Summer’s here and the time is right for thinking “I’d love to be a comedy writer”. Special offer (until Sun 18 August) pick up a free copy of Ready Steady Joke! for tons of tips how https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CC9HW25N
There are a million reasons to not take that leap from your lifelong desire to become a writer. And a million more to steer clear of funny.
I was lucky, in 1983 was able to give up journalism and become a writer almost immediately after. I moved to London to perform stand-up comedy during the one tiny period in its 50-year history when the demand for new entertainers was greater than the supply.
I wasn’t great but also I wasn’t bad. That was enough to get me three or four gigs a week. Gave me the rest of my time to learn how to write.
Can you write funny? My answer to that is… probably. Yes. Yes, you can. Why else would I be writing this? Why am I hesitating?
Perhaps it’s because for many people there’s a slightly different question. It’s not “can I write funny?” more a case of “do I want to?”
If you can write, you can write funny. I’m not saying you will instantly discover how to compose riotous wordplay like Tom Sharpe, compelling contemporary characters with the skills of Helen Fielding or unspeakable relationships like those you find in the books of Nora Ephron.
If you can write, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to add the contrast of tone that levity can bring to even the darkest of tales. I know I’ll never be able to create a sense of place with the extraordinary skills of Rose Tremain, or jaw dropping plot twists like Gillian Flynn – but I can work hard and become better at these.
Coaching new writers in how to develop the funny for TV and radio scripts, I frequently receive emails from people – women, invariably – that say something like: “I’d love to write comedy but I’m not sure I’m capable of it.”
I rarely get those emails from men. “I want to be a comedy writer,” they say. No caveats. No buts. Not a bad thing at this stage. Good for you chaps. You’re going to need to develop a modicum of self-awareness at some point but for now, it’s useful to go with that positive energy.
That was what I was like when I started out. Sure, I was plagued with self-doubt, lacked self-esteem and had no confidence. It took me years to discover these were the default settings for a comedy writer – any writer. But I loved TV and radio comedy and had no doubt that what I wanted to do was write sitcoms and eventually, funny books.
What held me back for so long from novel writing was the enormity of the task.
Ten years of being a stand-up had taken me in another direction. I wrote jokes, which rarely last more than a few seconds, and comic songs, where the average length of a piece of work was about two minutes.
There was something about the idea of writing 80,000 words that felt too much for a brain that was more suited to one liners and rhyming gags.
How about you? What’s holding you back?
The above examples are different versions of the number one obstacle to anyone wanting to write funny novels: fear.
Fear of failure. Fear of the unknown. This is universal.
Now add into that mix that most people’s number one fear is speaking in public and you can see how the urge not to test the public mood with your idea of what’s funny will be powerful.
“You want me to expose myself in public and you want me to be funny as well?” For people who want to write comedy even if it’s a book rather than a talk for a roomful of cynics you can see how the fear has come about.
Many writers are worried that people won’t appreciate their sense of humour. That they will commit the worst sin of not being funny.
I’m afraid there’s something to that. I guarantee that a number of people won’t find you funny.
They’ll get angry too. If you write a romance that’s not romantic enough for our reader they’ll move on and not buy another in your series. If they’re expecting funny and you don’t deliver their idea of what funny is they’ll rage at your impudence. Some of them will be angry enough to leave you a one star review on Amazon.
Okay that’s the bad news. That’s the “what’s the worst thing that can happen to you?” question. And it is horrible. Never stops feeling awful. Gets to the core of your psyche.
I am no stranger to this feeling. I performed more than 2,000 gigs as a stand-up and you don’t need to be a maths genius to work out that even if I succeeded 99 per cent of the time, that’s still 20 more publicly humiliating failures than the average person would hope for in a standard lifetime. Spoiler alert, towards the end of my performing career it was way more than 20.
Humour is subjective, there’ll always be someone who hates what you do. If you really think being exposed to that feeling is something to avoid then give up now.
Before you do though I’ll tell you what was much worse than dying on stage and being jeered by a roomful of people.
Indifference. Hearing your well-crafted gems landing to a deafening silence.
Whatever genre you write in, I guarantee there will be many times when you wonder if the hours of writing, marketing and publishing have got you noticed by anyone at all. Believe me, hostility to your writing is the least of your worries.
It can happen though. And it’s happening more thanks to the judgmental nature of social media. What if people get so angry about what you write that they try and cancel you?
I’d say that even in “the current climate”, a phrase that has become so loaded it requires those quotation marks, you are going to have to work really hard, or be obviously going out of your way to offend, in order to get cancelled.
Even then you may well find enough support among a bunch of people who are so angry at the threat of your cancellation that they will continue to support you.
If you think of all comedy writing along a spectrum, the vast majority of people make and consume comedy within very broad parameters. Most comedy can be rude, cheeky, a little shocking, pushing at the boundaries of social norms.
Where there is cruelty, it tends to be sugar-coated. When Ollie falls flat on his backside we’re laughing not because he might be in physical pain but because he received his come-uppance. And by the end of the movie we’re reassured that for all their disagreements Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are still the best of friends.
Here in Britain we have traditionally targeted most of our mockery towards the nation’s ancient and utterly absurd class system. America’s established humour base grew from the acerbic sarcasm of the 20th century New York immigrant Jewish comics.
Immigrant humour continues to run through US comedy and some of it challenges people and their strongly held prejudices. But if you have something heartfelt to say you can push a long way before anyone’s going to revoke your licence to amuse.
Another barrier to creating comedy comes because to many people, even those who know they can come up with funny ideas, the concept of “comedy” is alien. What do we mean by it? Is it the structure of a joke, the absurdity of a story, the flaws of a character?
Writing comedy stories is largely the same as for any other kind. All the rules of storytelling are the same: a character goes on a journey, they struggle along the way, fight the enemy, almost lose, triumph at the end. The main difference is that in comedy the enemy is rarely an outside force, it’s usually something within their character.
Every now and then I see a comedian or a piece of writing that’s so perfect I can’t work out how they did it. But most of the time I’m seeing skill and hard work paying off.
Joke structure? Odd stories? Funny visuals? These can all be learned, and they’re coming up later.
Hopefully you’ve already seen how all-encompassing the idea of “funny” can be. Making people laugh can be your number one goal or something lurking in the background. The vast majority of “funny” sits somewhere comfortably between those extremes.
Let’s look at another self-imposed barrier. No self-respecting self-helping writing manual referring to obstacles can be written without reference to the ubiquitous phrase “impostor syndrome”.
It’s always worth repeating the many ways in which you as a writer can tackle that annoying voice in your ear, that tells you you’re not good enough, or that you’re not worthy, that you must be mad to think you can do this.
We tell new writers not to worry, this happens to everyone. It’s up to you how you deal with it, you can ignore it or shout angrily at it to go away, or simply acknowledge its existence, smile and carry on writing.
At the end of every first draft, in fact every point on the way, as a writer you need to say to yourself “this is as good as I could possibly have made it at this stage.” That’ll shut up the impostor syndrome voice.
Any time it re-emerges, have a little conversation with it. You’ll realise soon enough that it’s little more than the over-emotional advocate for the simplest, clearest, most professional advice. What you’ve written is not terrible, it’s not bad, but it could be better. It can always be better.
Is it funny yet? Maybe. But don’t stress about that at this point. Get to the end of the first draft, put some space between that and looking at it again, and you’ll be able to judge that for the first time.
Writer, it’s time to act like the main character in your novel – face your fears and work out how to get around them.
Are you ready to step into this new world of funny writing? Almost. First you need to perform some detective work.
What am I talking about? All will be explained in the next chapter.
Not exactly an edge-of-your-seat Gillian Flynn type cliffhanger ending, but I’m learning.
Pick up your free copy here https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CC9HW25N Offer closes Sunday 18 August
And to receive my fortnightly newsletter about becoming a funny writer sign up at davecohen.org.uk