Member-only story
A Hermit Crab Walks into a Bar
How structure can help your short-form humor writing
I began my publishing career writing middle grade and YA novels. Funny ones. I am a fan of what is sometimes known as the incongruity theory of humor or even just incongruity theory. Philosophers have been discussing it for a few hundred years, usually in not very funny ways. In short, what it means is that humans find incongruity humorous. To be clearer, we find the unexpected or things that shouldn’t work together funny. In my middle grade and YA writing I found humor by making connections that went against our expectations: suburban kids getting the better of alien visitors…the smartest kid in class tossed in with and befriending troublemakers…a teenage slacker spending the summer with aging environmentalists.
My book length humor is very situational. It comes out of the world my characters are in. As a result, I have a difficult time doing funny public readings, because the entire novel is the set-up for incongruous situations. The joke on page 140 might be a callback referring to something on page 95. What happens on page 140 should be funny, but nowhere near as funny as it would be if my audience were familiar with what’s on page 95, too, so they can get the full impact of whatever incongruity I’m working on.
