There is something about the rhythm of ‘three’ that is pleasing to the ear – think about all the fairy tales where there are three bears, three billy goats or three little pigs. Or this example, where there are three elements. If I’d written ‘three bears, three billy goats, three little pigs and three musketeers’, your eyes would have got bored somewhere around the goats, just seeing the sentence running on and on. By the time I’d got to pigs, you would have wandered off to see if there were any biscuits in the cupboard. And then you would never have got the three musketeers, and that would, quite frankly, have served you right.

  Can I put in a link to my favourite scene from The Life of Brian in here? Please. It’s a great example of the rule of three:

  Brian tells his followers they are all individuals.

  The followers repeat in unison “Yes, we are all individuals.”

  Brian tells them they are all different.

  The followers, again in unison, chant, “Yes, we are all different.”

  Pause.

  One person in the crowd says, “Er... I’m not.”

  Person next to them says, “shhh.”

  This works on several levels. You’ve got the rule of three. You’ve got dramatic irony in that what the crowd is saying is directly at odds with what they’re doing. You’ve got a lovely pause between the set up and the punchline and then, you have a topper (a joke that builds on the punchline) with the second person saying ‘shhh’. It’s damn near perfect.

  2. Reactions and Reflections

  Now this, for me, comes under ‘observational humour’. It’s a bit like ‘l’espirit de l’escalier’ – which is the proper name for the state of waking up at three in the morning with the perfect reply to that thing your colleague said at four o’clock in the afternoon. The perfect witty riposte, just that little bit too late. When you are writing romantic comedies you can put that perfect reply in at the perfect time. And none of your readers will know that you had to go away for three days and sit staring at a wall in order to come up with that ‘off the cuff’ remark, because your characters will come up with it at exactly the right time. That’s the ‘reactions’ part of this section. The perfect witty statement, the puncturing of bombast, it can be placed just right to make your reader laugh, probably because they wish that it was the sort of thing that they would come up with in that situation.

  Reflection is similar, but more internalised. It is the witty turn of phrase that you monologue to yourself or observe to a listener. Again, we are trying to describe the everyday in a new, original and hopefully surprising way and it is that surprise, that confounding of the expectation of normality which will make the reader laugh.

  So you could have your character thinking about a potential boyfriend as ‘he’s all right. Well, he’s upright and employed and that’s two up on my last bloke’. And it’s funny because we’d normally think of being employed as a desirable trait in a potential partner, but being upright as absolutely essential, and the thought of a previous man being neither of these things creates an amusing mental image of our character trying to interact with someone permanently supine. Or a character thinking about her best friend’s new, much younger boyfriend. ‘I don’t know what she’s thinking. I’ve got shoes in my wardrobe older than him. Hell, I’ve got bread older than him.’

  You can also have funny reactions from the other characters. Depending on how you’ve set up the relationship between the protagonist and their friends, you could potentially have some very funny reactions to what they say and do. This is another good reason to have a best friend character, they can provide comedy with your protagonist playing the straight man (or woman).

  3. Running Gags

  Running gags are jokes or phrases that, fairly predictably, run throughout the entire book. Think of Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory and his ‘knock knock knock, Penny’ (Rule of Three again, see?). It can be repeated in various settings and under various conditions and the familiarity is what makes the audience laugh. We know what’s coming, we know how this joke works and it helps to make us feel part of the action, part of the gang. The Fast Show, if you remember it (it had Mr Weasley in it), was based almost entirely on running gags.

  You can thread similar jokes through your writing. A description, a saying, an observation or even a quote from somewhere else can be repeated, woven through the action to give the reader a jolt of the familiar. They know the punchline, they are waiting for it, the waiting builds the tension and the delivery gives a nice satisfying hit of dopamine. It’s from that ‘aah’ of recognition that the humour is derived. We’ve all picked up sayings, memes and statements that we use to reinforce our tribe (try saying ‘Live long and prosper’ at a WI meeting for an illustration of how your tribe needs to be on a similar wavelength for this to work), and a similar mechanism exists in fiction. When repeated jokes crop up, your reader feels included. Part of the ‘tribe’ which contains your characters. This is what makes a running joke successful.

  However, we do have to put in a caveat here. Be. Careful. Running gags only work under two specific circumstances –

  Firstly, that it’s not repeated so often that your reader thinks it’s just been put in for comic effect and gets tired of anticipating the punchline. Readers can feel that you are cheating a little by deriving repeat laughs from something previously set up to be funny, and it can get, dare I say, a bit boring. Take Sheldon and his knocking. Once an episode is fine and funny. Twice, and we still laugh, especially if the circumstances are different. Three times (and this is where Rule of Three doesn’t always hold true) and we’ve seen it, we’ve laughed at it twice and the humour is beginning to pall. Any more and we are wondering whether the script writers were on holiday that week. The only exception is if, at the third repetition something different happens. Then the first two repetitions were just the set up for that last one... which is all getting a bit meta.

  Secondly, your gag has to be understood. Imagine, if you will, a cartoon character whose catchphrase is ‘An apple a day is too much for a dog!’ I know and love this cartoon and, whilst writing a book, I conceive a running gag where characters say ‘an apple a day is too much for a dog!’ to one another. Of course, anyone who also knows and loves the cartoon character I am referring to will get the joke and find it funny. Anyone who has never seen or heard of the cartoon in question might find it oddly amusing the first time. Maybe the second time. By the third time I use the gag, they are going to wonder if I have lost my marbles and am just writing random words. So, know your tribe. (If you’ve never seen The Big Bang Theory, you are going to feel this way about my Sheldon example. Sorry).

  An honourable mention is due here for the call-back joke. This is a joke that refers back to an earlier joke, usually at the end of the scene, or sometimes at the end of the story. This is often a good way to end a book with the required aww factor without making your characters drown in cheesy lines. Apart from giving the reader a warm and fuzzy feeling of inclusion, recalling something that was said somewhere at the start of the characters’ relationship gives the story a pleasing sense of completion, as though you’ve closed a circle. It doesn’t work for all stories, obviously, but if you’re really stuck for an ending, have a look and see if you can use a joke, ideally just the punchline, from earlier in the story to end with a laugh.

  4. Suspension of Disbelief

  You can get away with anything in fiction. Seriously. I’ve written about vampires and people with quite lowly jobs who can afford to live in lovely houses, and both of these things require a degree of suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. The main thing to be wary of is that you set your rules at the start. This applies to all fiction, it’s not specific to comedy, or even to romantic comedy, but you might find that your comedy loses its edge a little if your rules aren’t consistent.

  Let’s take a situation that we’ve mentioned previously. The city couple moving to the country and protesting about the smell of silage and the noise of cows. You’ve set this situation up, your readers are finding the ‘fish out of water’ scenario funny, all well and good. But you have to keep it consistent. You can’t suddenly reveal that one of your characters was born in rural Wales and knows how to milk a cow, however much that might set up your romance with the gorgeous farmer next door. If your character was born in the country, they will know all about silage, even if they have lived in the city for twenty years. You lose that element that was making things funny, that scenario that your reader was invested in.

  Another situation. Your ditzy protagonist has spent all her rent money on having her hair done, and can’t afford to pay. But, fear not! Her landlord will let her work off the rent if she milks the cows that he inexplicably now keeps in the garden because this is a scenario I really didn’t think through before I started writing it. This is only funny if you’ve set up the scene whereby this has either happened before, or there is an arrangement between Ditzy Protagonist and Landlord that she can do this. Otherwise your reader is seeing a bonkers woman who spends money on hairdressing and may well be out on the street by evening. Although, to be honest, if her landlord is keeping cows in the garden, she may as well move because her local council are going to be round there sharpish and the neighbours will be complaining about the mooing... Anyway. Yes. Ahem. Your reader will suspend their disbelief willingly, but do be consistent about your rules.

  There’s also quite a lot of humour mileage in transferring one set of established rules to a very different location. Think ‘Coronation Street in space’. The denizens of a spaceship, searching for new life and new civilisations, but they have a corner shop, watch rubbish television and repeatedly try to put the cat out at night (who knew airlocks had catflaps?). Or, even a high octane police thriller set in a sleepy English village - which worked well for Hot Fuzz. This comes under juxtaposition of thingies...

  5. Sex

  Sex can be funny. It can be bloody ridiculous too, when you think about it. I bet amoeba don’t worry about whether or not they’ve shaved their legs or put clean sheets on. But beware when writing humorous sex scenes, because sex is all about tension. Written sex, rather like the real thing, is about the build up to the climax and anything that interrupts that build up defuses the tension and reduces the sexiness. So if your couple are just about to get to That Bit, and the reader is on the edge of their seat waiting for the Bedroom Scene, it can reduce everything down to farce level if you introduce jokes or gags. Yes, there are funny noises during sex (ahem, or maybe that’s just me), but if you put them into your sex scene, the reader will laugh, the tension will drop and you will have to work to build it back up again in order for the climax to be sexy rather than anticlimactic.

  You can, of course, write ‘funny sex’, but it should be differentiated from ‘sexy sex’, You can’t easily combine the two. You can also have your characters having funny discussions about sex, but when it comes down to the hot stuff, your reader really wants to concentrate on that, rather than heroes hopping around the bedroom trying to get their socks off or your heroine losing the ‘fillet’ from her padded bra. You want your reader to put down your book after the sex scene, fan themselves and have to go for a little walk in the cool air, not be smirking at your pages and thinking that your hero and heroine sound like two people who have never taken their clothes off before.

  Chapter 6: Tools to make things funnier

  1 Increase the tension

  The more you increase the tension before your punchline, the bigger the laugh. I once wrote a funny death scene in Please Release Me - I’m quite proud of it because I wrote a normal scene with a tiny dramatic irony based joke at the end, then I went back and rewrote it building up what the character imagined was going to happen, so that the contrast was greater. It still makes me giggle when I think about it. [Please Release Me is a dark book, but it has jokes in it. Funny isn’t the opposite of serious].

  Often having a longer gap between the set up and the punchline can also increase the tension. Take care not to make the gap so long that the reader has forgotten your set up by the time they get to the punchline, or it’ll lose its ... punch.

  Another thing that helps with increasing the tension is to put the most valuable piece of information at the end. This is the basis of all shaggy dog stories. The build up is such that the punchline, when you reach it, is hilarious (or makes you groan and then laugh). My favourite example of this is in Terry Pratchett’s Soul Music, where there is a long, long scene about stealing a piano, based on The Blues Brothers scene, which ends with ‘you can’t stop us, we’re on a mission from Glod’.

  2 Exaggerate

  If in doubt, exaggerate. If you’re relying on a character’s inappropriate response to make the scene funny, make the response over the top. If the comedy in your scene comes from the mismatch of characters, exaggerate the difference between them.

  The characters in Father Ted all have exaggerated versions of smaller flaws. The Office has exaggerated characters. The satirical ‘mockumentaries’ 2012 and W1A have exaggerated versions of characters and exaggerated situations. These are everyday people and everyday situations taken to extremes. They make you laugh because they’re so extreme. They make you cringe, because you can see how easily you could find yourself there.

  3 Be specific

  It’s easier to picture something specific than something generic. Biscuit is generic. Hobnob is specific (and delicious). Dessert is generic. Organic raspberry fool is specific. By using specific descriptions, you narrow the mental image down to something ... well, specific.

  Victoria Wood was a genius at this. Study the Ballad of Barry and Freda. ‘Smack me with a magazine’ is funny in context. ‘Beat me on the bottom with a Woman’s Weekly’ is hilarious because the word choice tells you a lot about the people involved. They’re polite enough to use the word ‘bottom’ rather than ‘bum’ or ‘arse’. They’re middle class, maybe. They’re the sort of people who have a subscription to Woman’s Weekly. They aren’t natural spankers (which is a sentence I never thought I’d write. Ever).

  If you want a more classic example, read anything by PG Wodehouse.

  Now, if you’ll excuse me. There’s a Hobnob that needs eating.

  4 Dialogue

  Dialogue is one of the greatest joys of the rom com. You can get characters to say things and riff off one another to great comic effect. You know how you walk away from an argument and three hours later, think of the perfect riposte ... but it’s too late to let it fly. Well, when you’re writing a book, you can go back and put it in.

  There is often the temptation to have long sections of dialogue where there characters are bantering, it’s all very funny, but it’s not moving the story forward. Resist the temptation. Resist. Have some banter, sure. But if you have more than three jokes in a row, think about moving onto to something that drives the plot, otherwise the humour will start to sound forced.

  Of course, if you can make a joke that does both - makes the reader smile and drives the plot forward, then go for it. Well done you.

  Always, always, always, remember to keep things in character.

  5 Subvert expectations

  There is a famous anecdote about Charlie Chaplin discussing a visual gag - you have a man, in a suit (because it’s always funnier to see a man fall over, if he’s wearing a suit), walking along the street and not paying attention to where he’s going. Ahead of him, there’s a banana peel on the floor and an open manhole cover. Which is funnier? Will he step on the banana peel? Or fall in the manhole?

  Man. Banana peel. Hole in the ground.

  He gets closer.

  Which will it be?

  Chaplin’s solution: The man steps over the banana peel ... straight into the manhole.

  Somehow this is funnier than either of the other options because you weren’t expecting it.

  6 Juxtaposition of thingies

  If you need something to be funnier, look at what you’re juxtaposing and make the contrasts bigger. This is basically a summary of all the advice above. Juxtapose better things. Exaggerate the differences.

  A general tip with all of the above is, if you’re trying to make a joke funnier, look at your punchline. Write the numbers 1 to 10 on a piece of paper. Now write more extreme versions of that punchline – more exaggerated, more specific, more surreal. Chances are, out of the ten possible versions, somewhere towards the end, will be perfect punchline.

  Chapter 7: Timing

  Bear with me here.

  Person 1: I say, I say, I say, what is the secret of good comedy?

  Person 2: I don’t know, what is the secret of good co-

  Person 1: (Interrupting) Timing.

  Trust me, it’s funny. And points out how essential timing is to the delivery of a good punch line.

  Now, this is something to bear in mind when writing comedy in novel form (I mean novel as in book, not as in new. We hope that all the comedy you write is new, and you are not copying from 100 Best Jokes for 11 Year Olds). Timing can be conveyed in several ways.

  1 Visual Cues

  Okay, let’s get one thing straight. Exclamation marks are not funny, all right? I know they have their place! Of course they do! But using them to show that your character is exclaiming, is a bit like using capitals TO INDICATE SOMEONE IS SHOUTING AND THEN PUTTING ‘he shouted’. Your words should do the work, don’t expect your punctuation to do the heavy lifting here. As Terry Pratchett says ‘Exclamation marks are like cats. Any more than two is a sign of insanity.’ He meant two together, but it could work if he’d added ‘on a page’.

  However. Separating out a phrase, using speech marks, italics or parentheses (that’s brackets, to you and me) can work very well to highlight a phrase that you intend to be taken in a humorous way.

 

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