Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

"Ah yes, the noise-canceling headphones. You could lock Rush Limbaugh, Phyllis Schlafly and Mullah Omar in a room together with a stack of Hustlers and 10 ounces of meth, and they couldn't come up with anything more misogynist. I storm back to my desk and type the phrases "my husband" "addicted" "video games" "HELP" into the search engine. Hundreds of links appear."

That's author Rachel Shukert turning her husband's videogame addiction into comedic gold on the pages of Salon.

In her new book, Have You No Shame?, Shukert takes that same exaggerated style to a  variety of queasy topics--I found myself laughing out-loud at things I never in a million years imagined laughing about.

Today, she teaches us how to write funny, part of my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
You take topics that nobody ever dreamed of making jokes about (the Holocaust, STD's, anorexia and religion), and make us laugh. What kind of writing process do you follow to take this serious material and make it laugh-out-loud funny? Any advice for making our prose funnier?

Rachel Shukert:
This reminds me of something: I had this teacher that told us once, when we were doing some kind of comedy scene "don't worry if you're not funny, because you'll just never be cast in a funny role.  You can't learn how to be funny, so forget about it." Continue reading...

And I remember thinking, "That's bullshit!"

Everyone has the capacity to be funny--especially writers.  It's inherent to being a writer to be standing at the margins, observing, noticing from all sides the general ludicrousness of human behavior--which is also the essential nature of comedy.
 
It's just a matter of choosing whether you find that ludicrousness funny, or you find it tragic.  I happen to find it to be both--although the pendulum swings between the two from time to time.

Fearlessness is another really important element.  You can worry about what's appropriate, and what people will say, but not until you've already written it all.  The actual writing process, for me, at least, is not the time for discretion.
 
And also, I find a keen sense of your own unorginality to be very comforting when you are bringing up perhaps unorthodox takes on a serious or taboo subject--you are not the first one to have had this impulse, or maybe even the first one to have made this particular joke.

Somehow, this makes me feel a little better--that it's not all so shocking, but just bringing up questions and thoughts everybody has--just in a fresh way.