If you go through my entire book looking for moments of humor, I think there are fewer than ten. And that is counting sarcasm as humor. I’m guessing that in an adventure story that’s probably not unusual. With a team of men that know each other pretty well, there will be a certain amount of banter which can be defined as humor. But, I don’t feel like I’ve fallen below some critical thresh-hold of comedic content.
But, at the same time, I have to confess that comedy is one of the things I greatly enjoy in stories. To my mind stories that do not have a certain amount of humor seem flat and lacking in interest. And for that reason, I was recently wondering if I could introduce a character in my next book that is a “wise guy.” And by wise guy I’m not thinking of the Good Fellas definition of an Italian American mobster as a wise guy. I’m harking back to my childhood when every block had at least one guy who was the clown. In my neighborhood we had a kid who today would equate most closely to an insult comic. He was a mimic and he could find a way to mock anyone and everyone. This often earned him at least a mild beating if the victims of his mockery pooled their strength to grapple him to the ground and pummel him until he shut up. But it was almost as if he couldn’t help himself. He was a slave to his craft.
Now I don’t intend to try and recreate that type of juvenile humor but I think I could make a character who doesn’t know when to shut up. I’m guessing I’d have to do a lot of work editing the dialog from this character because obviously that’s the kind of thing that pretty easily can be taken too far. As an example, look at the movie Dead Pool. This character shoots an almost endless series of insulting jokes at every other character in range regardless of whether they’re friends or enemies. For the most part it’s entertaining but at some points it can become wearisome. So, I understand that doing comedy “right” is a matter of balance and skill. And the other part of it is providing the “comic” with a foil; a straight man. So Dead Pool needs the haplessly earnest Colossus as the butt of a lot of his jokes. Building up a duo like that must be handled carefully so that these two characters can be more than caricatures. And all of this mustn’t take away from the main action of the story but merely come off as the personalities of the characters involved. It needs to seem organic to the relationship of the people involved.
Now after talking all that through, it seems like this would be a lot of work for not much gain to the story. But for whatever reason, I’m excited by the idea. Making the characters real seems to be as important to the writer as making the action exciting. I’ve found myself actually caring for my make-believe people as if they were real. Well, anyway, tonight I was thinking of humor.