Blogger: Etta Wilson
Location: Books & Such, Nashville
Weather: mid-70 s
After one day of reading the funny papers, I’m reporting there’s not much funny to be found. On one page of newsprint, there’s everything from elementary humor about common life occurrences to biting satire and social commentary. The daily comics also include a great range in age-level and subject matter appeal. And some strips are simply one frame cartoons with several voices, while others are dense four-frame scenarios continued from day to day. I’m not telling you anything new; I just hadn’t looked at these pages in some time. With the woes in the newspaper world, the comics may have a hard row to hoe.
Which brings me to the question: where do we direct kids to go for a good laugh? Maybe part of the answer lies in looking for humor all around us. An example: this summer my husband took our second-grade grandson to the zoo. They were at the goat-petting area and while hubby was taking a photo of John feeding a goat, another stole the zoo program out of my husband’s pocket and began eating it. John collapsed with laughter. It’s second-grade humor to be sure, but offers good clues about humor in general: being open to the unexpected, taking on the traits of another species, and being ready to laugh at ourselves and life in general.
Humor may be the hardest of all genres to write. Telling a joke or describing a humorous event is tricky whether in reality or on paper. I’m convinced that we start by wearing a smile and looking for funny things all around. As Mary Poppins might say, a little humor can make the medicine go down. What’s your favorite spoonful?
Agreed ma’am! What passes for humor these days… I dunno. Not much of it is what I classify as “funny”.
Love that about your husband, grandson and the goat! I have my Mom on film when our older mare was still a filly. She snookered Mom right out of a carrot. (Now I’ll need to go find that video!)
Calvin & Hobbes and the Far Side rank right on up there for me in the humor department, but I think those are more adult-level.
They were just funny for funny’s sake, and usually took a situation the (adult) reader is familiar with and tweaked it.
For kids, I think you hit it. Time spent together, just “being”. Situations will crop up on their own, possibly in four legged form!
For inspiration in my own life, there’s my husband who still cracks me up regularly, and our little dog May, who is a clown, among other things.
Trying to maintain a Biblical perspective helps too – I mean – if we can’t laugh at God’s sense of humor… We are taking things wayyyy to seriously!
Yes, humor is hard to write. And for some, it’s hard to read…I once wrote a humor piece for a local publication about a trip to the dentist. In the column, I talked about the dental assistant cleaning my teeth. I received a couple of reader responses (one sounding pretty testy) informing me that only a licensed hygienist, NOT an assistant, was allowed to clean teeth in our state. Talk about missing the forest for the teeth!
My all-time favorite humor writer is James Thurber, who wrote for the New Yorker magazine in the 1930’s-50’s. Another humor hero is P.G. Wodehouse, British author of the Jeeves & Wooster stories. Dave Barry, Mark Twain, and Erma Bombeck are also very funny.
I have to agree that most comics are not for kids. Especially the ones in newspapers.
Humor is hard to write. But not hard to find. One of the nicest compliments I heard about our family was that “we always end up laughing.”
In our house, we tend to favor the Reader’s Digest or AFV-type humor. A lot of it’s “juvenile” but it certainly gets us laughing. Especially the animal ones – like your goat, they trump people in very funny ways. And we LOVE puns, too.
Thanks, KC and Valerie. That statement that “humor is hard to write but not hard to find” tells me that if we look for the humor we can learn to write it or at least include a bit of it in our work. Would that more of us could get back to “juvenile” humor. Etta
Angie, you’re reading the comedy masters, (I hadn’t thought of Thurber in years) and I can tell you have a bent for writing humor. Keep at it!
Etta
I’ve always loved puns and any kind of language jokes, even when I was a kid. (Not the goat kind.) I try to teach my eight year old grandson that humor depends on the unexpected or exaggerated, not on hurting or embarrassing others.
The unexpected…definitely fodder for laughter. Thanks, Etta, for your insights.
Blessings,
Jean
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