If you go through my entire book looking for moments of humor, I think there are fewer than ten.\u00a0 And that is counting sarcasm as humor.\u00a0 I\u2019m guessing that in an adventure story that\u2019s probably not unusual.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But, I don\u2019t feel like I\u2019ve fallen below some critical thresh-hold of comedic content.<\/p>\n
But, at the same time, I have to confess that comedy is one of the things I greatly enjoy in stories.\u00a0 To my mind stories that do not have a certain amount of humor seem flat and lacking in interest.\u00a0 And for that reason, I was recently wondering if I could introduce a character in my next book that is a \u201cwise guy.\u201d\u00a0 And by wise guy I\u2019m not thinking of the Good Fellas definition of an Italian American mobster as a wise guy.\u00a0 I\u2019m harking back to my childhood when every block had at least one guy who was the clown.\u00a0 In my neighborhood we had a kid who today would equate most closely to an insult comic.\u00a0 He was a mimic and he could find a way to mock anyone and everyone.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But it was almost as if he couldn\u2019t help himself.\u00a0 He was a slave to his craft.<\/p>\n
Now I don\u2019t intend to try and recreate that type of juvenile humor but I think I could make a character who doesn\u2019t know when to shut up.\u00a0 I\u2019m guessing I\u2019d have to do a lot of work editing the dialog from this character because obviously that\u2019s the kind of thing that pretty easily can be taken too far.\u00a0 As an example, look at the movie Dead Pool.\u00a0 This character shoots an almost endless series of insulting jokes at every other character in range regardless of whether they\u2019re friends or enemies.\u00a0 For the most part it\u2019s entertaining but at some points it can become wearisome.\u00a0 So, I understand that doing comedy \u201cright\u201d is a matter of balance and skill.\u00a0 And the other part of it is providing the \u201ccomic\u201d with a foil; a straight man.\u00a0 So Dead Pool needs the haplessly earnest Colossus as the butt of a lot of his jokes.\u00a0 Building up a duo like that must be handled carefully so that these two characters can be more than caricatures.\u00a0 And all of this mustn\u2019t take away from the main action of the story but merely come off as the personalities of the characters involved.\u00a0 It needs to seem organic to the relationship of the people involved.<\/p>\n
Now after talking all that through, it seems like this would be a lot of work for not much gain to the story.\u00a0 But for whatever reason, I\u2019m excited by the idea.\u00a0 Making the characters real seems to be as important to the writer as making the action exciting.\u00a0 I\u2019ve found myself actually caring for my make-believe people as if they were real.\u00a0 Well, anyway, tonight I was thinking of humor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you go through my entire book looking for moments of humor, I think there are fewer than ten.\u00a0 And that is counting sarcasm as<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[288,2510,1289,1263],"tags":[46,76,1290],"class_list":["post-36521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor","category-literature","category-fiction-by-me","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-dead-pool","tag-fiction-writing","tag-my-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\n