laughing matters: how to incorporate humor in writing
Humor is perhaps one of the most misunderstood, and most vital, tools of poetry. In everyday life, we tend to see humor as a tool used to lighten a situation - in other words, decrease the gravity of it - and the trope of characters using humor to deflect or as a defence mechanism is rife in so much of our popular culture. As a chronically sarcastic person I’ve always felt affinity with figures such as Chandler Bing, Barney Stinson, or Howard Wallowitz in sitcoms. They’ve always been the most interesting characters to me, with often the most astute observations and also the most vulnerability. I feel this applies similarly to poetry; reading the work of poets such as Kaveh Akbar, Chen Chen, Bob Hicok and Caroline Bird, brought me closer to the poet and further inside the poem, directly because of their use of humor.
I think it’s important at this point to define what humor is, and what constitutes humor. As usual, what I have to say has already been elucidated far more eloquently by another poet - in this case, Kaveh Akbar’s words from his interview with Thora Siemson: “Humor isn’t a deflection; it’s a kind of wisdom. Humor is a way to defamiliarize experience, just like a poem. What a poem does is makes what is familiar to us feel new again, and that’s what a stand-up comedian does too, right? A stand-up comedian says, you know, this thing that you do every day that feels very normal and mundane to you is, in fact, actually absurd. That’s what a poem is doing. I think humor is native to poetry and probably a closer cousin to poetry than even prose or nonfiction, because of that core impulse.”
In keeping with this I ascribe to the belief that humor is not a tool of deflection but something that can be used to crawl deeper inside an emotion or experience. I fear as well there may be a danger in dismissing humor as a poetic tool. It is through the use of unfamiliar language to describe familiar events that satirists force us to look at situations from new angles, and that’s one of the things I love most about poetry: it asks us to always be thinking about things in new ways. Humor is about not shying away from the bizarre or the weird. I found when I began to allow space for humor in my writing, the kind of poems I produced changed drastically. They became more authentic, more unique, more “me”. I was no longer censoring myself, or trying to confine myself to the language or imagery I had been taught to view as poetic.
Life does not exist within two states of the serious and the absurd, and my favorite novels are those which embrace this such as Slaughterhouse 5, The God of Small Things, or Shame. The last one, a novel by Salman Rushdie, chronicles some of the lives of the political elite in 1970s Pakistan and it is through humor these goliaths of history are humanized. Humor, far from deflecting, brings us closer to each other. If we share a joke we have something in common. We are beginning to understand each other. As Terrance Hayes said: Be stupid. Be brave.
Remi Seamon is a young poet who spends her time split between Cambridge, England and Seattle, Washington. She received an honourable mention in the Foyle Young Poet of the Year award and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Unlost, Clementine Unbound, Rat’s Ass Review, underblong and streetcake, among others. She considers her greatest inspiration to be her dog.