If you have ever tried to be funny even once in your life, you’ve probably heard the old saying “dying is easy—comedy is hard.” It’s been attributed to a long list of famous people over the years, and its enduring fame stems from its simple truth: Being funny on purpose is terribly difficult.1 In fact, sometimes it seems like the more effort you put into being funny, the less funny you actually are.2
In other words, humor is delicate stuff, and it’s easy to go wrong. Whether you’re trying to write a humorous story or just inject some levity into a dramatic narrative,3 there are many, many more ways to go wrong than right. Humor is subjective, so figuring out why no one’s laughing at your jokes can be a maddening and frustrating process. But a good place to start is to ask yourself: Do you like the things you’re making fun of?
THE MEL BROOKS ARC
The big mistake people who are actually not very good at being funny make is to assume that humor derives from disdain—that we make fun of the things we despise. This is understandable, because a lot of humor kind of mean-spirited or predicated on The old cliché of someone slipping on a banana peel is the ur-example here: We laugh, at least in part, because someone else has suffered in a ridiculous way. From late-night talk show hosts mocking politicians to your old high school friends making fun of every single thing you do, humor can be and very often is dark and even cruel.
