The Dark One
Auror
While we’re on the subject of humour (and I’ve probably posted about this elsewhere), I also have no problem making characters and situations funny, even in otherwise serious books. Just lucky I guess, but I was confronted with a difficult situation in my book THEM.
The story featured a performance by a stand-up comic, which meant I had to write a comic monologue. Normally, comedy is simple for me — probably because of the foibles I tend to give my characters and the testing situations I land them in — but a comic monologue is an entirely different matter. There is no dialogue to bounce off and no character whose peccadillos the reader has come to know who can be put in an adverse situation. It just has to be funny in ways alien to my creative mind.
On top of that, the monologue had to serve other purposes. It had to be relevant to the various subthemes and subtexts, and had to carry the story forward in some way.
My solution was ingenious, if I do say so myself. I’d agonised for some time over whether the monologue was funny. I’d edited, edited, crafted and recrafted, and still I wasn’t sure whether it would make people laugh. Then it finally hit me — it didn’t have to be funny. In fact, it was better if it was really obviously try-too-hard unfunny…on the condition…that the main character said so.
I had the main character interjecting his own thoughts throughout the performance absolutely bagging the unfunny comic. Suddenly the scene was funny. Even the monologue became genuinely funny when the MC was peevishly saying how crap it was.
The moral to my story is that anything can be saved. Anything can be good in the right context.
The story featured a performance by a stand-up comic, which meant I had to write a comic monologue. Normally, comedy is simple for me — probably because of the foibles I tend to give my characters and the testing situations I land them in — but a comic monologue is an entirely different matter. There is no dialogue to bounce off and no character whose peccadillos the reader has come to know who can be put in an adverse situation. It just has to be funny in ways alien to my creative mind.
On top of that, the monologue had to serve other purposes. It had to be relevant to the various subthemes and subtexts, and had to carry the story forward in some way.
My solution was ingenious, if I do say so myself. I’d agonised for some time over whether the monologue was funny. I’d edited, edited, crafted and recrafted, and still I wasn’t sure whether it would make people laugh. Then it finally hit me — it didn’t have to be funny. In fact, it was better if it was really obviously try-too-hard unfunny…on the condition…that the main character said so.
I had the main character interjecting his own thoughts throughout the performance absolutely bagging the unfunny comic. Suddenly the scene was funny. Even the monologue became genuinely funny when the MC was peevishly saying how crap it was.
The moral to my story is that anything can be saved. Anything can be good in the right context.
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