How to write jokes when nothing is funny

An essay about craft and survival

In March, I went to Lakeland University in Wisconsin to be a guest lecturer for a few days. I taught a class on humor writing. It was a wonderful experience, but of course in hindsight I wish I had done it a little differently, said things a little more clearly. So this is my do-over — my attempt to write about how to be funny in your writing and in your life when absolutely nothing feels funny and the world is collapsing in on you.

To be funny, first you have to cry.

That’s the thing about humor: You have to have a big, open heart to see everything and feel everything. I learned how to be funny in order to find a way not to cry all the time. But the crying came first. So first you need to cry.

One of the funniest moments of my life came when my father-in-law was dying. It was the day before he went to hospice and my mother-in-law, sisters- and brothers-in-law, husband and I were sitting in the kitchen eating sandwiches for lunch. We always ate sandwiches for lunch; my mother-in-law would put out a plate of cold cuts and cheeses and tomatoes, a bag of Country Hearth bread, a bag of Sun Chips, and one small jar of mayonnaise just for me. I was the only one who wanted sauce on my sandwich. And we sat there eating, not saying anything as their father — my father-in-law — moaned in pain in the room above us. We could hear him even from the kitchen, and as his groans got louder they sounded orgasmic, like the line between death and pleasure had been broken.

It was like the time I was in college and watching a movie with my parents and when a sex scene came on, my mom hit the “mute” button. But hitting mute turned on the closed captions, which spelled out “ohh ahhh oh oh ahhhhhh!” and my little brother, in elementary school at the time, started reading them off in his deadpan voice. “Ooh ahh ahh.”

My mom shrieked in desperation as she tried to get control over the material, control over her home.

And that’s what I thought about as my dying father-in-law moaned in agony and I started laughing and so did my two sisters-in-law while the men looked down at their dry sandwiches.

“Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion,” says Dolly Parton's character, Truvey Jones, in Steel Magnolias.

In that movie, as Sally Field's character, M’Lynn, mourns the loss of her daughter, she screams to her friends that she wants to hit somebody so they feel as bad as she does. And Clairee, played by Olympia Dukakis, shoves Shirley MacLane’s character, Ouiser, forward and says, “Here! Hit this!”

It’s a ridiculous response to a moment of pain. Outsized emotions giving way to slapstick comedy. The contrast of light and dark make for a moment of chiaroscuro more dramatic than a Renaissance master could imagine.

Chiaroscuro is an art term that refers to the extreme contrast of light and dark that renders images on the page three-dimensional. It’s that contrast that gives them life.

The darkness always has light — you just have to find it. 

The politician standing on the floor of the state house, waxing poetic about freedom, justice, and how people with uteruses shouldn’t be allowed to have rights, can be rendered funny in a similar exercise. We simply describe him accurately. He’s not a politician, he’s a damp paper towel, he’s a shriveled potato, he’s a rotting tub of nonfat cottage cheese. I like to compare my politicians to expired dairy products. As long as it’s white and spoiled the metaphor usually works.

See, it’s funny now — all this freedom you can’t have anymore.

The light has darkness too. That’s even funnier, seeing the hidden danger lurking in the places of positivity and light.

I take myself to the garden center. Everything is gnomes and bright pinks and purples. I dare myself to find the darkness here. Searching among the flowers, I see a petunia called White Madness. I think I saw this petunia call the cops on a Black man bird-watching in Central Park. This petunia posts on Nextdoor every time a teenager walks through the neighborhood. This petunia held a tiki torch in Charlottesville. 

Then I go to HomeGoods and look through stacks of throw pillows and sniff candles. I love to smell candles — mostly because they smell so awful most of the time. My son and I have a game we play with candles in Target. We will sniff candles until we find one that is awful. “Here, smell this!” we say, and then we try to describe how it actually smells, not like leather and eucalyptus, but like dirty socks, dog fart, or — my son’s favorite descriptor — “Mom’s armpit.”

Humor is the art of contrast. The thing that is supposed to cleanse your home of bad smells actually reeks of hog confinement, damp basement, or the rotting remains of a meal you shared with someone but never finished and never will and now it sits in a container moldering in the back of your fridge. 

Take everything that terrifies you and makes you cry and make a list. I am afraid of tripping over my tiny dog and falling down the stairs and breaking my neck. I am afraid I’ll get really mad at a party where I am drinking wine and bite the edge of my glass until it breaks and I’ll swallow the shards because I will be too afraid to tell anyone I broke the glass. I’m afraid my son will turn into a Nazi.

I used to be so afraid that the rapture would come while I was on the toilet and Jesus would take me up into the sky and everyone left behind would see my butt. And maybe some poop would come out and even though I was saved, I’d be humiliated.

I’m afraid that once I was stalked by a serial killer who saw me out on my runs, but when he got closer he was like, “Gross,” and went and killed someone else.

I am convinced that if I make a list of all the ways I am scared and feel powerless, if I can turn them into a joke, then I will have power over them.

There are many ways to be funny when you are sad. Sarcasm. Satire. Self-deprecation. Punching up. Putting a funny sweater on your dog. Imagining ponies in different types of caps. You can commit to a bit. For example, in 2019 I went on a road trip with a friend and pretended I was a male poet out to experience the “real America.” And every time I saw a piece of trash or a penis scrawled in Sharpie on a bathroom wall, I took a picture and sent it to my friend with the caption, “The real America.” Or “America the beautiful.”  I did this for four days until at the end of the trip my friend, who I wanted to love me, told me he still loved his ex-girlfriend. Funny. Hilarious. Especially in the ensuing years, when my Google photos will show me memories of all that trash I took a picture of and I’ll think of that trip.

But wherever it ends up, I think humor begins with tears. Tears from loneliness and tragedy. Tears from the exhaustion of it all. It begins by seeing the contrasts, really seeing them. The darkness in the light. The light behind the dark things. It begins by letting it all break your heart.