Why I Started Humor Blogging
Posted on November 23, 2007
Filed Under Meta-Blogging |
Image Credit: comedy vs tragedy
After 3 years of blogging at Radioactive Liberty, I reached a point where I wanted to improve my writing skills. More specifically, I wanted to become a better humor writer. General principles of good writing apply to humor writing as well, and they are easy enough to find, so that’s where I started.
When I tried to take the next step of finding information on how to be funny, I was met with frustration. I was able to find bits and pieces of information about common tools of humor, but no one really seemed to have put it all together.
It’s quite likely that it’s the sort of thing that has always tended to flow from one person to the next through a personal mentor/apprentice type relationship. That’s probably a pretty effective way to provide beneficial support to one person, but isn’t particularly helpful in an age where people are inclined to search for information on the internet.
I’m fully aware of many of the devices used in writing humor, such as
- exaggeration
- stereotypes
- ridicule
- recall
- wordplay
to name just a few, but it just didn’t seem right to continually be given pieces of a great puzzle, a little at a time, and need to figure out how it all fits together.
Hasn’t anyone come up with a formula to use as an effective tool?
I remembered that Scott Adams had mentioned a tool he uses to measure how funny something is. He even uses it as a template for his work. He calls it the 2 of 6 Rule of Humor, and I assume he invented it.
The 2 of 6 rule basically states that when something hits at least 2 of 6 broad categories, then it’s probably funny. The more categories it hits, the funnier it is. If you could hit 5 of 6, you’re probably making people piss themselves.
2 of 6 Rule of Humor
The 6 categories in the 2 of 6 rule are:
- Clever
- Cute
- Cruel
- Naughty
- Familiar
- Bizarre
The order doesn’t matter. The point is that implementing a minimum of two is a key to making something funny. That’s all well and good, but those terms are kind of broad and vague. It took a while for it to sink in. Over time, I started seeing how the common devices of humor fit into each of these categories, and I started to realize just how effective a tool it can be.
I plan to cover this topic more in depth in the future.
Was all the funniest stuff on the internet written in 1995?
I hope to Hell the answer is “No,” because I’m sick of seeing the same old non-funny shit that’s been perpetuated through the internet since the days of usenet.
Thankfully, I know the answer is “No.” I can see for myself the many talented individuals cranking out new and seriously funny writing on a daily basis.
It’s great that we have things like the Humor-Blogs.com directory, but it just doesn’t seem to take the idea far enough. It’s nice to have a directory of blogs that are intended as humor, and to allow for feed aggregation of publishers that have joined, but there really needs to be more of a community aspect to it.
In some way, I have a goal of helping bring that into existence. I encourage talented individuals to contribute their original ideas to be showcased here at Humor Blogging.
Isn’t blogging more than just internet marketing?
Of course it is. In one way or another we’re all marketing ourselves, and our writing, but just look around the Meta-Blogging community, and over and over you’ll see people ignoring the value of entertainment. It’s like people got this idea of using blogging to get rich quick, and forgot the importance of just having fun.
Let’s reclaim the importance of fun, laughter, and enjoyment for the good of the blogosphere. Let’s collaborate together to become better humor writers.
Let’s make an effort to promote talented individuals that write truly funny and original content, because that stupid picture of the kindergarten class with Bill Clinton’s face on all the kid’s wasn’t that funny the first 17,000 times I saw it, and it’s making me want to start strangling people by now.
That’s why I started this site. Something I wanted to exist simply didn’t seem to exist. I couldn’t find it, so I created it.
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Comments
13 Responses to “Why I Started Humor Blogging”
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This is an interesting question and I think you were onto the answer in your post with the part about the mentor/apprentice angle.
I think people that are funny don’t look for the how-to but rather what the veterans are doing. I don’t think it can be taught to the masses through an internet site or blog like a sales class.
But like you said, having a funny blog with a group of talented humor writers providing original content with good quality is a great way to promote funny and be mentors in a sense.
And a random thought about humor that I firmly believe in: Humor is like music. You use your skills to create funny, not use funny to show off your skills.
that stupid picture of the kindergarten class with Bill Clinton’s face on all the kid’s wasn’t that funny the first 17,000 times I saw it, and it’s making me want to start strangling people by now.
I bet the 17, 001st time just makes you get all silly with laughter! HA!
Very good tips.
Love it…love it…LOVE IT!! Thank god for another one of us humour writers/satirists. I run a blog on stand-up comedy and I too had a hard time finding articles referring to the more technical side of humour/comedic writing.
Welcome to the neighbhourhood!!
Great article. Personally I’ve never sat down trying to be funny, but I get a decent amount of email telling me that my posts are funny. I don’t know if I agree or not. Sarcastic maybe, but not generally funny.
Chris, I like your analogy to music. It fits in many ways, probably because both are art forms. I agree that there are limitations to trying to “teach” humor through a blog, but I think that by having a community oriented around it, it will help with the sharing of ideas. It may be limited in what it can achieve, but it’s still better than nothing. Obviously, you can’t teach the sense of humor, just like you could teach someone scales, chords, etc, but that doesn’t mean that the person can pick up a guitar and make people feel the music. That takes something innate. You still need to start somewhere though.
RT, that’s still nothing compared to the gutwrenching belly laugh I get the 17,002nd time.
Lucy Dee, thanks for coming by. I hope to see more of you around. I’d really like to know more about your experiences as a stand up. I’ve never been much of an “In front of crowds” type person.
ABAN, Your name’s too long. It’s an acronym now. Like I was mentioning to Chris, there’s definitely an amount that there needs to be a natural ability. I have a natural inclination toward sarcasm myself. For people not offended by it, it has a natural humor element to it. If you go by the 2 0f 6, you’ve got “Cruel” covered with the sarcasm, which is ridicule. Of course, you don’t want to be dull, so you just naturally ramp up the “Clever.” There’s 2 of 6. Add a little more to it, and it might even be really funny.
I said “natural” a lot in that last comment.
This is a great topic for discussion! The other comments so far have been great, too!
Have you read the book from the scientists at LaughLab? They studied what humour is from the perspective of neuroscience, and had to find funny jokes to do their experiments. How they gathered those jokes is almost as interesting as the results! They nicely summarize what people around the world find funny, and not funny, based on actual scientific measurements and observations. Check it out on Amazon.com or Google for further details.
One model that I developed and have been working with lately with great success is a two-step process for making people laugh.
Step 1: Create a setting/circumstance that is enveloping. Based on my own experiments with humour, I can see how your 2 of 6 rule would work great for this. This can often be done with just one line at the beginning: A sailor walks into a bar with a brightly-colored parrot on his shoulder. The bartender says, “Wow, where’d you get that?” And the parrot says, “The Navy. There’s lots of them.”
Step 2: Do a “flip”, where you surprise the listener/reader. According to Paul Ekman (book: Emotions Revealed), surprise is typically followed by fear. For example, you’re walking through the forest and a bear jumps out to get you. First you’re surprised, then fearful (and probably running for your life). But if what follows isn’t fear, then we get a sense of relief that makes us laugh: You’re walking through the forest, a bear jumps out to eat you, so you slap his nose and make him sit.
In the parrot joke, the surprise is a parrot that owns a person. The thought of being owned like a pet is frightenning for most people and it’s a relief when the ownership is of the sailor and not you. It’s also wonderfully ironic and makes use of personification, in keeping with the cleverness factor emphasized by Fiar.
It seems that the flip needs to take place in the “gap” between our emotional and rational responses, which is why timing is so important and yet has so many variations. The process causes the amygdala (a very dense part of the brain) to prepare the body to deal with challenges to the safety of the listener (whether real or imagined, emotional or physical), followed by a release of built-up natural tension about 1/10 of a second later when the prefrontal cortex recognizes that there is no impending danger, threat, or deprivation.
I have no idea why cute things are sometimes funny, unless they bite.
I’m really glad you’ve opened the discussion on this topic, and I’ve added you to my aggregator. Keep up the good work!
Oh yes, and keep in mind that it is the natural human ability to empathize with the sailor (rather than the parrot) that makes the joke work. Empathy plays a major role because it takes identification with the characters to stimulate the amygdala in a normal person, according to Daniel Goleman (book: Social Intelligence).
Thanks for the input Andrew. I’ll definitely need to check that out. I find it fascinating just how complex humor really is, and just how important it is to human psychology.
Uhh…still waiting on the funny there, guy!
It’s my experience that trying to describe what is funny, or how to be funny is profoundly unfunny. That’s not to say this isn’t a valid exercise, just that one shouldn’t expect discussions about humor to be humorous.
Has anyone ever taken the humor writing course from MediaBistro? (http://www.mediabistro.com/courses/cache/crs3329.asp)
It seems like a lot of money for essentially an online critique group with a weekly chat, but if I heard some good feedback about it, I might consider it.
Good luck with the new site Fair!
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