*************************************************************************************************************************
A YOUNG lady, Miss E. H., of Oklahoma City, has written me asking if there are any standing rules for writing humour. I am naturally flattered to have been selected as an official spokesman in this matter, and I hope I will not intone as I go along, or become too pontifical, or turn sully.
Perhaps we might begin with a caption for a drawing I have had around for years: 'Where were you all night, Chastity?' This is known to the trade as a Formula Caption, or one that is subject to endless variations: 'Quit messing around with that loaded pistol, Prudence,' and 'For Heaven's sake, Patience, will you please give me a chance to explain?' There are many formula situations with which every magazine reader is familiar: the man falling from a building and saying something to a girl in an office on his way down; the man and the girl cast away on a raft in the ocean; the two artisans working on the face of a gigantic clock; and the two beachcombers on the beach discussing what they have come there to forget. This last, by the way, was best done nearly forty years ago in what must have been its original version: the First Beachcomber says, 'What did you come here to forget?' and the Second Beachcomber says, 'I've forgotten.' So much for formulas in comic art.
I have established a few standing rules of my own about humor, after receiving dozens of humourous essays and stories from strangers over a period of twenty years. (1) The reader should be able to find out what the story is about (2) Some inkling of the general idea should be apparent in the first five hundred words. (3) If the writer has decided to change the name of his protagonist from Ketcham to McTavish, Ketcham should not keep bobbing up in the last five pages. A good way to eliminate this confusion is to read the piece over before sending it out, and remove Ketcham completely. He is a nuisance. (4) The word ' I'll' should not be divided so that the 'I' is on one line and ' 'll' on the next. The reader's attention, after the breaking up of ' I'll', can never be successfully recaptured. (5) It also never recovers from such names as Ann S. Thetic, Maud Lynn, Sally Forth, Bertha Twins, and the like. (6) Avoid comic stories about plumbers who are mistaken for surgeons, sheriffs who are terrified by gunfire, psychiatrists who are driven crazy by women patients, doctors who faint at the sight of blood, adolescent girls who know more about sex than their fathers do, and midgets who turn out to be parents of a two-hundred-pound wrestler.
I have a special wariness of people who write opening sentences with nothing in mind, and then try to create a story around them. These sentences, usually easy to detect, go like this: 'Mrs Ponsonby had never put the dog in the oven before,' ' " I have a wine tree, if you would care to see it," said Mr Dillingworth,' and 'Jackson decided suddenly, for no reason, really, to buy his wife a tricycle.' I have never traced the fortunes of such characters in the stories I receive, beyond the opening sentence, but, like you, I have a fair notion of what happens or doesn't happen, in 'The Barking Oven, 'The Burgundy Tree', and 'A Tricycle for Mama'.
An ageing author who receives, but never has the time or strength to read, humourous stories written by women that invariably run to 8,500 words, can usually get a pretty good idea of the material from the accompanying letters, many of which contain snapshots of the writer's husband, baby, and beach cottage. These pieces have usually been written in a gay, carefree vacation mood, and it is a sound rule to avoid slf-expression at such a time, since it leads to overemphasis, underlining, unnecessary quotation marks, and the odd notion that everything that happens is funny. The American housewife, possibly as the result of what might be called the 'Blandings Influence', also seems to believe that amusement is inherent in everything that goes wrong about the house and in everybody that comes in to fix it. My own experience has not been that fortunate. In my view, a carpenter named Twippley is likely to be as dull as a professor named Tweedle, and I think we are safe in setting this up as a standing rule.
Another reliable rule, Miss E. H., is that nocturnal urges to get out of bed and write something humourous should be strongly resisted. The woman who springs up, lights the light, wakes up her husband, and starts 'writing it out' is not only a nuisance, but is almost certainly labouring under the common illusion of the sleepy that the commonplace is remarkable. These night pieces are usually dashed off in less than twenty minutes, and when written by the female, seem to grow out of the conviction that writing late at night lends a special magic to prose, like writing in a rose arbor or on a houseboat. The magic, alas, rarely survives the cynical light of day. Tender is the night, but it has neither literary style nor creative talent, and no more enhances the quality of a lady's output than does the assumption of such cute and booksy noms de plume as Suzana Prynne or Priscilla Winkle.
Since I was twelve, I have had an antipathy to ladies or gentlemen who write comic stories in baby talk, Deep Southern dialect, or other exasperating lingos, or whose characters lisp, or stammer, or talk like Red Skeleton. I am also distinctly cool to writers who try to interest me in tribal dialect, African, Mayan, or American Indian. My worst personal experience in that field was when I read, or tried to read, a manuscript dealing with the confused whimsies of the Shoshone Indians: 'I have lived among the Shoshones for twenty years, and have thought for sometime that their humour, which consists mainly of heavy banter, would be a valuable addition to American folklore. In some instances, as in the case of OGLA WAHGU, which is not easily rendered into English, I have made no attempt at translation. OGLA WAHGU means, variously, "not for me", and "I am going" and more rarely, "strook him". ' My secretary returned the manuscript with a polite letter saying I had died.
There ought to be a law, Miss E. H., and not merely a rule against the sort of thing that emerges when an authoress - she is usually either very young or in her treacherous fifties, 'invents' what she calls a new kind of humour. This stuff, out of Tender Buttons by 'Jabberwocky', is even less clear than the kidding around of Shoshones. 'He was in bad, but she knew he was not a sloop.' Another exhibit, as hard to believe as it was tedious to decipher, started off like this: ' "Where have you asked?" Sylvia been. "No answer in particular," Roger whered.' It is possible that a new and valid kind of humour may be invented some day, but I hope the inventor will send it to someone else, not me.
My final standing rule, Miss E. H., is that the young wife and mother should sedulously avoid the cowsie-wowsie type of humour. This genus invariably begins something like this: 'Now that she has become a humming bird she wondered what George had become and where he was! Then she knew. Of course how silly of her! George would be a flower with a bell much too deep for her to reach into. Wasn't that just like spiteful, inconsiderate George! She hoped suddenly that he would be eaten by a cow. It would serve him...' I do not know what in the name of God causes this, but there is a lot of it, and most of it is sent to me. From the snapshots of the authoresses enclose of themselves, their husbands, and their babies, I gather that they are healthy, reasonably sane, well-mated, and happy. I have to think that humour is not compatible with a successful marriage, but what else can I think?
We now come to the perennial parody of Noel Coward of which the ladies are so fond, and there is, in my house, a standing rule about that too. And if, after your marriage, you ever send me a burlesque of Private Lives, Miss E. H., singed with the name 'Knowall Coward', I will burn the snapshot of you and your husband and the beach cottage. As for your poor baby - but I am getting surly now and will close, with best wishes, love and kisses, and a friendly warning that humour can be a headache, dear Miss E. H. Why don't you become a bacteriologist, or a Red Cross Nurse, or a Wave, like all the other girls?
...Posted by Ishani
**********************************************************************************************************************
A YOUNG lady, Miss E. H., of Oklahoma City, has written me asking if there are any standing rules for writing humour. I am naturally flattered to have been selected as an official spokesman in this matter, and I hope I will not intone as I go along, or become too pontifical, or turn sully.
Perhaps we might begin with a caption for a drawing I have had around for years: 'Where were you all night, Chastity?' This is known to the trade as a Formula Caption, or one that is subject to endless variations: 'Quit messing around with that loaded pistol, Prudence,' and 'For Heaven's sake, Patience, will you please give me a chance to explain?' There are many formula situations with which every magazine reader is familiar: the man falling from a building and saying something to a girl in an office on his way down; the man and the girl cast away on a raft in the ocean; the two artisans working on the face of a gigantic clock; and the two beachcombers on the beach discussing what they have come there to forget. This last, by the way, was best done nearly forty years ago in what must have been its original version: the First Beachcomber says, 'What did you come here to forget?' and the Second Beachcomber says, 'I've forgotten.' So much for formulas in comic art.
I have established a few standing rules of my own about humor, after receiving dozens of humourous essays and stories from strangers over a period of twenty years. (1) The reader should be able to find out what the story is about (2) Some inkling of the general idea should be apparent in the first five hundred words. (3) If the writer has decided to change the name of his protagonist from Ketcham to McTavish, Ketcham should not keep bobbing up in the last five pages. A good way to eliminate this confusion is to read the piece over before sending it out, and remove Ketcham completely. He is a nuisance. (4) The word ' I'll' should not be divided so that the 'I' is on one line and ' 'll' on the next. The reader's attention, after the breaking up of ' I'll', can never be successfully recaptured. (5) It also never recovers from such names as Ann S. Thetic, Maud Lynn, Sally Forth, Bertha Twins, and the like. (6) Avoid comic stories about plumbers who are mistaken for surgeons, sheriffs who are terrified by gunfire, psychiatrists who are driven crazy by women patients, doctors who faint at the sight of blood, adolescent girls who know more about sex than their fathers do, and midgets who turn out to be parents of a two-hundred-pound wrestler.
I have a special wariness of people who write opening sentences with nothing in mind, and then try to create a story around them. These sentences, usually easy to detect, go like this: 'Mrs Ponsonby had never put the dog in the oven before,' ' " I have a wine tree, if you would care to see it," said Mr Dillingworth,' and 'Jackson decided suddenly, for no reason, really, to buy his wife a tricycle.' I have never traced the fortunes of such characters in the stories I receive, beyond the opening sentence, but, like you, I have a fair notion of what happens or doesn't happen, in 'The Barking Oven, 'The Burgundy Tree', and 'A Tricycle for Mama'.
An ageing author who receives, but never has the time or strength to read, humourous stories written by women that invariably run to 8,500 words, can usually get a pretty good idea of the material from the accompanying letters, many of which contain snapshots of the writer's husband, baby, and beach cottage. These pieces have usually been written in a gay, carefree vacation mood, and it is a sound rule to avoid slf-expression at such a time, since it leads to overemphasis, underlining, unnecessary quotation marks, and the odd notion that everything that happens is funny. The American housewife, possibly as the result of what might be called the 'Blandings Influence', also seems to believe that amusement is inherent in everything that goes wrong about the house and in everybody that comes in to fix it. My own experience has not been that fortunate. In my view, a carpenter named Twippley is likely to be as dull as a professor named Tweedle, and I think we are safe in setting this up as a standing rule.
Another reliable rule, Miss E. H., is that nocturnal urges to get out of bed and write something humourous should be strongly resisted. The woman who springs up, lights the light, wakes up her husband, and starts 'writing it out' is not only a nuisance, but is almost certainly labouring under the common illusion of the sleepy that the commonplace is remarkable. These night pieces are usually dashed off in less than twenty minutes, and when written by the female, seem to grow out of the conviction that writing late at night lends a special magic to prose, like writing in a rose arbor or on a houseboat. The magic, alas, rarely survives the cynical light of day. Tender is the night, but it has neither literary style nor creative talent, and no more enhances the quality of a lady's output than does the assumption of such cute and booksy noms de plume as Suzana Prynne or Priscilla Winkle.
Since I was twelve, I have had an antipathy to ladies or gentlemen who write comic stories in baby talk, Deep Southern dialect, or other exasperating lingos, or whose characters lisp, or stammer, or talk like Red Skeleton. I am also distinctly cool to writers who try to interest me in tribal dialect, African, Mayan, or American Indian. My worst personal experience in that field was when I read, or tried to read, a manuscript dealing with the confused whimsies of the Shoshone Indians: 'I have lived among the Shoshones for twenty years, and have thought for sometime that their humour, which consists mainly of heavy banter, would be a valuable addition to American folklore. In some instances, as in the case of OGLA WAHGU, which is not easily rendered into English, I have made no attempt at translation. OGLA WAHGU means, variously, "not for me", and "I am going" and more rarely, "strook him". ' My secretary returned the manuscript with a polite letter saying I had died.
There ought to be a law, Miss E. H., and not merely a rule against the sort of thing that emerges when an authoress - she is usually either very young or in her treacherous fifties, 'invents' what she calls a new kind of humour. This stuff, out of Tender Buttons by 'Jabberwocky', is even less clear than the kidding around of Shoshones. 'He was in bad, but she knew he was not a sloop.' Another exhibit, as hard to believe as it was tedious to decipher, started off like this: ' "Where have you asked?" Sylvia been. "No answer in particular," Roger whered.' It is possible that a new and valid kind of humour may be invented some day, but I hope the inventor will send it to someone else, not me.
My final standing rule, Miss E. H., is that the young wife and mother should sedulously avoid the cowsie-wowsie type of humour. This genus invariably begins something like this: 'Now that she has become a humming bird she wondered what George had become and where he was! Then she knew. Of course how silly of her! George would be a flower with a bell much too deep for her to reach into. Wasn't that just like spiteful, inconsiderate George! She hoped suddenly that he would be eaten by a cow. It would serve him...' I do not know what in the name of God causes this, but there is a lot of it, and most of it is sent to me. From the snapshots of the authoresses enclose of themselves, their husbands, and their babies, I gather that they are healthy, reasonably sane, well-mated, and happy. I have to think that humour is not compatible with a successful marriage, but what else can I think?
We now come to the perennial parody of Noel Coward of which the ladies are so fond, and there is, in my house, a standing rule about that too. And if, after your marriage, you ever send me a burlesque of Private Lives, Miss E. H., singed with the name 'Knowall Coward', I will burn the snapshot of you and your husband and the beach cottage. As for your poor baby - but I am getting surly now and will close, with best wishes, love and kisses, and a friendly warning that humour can be a headache, dear Miss E. H. Why don't you become a bacteriologist, or a Red Cross Nurse, or a Wave, like all the other girls?
Cordially yours,
...Posted by Ishani
**********************************************************************************************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment