When Noah kindly offered me the chance to write an article for his blog, my first thought was to be vain and offer my advice on how to write a masterpiece of speculative fiction. But there are loads of articles for writers out there, and loads about science fiction. I thought I’d write about the other half of SF/comedy, and talk about the difficult business of telling jokes.

Comedy novels are really tricky to write, as a good comedy is a good story that also contains good jokes in the right places. Not only do the jokes have to be of reasonable quality, but they have to be appropriate for the plot and not in bad taste (which is not the same as being in perfect taste. Judging how far you can go and when is extremely important). I think that comedy deserves to be acknowledged as a difficult and important type of drama, rather than its disposable opposite, and should be taken into greater consideration in literary awards. Then again, I would say that.

Parody and satire are not quite the same thing as comedy, as you don’t have to have jokes (1984 is a parody of dictatorships, and as such is both an exaggeration and an extrapolation, but is notorious laugh-free). However, they are no less difficult for it. Parodists have to hit upon the right pitch, and that can be just as subjective a matter as with humour. I recently read and enjoyed the satire Jennifer Government by Max Barry, but I felt its message was obscured by heavy-handed slapstick. No doubt there are people who feel it was too poker-faced. In this field, you rapidly learn that you can’t expect everyone to laugh.

Parody also has to be entertaining in itself. Too many parodies by aspiring writers are either just games of “Spot the reference” or cynical, second-rate rewrites of the source material. A Lord of the Rings where the heroes wet themselves and run away is, ultimately, just as crap as it sounds. There is simply no point in reading something like that. (If you want to see parody done well, watch the film Galaxy Quest. In particular, note its tone, both mocking and affectionate). A good rule of thumb is that if you think you are writing something strikingly original, you’re probably not, and if you think you are writing something smart and edgy, you’re probably writing something terrible.

The opposite to thinking that you’re smarter than you really are comes in the form of the comedy that isn’t really a comedy at all. If a comedy makes you smile twice before it ends, then it’s failed. It’s not enough to have a moderately amusing idea and then write a story about it. The Easter bunny has a hangover. So? Sooner or later, you have to bite the bullet and actually try to make people laugh. It’s not enough to have a droll idea, discuss it for a few moments and then stop.

Very often, humour comes from contrast. Some things are funny because they are absurd. The comedies I have written are set in space, which allows all sorts of silly things to happen with aliens. For instance, I have a character who is an enormous psychic newt who lives in a tank of water (he is a spoof of the Guild Navigator from David Lynch’s Dune). The humour involving him is largely about the banal details of being a giant newt: how does he drink wine? If he tips it into the top of his tank and absorbs the stuff, what about curry? What does he put in his tank to make it more homey? A wave machine?

Amusing as this may or may not be, it is also weirdly logical. There’s nothing very funny about Mr Newt having a hat in his tank, or at least nothing as funny as him owning some fronds and a plastic castle. The joke here is that a sophisticated, intellectual creature lives like a pet goldfish, and all the things I’ve mentioned are extrapolations of that concept. Similarly, the society of the lemming men of Yull is based around their belief that suicide is the greatest virtue (because they are cartoon lemmings and hence instinctively jump off cliffs). Hopefully, the implication that fascism turns people into ants and lemmings is, in a different and darker way, amusing.

George Orwell, who knew much more about humour than might be expected, praised Lewis Carroll’s absurdity over Edward Lear’s, because Carroll knew when to stop, when to add logic. Lear, he felt, always went one step too far and just became silly. Similarly, Monty Python and the Holy Grail becomes funnier the more you know about Thomas Mallory and medieval life: Willans and Searle’s Molesworth books get better as you get older and appreciate their parodies not just for absurdity, but for their accuracy as well. I suspect that good comedy requires a rigid framework, a sounding-board for the jokes to strike. It isn’t simply a matter of cutting loose and running amok – well, not all the time, anyway. After all, where would the Addams Family be without the real world? The joke isn’t just that they’re weird, but that their weirdness contrasts with reality.

As well as absurdity, we also have the straight-up joke. Some jokes are also puns (Suruk the Slayer’s confusion between “birdbath” and “bloodbath”, say) but the humour almost always comes from finding a surprising new meaning to what was originally intended. This often involves puncturing high expectations with low ones, finding a dirty meaning where things looked clean. Dirty meanings usually involve sex, but can include drunkenness, cowardice or whatever else is funny and subversive without alienating the character from the reader. Blackadder Goes Fourth contains many examples of the soldier on the front line making his general’s pompous pronouncements look idiotic. The general wants his men to love him and strive for glory on the battlefield: the soldier wants to stay alive, get drunk and see his wife. This isn’t just funny: it’s tragic, humane and true.

Which brings me onto another issue, that of taste. Taste is more than not mocking the afflicted, although that is a very good place to start. Gags about disability and so on do more than annoy those with mature sensibilities; they mark the comedian out as desperate, a boxer who doesn’t mind trying to chew his opponent’s groin if it will win him the fight. I find Isambard Smith ridiculous: I think many of the things he does are foolish and ill-advised, and I acknowledge that he is crass. But I also know that he is a decent person, intelligent and extremely brave, and I would want him as a friend. It’s understanding that, knowing what the character’s actions will mean to the reader and to the book, that’s the key to it. I’ve always felt that understanding what you’re doing and why is vital for a writer (I’m very wary of those people who tell you to write from the heart, as though writing is some sort of chest complaint). The writer should always be able to answer the question: why am I making this gag? Just because I can? What is it telling people about my characters?

There’s a scene in David Lodge’s novel Nice Work where a gruff factory owner lies in bed beside his boring wife and fantasises about sex with a female lecturer whom he despises. His fantasy is effectively that of overpowering the lecturer’s trendy beliefs with the magnificence of his own knob, and is grotesque, comical, slightly horrible and rings completely true. It is also sad and sympathetic. I’m certain that the scene itself, and the balance of factors within it, is the result of real skill and care. And that’s what real comedy requires. Ultimately, writing comedy is hard work. It’s just lucky that it’s such fun.

—–

About Toby Frost:

By day a mild-mannered representative of the UK legal system, by night a hard living, hard drinkin’, whoring and gambling stereotype of a driven artist(1), Toby Frost is everything a writer should be: thoughtful, articulate and incapable of retaining technical information for more than 5 seconds.

What’s more he is that rare thing, a writer who actually got round to writing something. Sadly, nobody wanted to publish it, so he wrote something else.

The “something else” then sat in a kitchen cupboard in Newcastle-upon-Tyne for three months(2) before being plucked from obscurity by Myrmidon Books, a fine and upstanding publisher if ever there was one. Thus was Space Captain Smith born.

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One of those ways is by having a “bonus section” here on this blog, which will be done in a variety of ways.  For example, in my next review, I talk about three classic Invasion novels from the Victorian era, and here I’ll not only expand on those thoughts, but provide links to digital copies of each since they are all public domain.

Normally I’ll have a link at the end of the article, allowing someone to find the bonus page on my site without any searching.  It’s not like everyone is going to get their copies and read them at the same time, after all. And what if they went back to it months later and only then became curious to know more.

However, I wasn’t able to get a link ready in time for when #199 went to press, so I’m simply going to have to shout it from the rooftops, because I got something special for you:

Toby Frost, author of the Space Captain Smith series I reviewed in #199, has agreed to post a blog here about writing comedy which, in his words: “hopefully contains many profound insights – no guarantees on that, though…”

Looking forward to this.  Spread the word to your fellow KODT readers out there.

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Kidding aside, I did come across something odd the other day when serving coffee.  Some time ago I had switched from regular milk to almond milk in my diet.  It’s much lower in calories, is just as healthy, and doesn’t counter the benefits of tea like milk does.  I’ve been having it with my tea and coffee for some time now, and while it’s not a perfect substitute (lacks creaminess) it does add a nice subtle nutty flavor while still tasting like milk.

Then, the other day, Gillian’s parents came over to celebrate her birthday.  Our whole bean coffee is flavored (hazelnut cream or french vanilla) and knowing they prefer normal I was forced to serve Folgers instant.

When I added the almond milk, something strange happened (coffee on the left is from freshly ground beans).

Or you can watch on video using my Macro lens for an up close look at the process.  It quickly reminds me of clouds on a gas planet.

My guess is that something in the freeze drying process makes it so the coffee and almond milk refuse to blend.  That’s just science. I think.

I have no doubt that this discovery will someday lead to a cure for cancer, AIDS, and premature baldness.

Nobel Prize, please.

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1) There is a clear storyline going on. While there are lots of mysteries involved, you don’t have that absurd vauge conspiracy thing that drags on forever without EVER being the slightest bit clearer. There are regular payoffs as things develop, and not everything gets covered up in the end with no evidence left to support anything. And that is because of….

2) One of the main characters is a frickin MAD SCIENTIST. See, with an X-Files type show you have your Mulder and Scully types… though to be fair neither of the main protags fall perfectly into those roles, thank god. But John Noble (you remember him as Denathor from Return of the King) plays an honest to god scientist who routinely dabbles in God’s domain, is on half a dozen psychotropic drugs at any given time, and is pretty much off his rocker. He keeps a live cow in his lab.

Point 1 is good enough to justify this show’s existence. I stopped watching the X-Files when I realized it was going nowhere and never would go anywhere, and the show was kind of trapped in that sense. If you want to have it happen in the “real world” you can’t have the revelation of supernatural/alien things ever publicly acknowledged. But they get around this because of…

3) It doesn’t take place in our reality. It’s close, very close, but it’s not here. Parallel worlds is the ongoing story connector here, which was finally made apparent when the heroine ended up in that other reality to meet Leonard Nimoy (yay!) who is one of the key shadowy figures in the main storyline–in the Twin Towers. But having the main world also an alternate reality lets them get away with things that the X-Files would have disappear to be looked at by “top men” (okay, that’s Indiana Jones, but you get the idea)

Anyway, it’s a fun show to watch. Hopefully the remaining seasons hold up compared to the first two I’ve seen so far. The lead actress is very good, and it’s just a blast to watch John Noble have a constant screw loose.

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It probably stems from the fact that names are a bit of a blind spot for me in real life.  Having moved into this condo, it seems that everyone here knows everyone else.  And I’m trying to get to know the names of my neighbours, but even yesterday I had to be reminded of someone’s name.  Hell, for the longest time I got my friend Nita’s husband’s name mixed up with her brother’s.  Awk-warrrrrd.

But of course the first step in fixing a problem is recognizing it, but it got me to wonder what other writers and readers had out there in terms of blind spots.  Consistency in things like hair or eyes, perhaps?  Spatial awareness (ie characters might teleport without the writer realizing it)?

Another problem I have comes from when I learned to type. The double space. I was taught to ALWAYS double space after a period, but it came to my attention last year that nobody does that anymore. But if you look over my posts you’ll see them creep in from time to time, or most of the time.  In fact, every paragraph before this one uses them. The only reason this one doesn’t is because I just became self-aware of it. So any time I write or edit, I find I have to use Find/Replace to clean up all the double spaces I missed. I wonder how many people are still stuck in that same way?

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Oh, and a YT-1300 stock light freighter on the ceiling.

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Some friends of mine have helped me a lot in that regard, namely in helping me design a website to promote my services.  I haven’t quite gone “live” yet.  I haven’t advertised on any writer forums as of yet, because I’m hoping for some feedback in the meantime.  So, here it is.  I converted my old blog before this one into something completely new:

http://noahjdc.wordpress.com/

Be sure to let me know what you think!  Heck, you can test out the online contact form on the home page to leave comments with

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I intend to use the column to look at great but lesser known authors and stories, or reexamine well known ones in a different light.

For example, in issue #199 they will be printing a review of Space Captain Smith, by Toby Frost.  A great series of comedy adventure novels that has the esthetics of Victorian England (but it’s not steampunk, it just LOOKS that way). Fans of Terry Pratchett will appreciate the humour (I’ve compared him to a science fiction cross between Discworld and Ripping Yarns). Fans of Flashman (by George Macdonald Fraser) will find humour in the fact that Smith is quite purposefully the exact opposite of the loveable cad Flashman. But more on that in the review

In issue #200, I take a different approach, looking at the genre of Invasion Literature from the Victorian era.  It all began with my love of War of the Worlds, and in researching it discovering that the book would never have existed if it weren’t for the fact that stories about England being invaded by (usually) Germans were all the rage from the late 1800s up until World War I.  So I not only look at War of the Worlds, but the book that kicked off the genre of that time – The Battle of Dorking.  In addition, a great comedic writer, PG Wodehouse, wrote a spoof of the genre called The Swoop. So I look at the genre in general by examining these three very different examples in particular.

What I also intend to do is follow up my KODT articles with a link to my blog here, where I can either examine the topic in greater depth, or provide some other interesting kind of bonus material.  In the case of Invasion Literature, all the books I mention are public domain, so I’ll be providing easy links to them for those who want to get a copy.  And in the case of Space Captain Smith, Toby Frost has graciously agreed to guest blog for me once #199 hits the stores. I’m looking forward to that!

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