Canned Funny, Or, Why I Write Fantasy and Not Comedy

I adore Jasper Fforde; I think he is one of the greatest things to happen to fiction. I feel similarly about Douglas Adams, as well as Terry Pratchett, who I consider the most easily digested narrative theorist in human history. In non-fiction humor I have to give credit to Dave Barry, who has many times had me choking on my own spit, as well as the lesser-known Lore Sjöberg and the bigger, less bald juggernatus of David Sedaris and John Hodgman.

In short, I adore funny books.

I also adore Neil Gaiman, who sits somewhere between urban fantasy and modern horror's answer to Splenda (and who is, sometimes, quite funny). I love Mark Z. Danielewski's capacity for bizarre, existential creep, and I love Steven Hall's psychotropic The Raw Shark Texts, which genuinely had my pulse pounding. I love the creepy things John Carpenter can make happen and I love the gray-washed atmosphere of the early episodes of Heroes, before things took off into modern mythology (not that this is in and of itself a bad thing; it was just not the same thing that hooked me).

In short, I like scary books.

In the middle, I find many things Neil Gaiman writes, but also the work of Joss Whedon, who is a personal idol, and who has admitted quite plainly that he loves to intersperse creepy moments and funny moments as liberally as possible in his shows. One of my favorite books of the past year has been Résumé with Monsters, which as disturbing as it is very funny; and I would be remiss if I did not mention the entire genre now known as zom-com, from the better-known Shaun of the Dead to the older and more classic Evil Dead movies and Dead Alive (Braindead if you insist on being from other countries).

More than horror, in some ways, more than comedy in many ways, I adore the writers and filmmakers who are able to mix the two; who can take two genres which depend upon surprise and sudden swells of emotion to work their magic (the two that aren't porn), and combine them in ways that blend and enhance rather than neutralize. So then, the obvious question, hinted at in the title: Why don't I write that? I suppose there is a simple answer, but if it was really that simple, I wouldn't write a blog post about it, now would I?

First of all, comedy is hard. When I was much younger I had a dream of being a stand-up comedian; I worked on routines here and there, pecked at ideas, aped comics I saw on television in an effort to find what was funny. I suppose it left me with a good understanding of what is and is not funny (see below), but it also left me with the understanding that comedy is incredibly difficult. When I am funny, and I'll admit I am capable of being so, it comes effortlessly and suddenly; it doesn't take preparation, it just shoots out. When I prepare--when I analyze--it starts to lose its bite. Call it gonzo comedy if you want, or accuse me of being Tom Robbins or William S. Burroughs or someone else famous for odd editing habits; I just can't edit comedy and preserve its marrow.

Second of all, fantasy (or horror, or whatever you want to call my work) is not hard. Note that I do not say this other genre of writing is easy; it isn't, it is very challenging. But it flows out of me more easily than comedy does, and it is much easier for me to edit and still preserve its core. And what's more, it is something I can think about; it is something I can focus my mental energy on very easily, and as such, it is something that, while it challenges, does not run dry (save for those terrible times when I get stuck and can't get any words to flow from my hands to the screen, which is another, much darker affliction).

Also, and this is the nicest way I can say this: "Creepy" is almost universal; "Funny" is almost universally personal. To be slightly less diplomatic, I do not find most comedy funny. At all.

I don't like comedy that relies on the embarrassment of its main characters for its punch--I just end up feeling bad for the person, wincing when I'm supposed to laugh. I see right through comedy that depends on firing off taboo words and subjects as quickly as possible. I don't like comedy about having sex with fat people. I don't like comedy that depends upon enforced gender segregation. I don't like comedy about lying to people for the purposes of sex. I don't like comedy about bodily functions. I don't like stoner comedy. I don't like racial comedy. The list goes on and on.

And then, there are the exceptions. There's Superbad, which is about trying to get laid, and Arrested Development, which should be cringe-inducing but is hilarious. There's the stand-up work of Eddie Izzard and Robin Williams, both of whom make fun of, among others, the English, the Americans, most of the Middle East, and the French, as well as, in Izzard's case, the Holocaust (if Williams hit that subject I have yet to read it).

Comedy, for me, is in tone, delivery, facial expression, motion; it's the way a line is said and the flailing as a character falls. To this day, one of the most brilliantly funny moments in Whedon's seminal Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes during the seventh season, and takes place entirely in a speechless background shot; a similar Firefly moment sends me into giggle fits, because of nothing more than the look on Nathan Fillion's face. When I'm reading comedy, it's about timing; the way the writer controls the cadence, the twisting of words, the behind-the-scenes smirking and the implication. Terry Pratchett is a master of this--were there a just God this mind would be preserved forever.

I can do these things; I know I can. But the truth is, if I find most things that send the general public into gales of laughter to just be noisome or excruciating, how can I hope to know when I've got something that's funny?

I realize writing for oneself is important; if you don't love it, how an you feel good about foisting it on others? But even in that there is a trap, because I consider good comedy so rare and bad comedy so prolific and fecund that I don't want to risk adding more of the latter at the cost of the former. If I write comedy it gets dissected and reassembled and juggled about and analyzed; and then we run once more into the issues mentioned above. Again, comedy is hard--I want it to be perfect, more so than I want all my writing to be perfect, and I am liable to be destructively hard on myself if I try to write it.

This is not to say I never write comedy, or that I will never write a book that is entirely comedy; maybe I'll get incredibly lucky and some blow to the head will allow me to be the next Jasper Fforde (I would never, however, pretend to be the next Terry Pratchett; some lightning really does strike once). Maybe I'll even get there through hard work and a nice bolt of inspiration. But for the moment, I feel that what wit I can muster is best put into the mouths of my characters and the twists in my phrasing. I am at home with the creep and the mystery and the anomalies, and I prefer to stay down here playing with myth to going up in the light; up there, people might not be laughing with me.