April Fools' Day -- Humor Writing and Reading Recommendations

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April Fools’ Day is this week! Will you be a prankster or end up with egg on your face?

A surprisingly old tradition, historians trace the April Fools’ Day Celebration to the change in the calendar after the Council of Trent in 1563, moving the start of the New Year to January and beginning to celebrate Spring in late March rather than at the beginning of April. Those who were slow to adapt and celebrated the wrong holidays at the wrong time were knows as April Fools. For those of you who love a deep dive, you can read more here.

Of course, there have been other traditions of dressing up in costumes and pranking people, but the real question we want to look at is what’s funny in writing?

Humor Writing

At first blush, Chanticleer only has The Mark Twain Award that appears to cater to humor writing, but we all know that humor is key for almost any story. What better way to keep the reader engaged than those laugh out loud moments?

Interested in learning more about the Mark Twain Awards? Click here for more information and here to submit!

We can think of a few common times of humor in writing:

Satire (obviously)
Dark Humor
Situational Humor
Self-Deprecating Humor

Let’s go deeper!

Satire

One of the big keys to Satire is to always punch up. Making fun of people who are already having a tough time often leaves a bad taste in the reader’s mouth.

One classic example of Satire is George Orwell’s Animal Farm which critiques the fascist re-envisioning of Communism by Joseph Stalin through the lens of barnyard animals. This is a darkly told satire with the intention of speaking truth to power.

For lighter Satire, you can always look at Saturday Night Live and see their most recent jokes about whoever holds political power in the US.

Satire often ends up with someone adopting a role they don’t actually believe to expose parts of that belief that don’t hold up well, such as Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”

Dark Humor

Also known as Gallows Humor, Dark Humor looks at terrible situations and finds the irony in them.

This often pops up when someone says “Well, at least it can’t get any worse!”

Situational Humor

This happens when the character’s position in a scene happens to be very funny. For example, in Who Mourns for Morn from Star Trek: Deep Space 9, the Ferengi bartender Quark is harangued by 4 different thieves, all looking for a cut of the estate of Quark’s best customer (now deceased). At one point, all four of them, not knowing the others are there, arrive in Quark’s quarters where he hides each of them from the previous until he has a full house!

Quark at the center of attention with 4 phaser pistols pointed at his head

Self-Deprecating Humor

This often can be seen in Non-Fiction work. Self-Deprecation can make people feel less intimidating and put the reader at ease with a speaker. Possibly one of the best examples of this comes from the prologue of a 1910 Calculus Textbook.

Be careful though! A little Self-Deprecating Humor is a lovely introduction, but too much will quickly tire a reader out.

Final Tips:

Be Personal:

You know what’s funny in your own life. Start there with retelling those stories to see how it works out.

Subvert expectations:

We’ve all seen cliches, and those have their place in all stories, but think about times when a scene did not go the way you expected. One great example is in The Last Jedi when Rey returns Luke’s lightsaber and he immediately tosses it.

Such hope immediately dashed

Rule of Three

This is one of the big places to subvert expectations. You offer two regular, expected ideas, and then follow it up with a third option that surprises

Ex: “What are you up to today? Work? Day off? World domination?”

Obviously, there’s often a little more time between the appearances.

For more information on charging up your writing, consider this article on Rhythm and Cadence and Beats by Margie Lawson.

Chanticleer Book Reviews to make you laugh and cry

INSYNNIUM by Tim Cole

Grand Prize Winner for the Cygnus Awards

The dramatic premise explored in a new novel, Insynnium, is a wild, immersive leap into a world-changing (but fictional) drug. In other hands, what could be a dystopian thriller goes one step further in author Tim Cole’s capable hands. He focuses on the humans who first discover and use the drug and weaves his story with a devilish charm.

This is somewhat Bill Murray/“Groundhog Day” territory, a film exploring one man’s reliving a day in his life over and over until he learned new behaviors, new skills and came out of it a better man. Unlike “Groundhog,” Max McVista takes multiple doses of the drug against all advice, then somehow expands time itself in what he calls an “AUE” or “Alternative Universe Experience,” enabling him to spend months and sometimes years becoming or experiencing whatever he wishes. When returning real-time, he’s only missed a day or two. (For E=MC squared fans, it’s basically reverse engineering of Einsteinian physics.)

Continue Reading Here

EVIL UNDER the STARS by C.A. Larmer

First Place Winner for the Mystery & Mayhem Awards

Who commits a murder in a crowd of a hundred people relaxing in a park, and how did the Agatha Christie Book Club miss the entire thing from only a few feet away? In the trendy Sydney suburb of Balmain, Kat Mumford, social media interior design star, has been murdered during the inaugural Cinema Under the Stars. Her distraught husband, Eliot, is clearly the prime suspect, but at the time of Kat’s strangulation, he is nowhere near her. In fact, no one was sitting near Kat, and the crowd seems to have been so absorbed by the movie, Agatha Christie’s Evil Under Sun, that no one saw a thing out of the ordinary.

When Alicia Finlay and her book club realize the murder occurred right under their noses, there is no way they can just let the police handle it. When Alicia’s boyfriend, Detective Inspector Liam Jackson, actually calls her for information, she and her club decide to do a little investigating of their own. Despite being told to butt out, Alicia, Lynette, Claire, Missy, and Perry go undercover to find the killer, but the twists, in this case, will lead them down a strange path to find a crafty killer. The club must sift through the suspects: a smarmy barman, a detestable reverend, a pregnant domestic abuse victim, a mystery mustached man, a dead junky, and a hipster hubby. With few clues but many dead ends, the club will meet their most challenging mystery yet!

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ELEPHANTS IN MY ROOM by Christie Nicholls

A bitingly funny collection of life-stories from Christie Nicholls – stand-up comedian, actor, and writer – made all the more piquant by her repeated insistence that she has no short-term memory. Fortunately for us, her long-term reminiscences more than make up the deficit.

Nicholls has divided the book into four parts. In the first, “A Broad Abroad,” she recalls her experiences of traveling to far-flung places, beginning with a summer in Belém, Brazil as a child. She and her brother, for some reason nicknamed Beluga, slept in hammocks and played in a swimming pool, but much of her cherished time involved a German Shepherd named Ferdinand, from whom she learned dog talk. Raucous family bowling in Bologna, Italy, is contrasted with attendance at a staid English wedding. At a later period, Nicholls and her mother went to Sweden, where the budding comic tried her hand at stand-up in newly acquired Swedish, leading to an amusing mix-up of jargon.

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Chanticleer Editorial Services – when you are ready

Did you know that Chanticleer offers editorial services? We do and have been doing so since 2011.

Tools of the Editing Trade

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We work with a small number of exclusive clients who want to collaborate with our team of top-editors on an on-going basis. Contact us today!

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A great way to get started is with our manuscript evaluation service. Here are some handy links about this tried and true service: https://www.chantireviews.com/manuscript-reviews/

And we do editorial consultations. for $75. https://www.chantireviews.com/services/Editorial-Services-p85337185