8 Ways to Inject More Humour into Your Writing

Some practical pointers about how to bring the funny in your fiction

Photo by Charles on Unsplash

It’s a great feeling to read something so amusing that you can’t breaking into a broad smile or even laughing out loud. Perhaps the only greater feeling — for a comic writer at least — is the satisfaction of knowing that you made that happen. But how?

Many writers would like to be funny writers. But humour is one of those things that can slip away if you look at it too closely. Analysing funniness is a notoriously humourless activity, and when a writer is really making an effort to get laughs all the time, the effect is often quite laboured and off-putting — quote the opposite of what was intended.

Here are a few practical thoughts about how to get more humour into your work…

Please yourself

Humour flows from authenticity, and efforts to fake it will usually founder. If you are the sort of person who likes confrontational, taboo-busting humour or biting political satire, you may struggle to write a credible story that is a genteel comedy of manners or a whimsical, childlike fantasy. Make sure that you find what you’re writing funny, and others may well agree; but if you don’t get it, how can you expect anyone else to?

Listen to your words

Reading your work out loud is vital for any writer, but especially so for comic
writers, where the slightest hiccup in rhythm or unfortunate repetition can ruin a funny line. You may have noticed that the key word of a joke’s punchline is often never mentioned in the set-up, so as not to ruin the effect. Similarly, in fiction, you sometimes need to rewrite sentences and paras so the really funny part of an incident only happens at the very end of the line.

Paying attention to these subtle tweaks can massively improve your humour quotient. Think hard about funny words and sounds. Once you start really listening to your words — and to other people’s — you start to notice that some words are inherently funnier than others, perhaps because of how they sound or their associations, or a mix of both.