to my immense relief, I don't think I have repeated the offence, even in the early drafts of later books.

Having said that, walking a fine line of humour is something that I do a lot. My books, and particularly my current series, The Frost Files, rely heavily on jokes. They use slapstick, physical comedy, misunderstandings, and sarcasm, because if you can laugh at a character, then they are flawed, and if they are flawed, then you can care about them—and be delighted when they rise above their flaws to do the extraordinary.

One of the things I'm always very careful about is the difference between sarcasm and snark. The difference between them is simple: sarcasm doesn't have to be mean, but snark always is. To be glib: sarcasm punches up, but snark punches down. Like any author, I read a few reviews here and there (even if I claim not to), and it always irks me when reviewers refer to my characters as snarky. They are not. Say what you like about Teagan Frost, the psychokinetic government agent/wannabe chef who is the hero of the Frost Files—she is never mean. Sarcastic as hell, sure, but it's never personal. The reason for that is, again, quite simple: being sarcastic in a mean way just doesn't make me laugh, and I don't think it makes many other people laugh either. I'm sure there are exceptions here and there, but I can't think of any.

This isn’t to suggest that sarcasm is a safe harbour. It isn't. For one thing, it's reasonably low hanging fruit, humour-wise. It doesn't take a lot of effort to have a character be sarcastic, and as a consequence, it can often be something of a crutch when a writer is having a bad day and just needs their damn characters to move things along already. But overuse can quickly leave a sour taste in a reader’s mouth. We all enjoy people who can deliver a stinging, sarcastic one-liner, but we all know somebody who does it all the time. Those people suck. It would be advantageous for all concerned if my readers didn't fervently wish that any of my characters would just wander out into traffic.

A much safer—and in my view, far more rewarding—use of humour is in chaos. It's a truism that someone falling down is always funny, and depending on the context, it can be horrific. But nothing makes me snort as hard or cackle as deliciously as seeing a character I like take an unfortunate, non-injurious tumble at the worst possible moment. Some jokes just never get old. And to take that to its logical conclusion, if I can create a situation that is both deadly serious and completely stupid at the same time, that makes me laugh even as I'm writing it, or even just thinking of it, then I know I'm onto a winner.

In the same book in which I made the unfortunate joke above, China Shop—our unlikely crew of government agents of which Teagan is a part—end up on the run from the police. They get into a car chase in south Los Angeles, because of course they do, all of them packed together in a Ford F150 haring down El Segundo Boulevard, trailing a dozen cop cars and a police chopper. The driver is a man named Paul, a fussy former Naval officer. I realised quite early on, long before the car chase, that he had a passion for really, really bad pop music. Which meant that if he needed to focus on driving well, he’d probably be playing some.

And that’s how my characters came to be involved in a car chase to the soundtrack of Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On.

Having written it like that, I'm guessing you probably didn't laugh. Fortunately, my readers did. I still get asked about that scene. I did have some trepidation about it—not because it wasn't funny, but because authors cannot quote the lyrics of a song without paying hefty fees to the people who made it. I would have to rely on readers being familiar with the song in name only, but it was a risk I was happy to take.

What makes things even trickier about certain humorous elements is that they don't translate. If you write a book that does even moderately well these days, you almost certainly end up selling rights in other languages. When The Frost Files sold to a German publisher, the title of the first book, The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind, simply didn't translate. The book ended up having the title The Frost Files: Letzte Hoffnung (which means Last Hope - don’t ask me, I didn’t come up with it). Did any of the dozens of jokes in the book actually survive translation to German? I have no idea. I cannot speak or read German. But thanks to Google translate, I know from the odd online review that some readers just didn't find the book funny.

My guess is that translating some jokes lost their essence. This is not, you understand, a comment on the skill of the translator, who I'm sure did an excellent job. It's just the nature of the beast. Ultimately, there's nothing I can do about this. There's nothing anyone can do about this. Even supposedly simple humour can be incredibly complex; we just don’t notice the complexity because we are fluent in the language, are familiar with its rhythm, its warp and weft, not to mention the cultural conventions around it. Switch languages, though, and all that goes away. My translator clearly did his best, but sometimes it just doesn’t work.

To bring us back to my unfortunate joke I mentioned the start, it's something that taught me a surprising lesson. When you first start out trying to be funny, you invariably discover that things that you think are funny are not really viewed as such by everyone else. But it is only through making these mistakes that you learn to really make people laugh. And if you can laugh at yourself—if you can crack up thinking about how stupid, simple, and pathetic your first attempts were—then you’ve really got something.

I’m not glad I made the joke. All things considered, I would have preferred the lesson to come from a situation that I don’t look back on and cringe. But I am glad that smarter, more aware colleagues stopped me from making it, and I do value the lesson. It made me a better writer. And it made me a lot funnier.

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