Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Humor Writing--À La Carte

What makes a story or piece of writing funny? Is it the premise? The wordplay or combination of words and language? Does the tone or the voice of the narrator make a story funny? Is it the use of jokes or zingers? The use of unexpected or unlikely juxtapositions? Or a combination of these things? From parodies like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith, and comic essays like “The Santaland Diaries" by David Sedaris, rib-ticklers such as Charles Schultz’s Peanuts comic strip, or humor columnists such as the Washington Post’s Alexandria Petri, humor is serious business. We’ll study humor writing from McSweeney’s, New Yorker's Shouts and Murmurs, fake news and satire from The Onion, and more. And we’ll use these examples as blueprints to generate our own humor writing. Be prepared to take a closer look under the metaphorical clown’s hood and check out the pulls and levers, the balloon animals, and all the buttons and snaps of what makes us laugh.

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