You're Not Funny: On Writing a Comic Novel

If there is any rule about writing a comic novel, and there isn’t, the first rule (or realization) should be: You’re not funny. No matter how often you laugh while writing your comic novel, there will be people who won’t find it funny. And you should not be frustrated! When you made that paragraph break because you believed it would give the reader a little breather from laughing so hard, please realize again: You’re not funny!

Not long ago, The New York Times posted an article called “22 of the Funniest Novels Since Catch-22” and included Rachel Ingalls’s 1982 novel Mrs. Caliban, a book I’ve been praising for years. I’ve written about it, taught it, told friends about it. But never once did I think it was funny. Heartbreaking, yes. And maybe it’s funny that one of the characters has sex with a sea monster in every room of her house, but that doesn’t seem funny so much as . . . aspirational.

To write a comic novel I had to remind myself of the following: If I assume that my readers, any readers, will laugh as they read, I’m acting like an underage kid who keeps trying and failing to enter the beer tent. Always unsatisfied! Failure all the way down . . . In accepting my probable failure, I am echoing my character’s own fear of failure, considering that so many comic novels concern outsized ambition and a character who flounders under its weight. That insight led me to realize I was bonding with my primary character. We were both failing!

In recent novels that are, to my mind, very funny, there is always at least one character who wants and wants and wants—and that yearning forms the comic engine of these books, backlit with heartbreak.

There are plenty of instructions for writing comedically in Camille Bordas’s The Material, which is about characters struggling in a fictitious MFA program in stand-up comedy. The novel is almost a glossary of approaches, from the theoretical to the practical, for creating comedy. As one character tells it, “Comedy was tension, high def, walking the tightrope of pretending a joke you’d spend hours shaping was just occurring to you for the very first time.” Other pointers: “No such thing as too soon in comedy, only not funny enough.” And there’s advice that’s more uncomfortable than questionable: “Half the job was bounding between self-hatred and megalomania at absurd speeds, ignoring at all costs the possibility that you could ever belong to the stodgy middle.” Bordas’s characters mine their every experience for humor, ruthlessly exploiting their families and friends while testing moral parameters.

The comic impulse may be transgressive, a flag planted and replanted against the authority of time, culture, agreed-upon reality, and the tendency to stifle our unsavory mental calculations. There’s an old proverb: “Tell the truth and run.” Humorous writing often tells the truth, particularly about the body’s indignities and the lure of cowardice. Sometimes, though, fantasies are more fun than truth, as humor lets us all imagine we can outwit the censorious scolds in our minds. My favorite insight in The Material is that those working in comedy are “in the business of finding people’s horrible thoughts so they didn’t have to go there themselves.”

Miranda July’s All Fours presents us with a yearning character who is unremittingly erotically ambitious and consistently reveals her own horrible thoughts. Her first, more conventional ambition is to drive alone across country. Despite her meticulous preparations, she stops about thirty minutes from home and takes up residence in a motel, lying to her husband and child about where she is. Beyond the reach of her marriage, July’s narrator feels freed at last—no need to fulfill her husband’s desires, or demand that her child get dressed in the morning, or “pack a five-part bento box lunch.” She develops more compelling desires, including the wish to turn her motel room into the most softly lit, sweet-smelling sex nest imaginable by hiring an interior decorator, the wife of the young aspiring dancer/Hertz employee she obsesses over.

July’s narrator continually attempts not just to fulfill but to heighten her desires. At the start of the novel, when she learns a stranger with a telephoto lens has taken photos of her, she finds the idea stimulating, not troubling. “Please, trouble me! Trouble me!” Later, the narrator answers her doctor’s questions: “Was I sexually active? And how!” Reading All Fours reaffirmed for me how funny exclamation points can be. Not only do they make sentences sound wildly overwrought, they’re like a comic novel compressed into one punctuation mark: a tall figure attempts to dominate a cozy little partner but is condemned to float in space and never get to the point. Whatever tries to coerce but proves ineffective: that can be funny.

So much humor depends on exceeding what we might consider a carefully proportional view of things. Even the reviews of All Fours are sometimes humorous because they’re squeamishly unbalanced about the novel’s lively, extended sexual descriptions. Consider this from Alexandar Jacobs at The New York Times: “Compelled to read these definitely not twee-rated passages, I briefly considered filing a complaint with human resources.” Ron Charles in The Washington Post writes, “I felt so self-conscious reading ‘All Fours’ on the subway that I tore off the cover. July, 50, seems determined to cure the inhibitions of middle age by stripping away every censorial impulse and plunging us into a bubble bath of erotic candor.” That “bubble bath of erotic candor”—we’re all here for that! A one-sentence review on Goodreads (although I don’t agree with its final emotional judgment) made me laugh out loud because it takes such a steep turn: “The writing is incredible and also I hated this book.”

Another recent novel that is funny and bristling with unexpected and bracing pronouncements: Halle Butler’s Banal Nightmare, about a woman in her 30’s who returns to her Midwestern hometown after a breakup. That might sound like the standard plot for a Lifetime movie, except that the cultural reflections are so apt and hilarious and scathing. The primary character, Moddie, is enraged and chewing-aspirin-level bitter—and with good reason. Gradually, it becomes clear that Moddie cannot move forward in her life without laying bare a trauma that others in her circle have ignored or diminished out of self-interest.

Defeating expectations is part of imaginative writing, but the act of defeating expectations happens especially in humor writing—sometimes more than once in the same paragraph. Moddie sprays her anxiety and not-so-hidden hostility all over her environment—even onto groceries. “This foul fucking tortellini—a cozy food, a child’s food. Food of fools!” At a party where an honest person can’t hope to thrive, Moddie describes what she thinks about a program on National Public Radio: “‘It was interesting,’ she said, forgetting herself, ‘mostly because of how tedious it was.’ She relaxed a little more and said the tedium was ‘almost thrilling’ and ‘bordering on erotic.’” When trying to explain why she moved back to her hometown, she says to unsympathetic listeners: “In Chicago, I made a series of increasingly questionable choices that led me to an enervating wasteland of superficial friendships with people I did not respect, some of whom I outright hate, and now I’m giving it all a nice big rest.” She elicits our sympathy as she attempts to navigate among her often equally miserable and deluded friends.

In all three of these novels, characters endure a backwash of pain, and the humor comes from the contrast between their ambitions or fantasies and the multiple losses they face, including loss of control over themselves and others. While humor takes us on one track and then pulls us off that track, something in a comic novel gestures toward fear and vulnerability, the ultimate loss of control that comes with our mortality. I searched for the word dead in my own comic novel, Tabitha, Get Up. The word appears fifty-one times. I thought that was a lot. Then I looked up “die”; it appears seventy-four times. (I know that’s not funny.)

Writing a comic novel didn’t sneak up on me. It wasn’t a case of writing scenes that gradually turned comedic. I wanted to write a novel that was clearly, unabashedly trying to be funny—until I realized it’s better not to try. Only to hope. Maybe I also feared I was trying too hard. At the time, I was dealing with a series of crises in my life, and I wanted to attempt writing in a genre that offered some degree of self-forgiveness or self-forgetfulness by recalibrating my predictions. Or upsetting my expectations: that’s what comedy does—and that’s why the end of a joke is called a punchline. Frankly, I wanted to punch through my preconceived notions about where my life was headed.

Earlier, I’d written a long, complicated, failed short story that ended with an email written by a minor character. That email contained the voice that became the primary character’s in Tabitha, Get Up. I liked that voice—its high, galloping energy. But the character in the original story wasn’t someone I wanted to be with for 300 pages. She was greedy, grasping, and her desires were pretty limited. So I tried keeping the voice’s rhythms while inventing Tabitha, a character who has developed the immense ambition to write two biographies simultaneously about two famous people: a stunningly handsome actor and a children’s-book author who also writes erotica with a cult following. I gave Tabitha bad odds, flaws and failures, reawakened desires, and renewable sources of optimism—as well as people in town who remembered her from high school. I also gave her a self-absorbed mother who believes that her own strength derives from her biological relation to members of the Donner Party.

To sweeten Tabitha’s life, and mine, I furnished her with some of my strongest fantasies—foremost among them, a standing invitation to the world’s best bar, a place so intoxicating you don’t feel like you need to drink. And because comedy loves embarrassment as much as ambition, I invented situations in which Tabitha has to deal with her own mortification. One such experience involves a fringe vest and a stranger crying out, “Hey, Davey Crockett!” Tabitha reveals what happened in that awful incident to the person she most wants to trust. And her little explosion of truth-telling is, I think, not only funny, but also good to hear—especially in light of what might be our own festering shame.

Through every revision, the novel recounted Tabitha’s memories about a wedding gift from her failed marriage: a hope chest for storing linens, which she never opened because of an old folk tale. In the tale, a bride attempting to surprise her husband by playing a little trick is assumed to have run away after the wedding. Years later, a large hope chest is opened and there’s her corpse, the chest’s inside lid marked with the bride’s frantic scratches. Maybe that story was a bit too on-the-nose about the suffocation experienced in a bad marriage. But if comedy is in love with embarrassment, it’s at least as much in love with exaggeration.

Maybe one of the larger ambitions a writer can have is to be funny. Seriously funny. And yes, if you yearn to write a comic novel, you can save your heart from being thrashed by telling yourself: You’re not funny. And then going ahead anyway, accepting that the whole situation is funny in itself. What unbalanced ambition! Look at how hard you’re trying to make anyone at all laugh! It’s impossible!

Then, if the novel ends up being funny or even somewhat amusing, to somebody, somewhere—probably inadvertently—what a surprise!