The Serious Art of Dissecting Funny-Eileen McVety, Author
By Eileen McVety, author, Welcome to the Company (or what it’s really like working here)
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Quick. Which is funnier? Argyle or plaid?
When I first set out to write a book spoofing office politics and culture, I didn’t think I’d be forced to grapple with such ethereal questions. Perhaps I should have known better. After all, it was not my goal to write anything that made readers crack a smile. Nor was I hoping to stir up a few random chuckles. No, I strove for the brass ring of all humorous writing endeavors—a spontaneous, laugh-out-loud reaction from my audience.
The difference between a reaction of unrestrained laughter and one of polite chuckling can be enormous in terms of book sales or lasting impressions. It can also be as simple as the distinction between argyle and plaid.
This was the first lesson I learned in writing my humor book: your choice of words matters.
True story: the first literary agent who considered (but ultimately passed on) my book was himself, a former writer for “Saturday Night Live.’ The 45 minutes I spent on the phone with him discussing my book was undoubtedly the most interesting feedback session I’d ever sat through. We walked page by page through my manuscript and he pointed out the passages that worked and those that fell short.
“See your use of the word toupee here on page 25?” he said. “Toupee isn’t funny. It’s an old-fashioned word. It doesn’t work.” He said this as matter-of-factly as another editor might have said, “Don’t use a semicolon here. That’s the wrong mark of punctuation.” I remember scribbling in my notes: “Toupee NOT funny” and subsequently losing confidence in my ability to discern the outrageous from the outdated. That’s when he went on to say: “On the other hand, peckerhead on page 3…VERY funny word.”
“Really?!” I brightened. “You LIKED peckerhead?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “If you can apply that thinking to other parts of the book, you’ll really have something.”
“So peckerhead is the bar I should strive for?” I mused.
He didn’t hesitate in agreeing: “Peckerhead’s your bar.”
And so I learned to tune into language with an ear toward sound. Some words simply sound funnier than others. Others, like “Gavin MacLeod,” carry funny connotations. And still others sound hilarious when they’re placed in the context of someone speaking them.
Another lesson learned: the more true to life the situations you depict, the more sharp the humor.
One of the mistakes I made in my initial drafts of the book was going for an easy laugh by creating absurd office situations that could never happen. Again, that agent was instrumental in guiding me: “Exaggeration is good,” he explained. “But exaggeration is more effective when you apply it to real situations.”
He pointed to a part in my book that he felt worked particularly well—a section in which I offered advice for writing a report title. In that section, I compared a well-written report title “Cooper Dickinson Steel: An Analysis of the Competitive Landscape for 2007” to a not so well-written one “Here’s the Report You Asked For.” The agent went on to explain what made this funny: “You can just imagine the clueless guy who would write this. Someone told him to write a report and he just slapped something together.” Yep. We’ve all worked with people like that. They may not have been so funny to share a cubicle with but they suddenly become hilarious when resurrected on the page.
So on the sometimes tear-producing road to publication, I learned a thing or two about funny. Funny is carefully, methodically planned, but comes off sounding spontaneous. Funny is taking what’s real and exaggerating it to effect. And funny is injecting the element of surprise into your writing. You begin by taking your reader down an expected path and all at once shifting direction. The reader is jolted, bewildered, and in response, a wonderful sound emerges—the infectious sonata of full-on laughter.
For the record, which is funnier, argyle or plaid? The answer, of course, is plaid. Hands down.