A Word in Your Eye

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 27: Mixing Humor with Drama and Horror

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/12/01/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-27-mixing-humor-with-drama-and-horror/

Key points: To blend humor and drama, start with the drama, identify the key points, then add humor. Humor is good while reading, but drama and character make readers come back. When the humor detracts, excise! Be careful about humor that pushes readers out of the story. Make humor fit the character -- don't break characters for a joke.
( Chunks of humor, drama, and horror )
[Brandon] All right. Howard, we're going to make you do the writing prompt because you're the expert on this.
[Howard] Okay. Take the most intense character tragedy you can imagine for a character that you've already got and find humor in it for another character to point out. Whether or not it's appropriate, find humor in that tragedy.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. [The podcast cut off at this point. We can only assume that Brandon provided the tag line "You're out of excuses, now go write."]

Writing Excuses Episode 21: Humor

from http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/06/30/writing-excuses-episode-21-humor/

This episode is about humor, how to make people laugh, with a particular focus on writers. How do you write humor, why do we write humor, more suggestions about how to write humor, and a writing prompt to get you started. Now if we can include cute, naughty, bizarre, clever, recognizable, and cruel elements in our jokes, we'll get the laughs. Like a brick doesn't.
( Watch for laughing bricks . . .  )
And the writing prompt: write something funny in which strong profanity is appropriate but doesn't happen.

See you next week.