by Joe Bunting |
There’s a type of question I get every once in a while that always surprises me. Here are a few:
- My teachers in school told me you should never begin a sentence with “and.”
- Isn’t that incorrect?
- Isn’t that a run-on sentence?
- My teachers in school told me you should never begin a sentence with “and.”
- Isn’t that a fragment of a sentence?
- Isn’t that breaking the rules?
- Shouldn’t you fix your contractions? You don’t want to sound so informal, do you?
These questions surprised me because early on I learned that the best writers regularly break the rules. In fact, in every art form, from painting to sculpture to writing, one of the rules is to break the rules.
However, there is one dirty secret about breaking rules. I think it’s this secret that enables us to chide Stephenie Meyer and our eighth graders for not following the rules all while celebrating James Joyce for basically writing the book on rule breaking.
by Joe Bunting |
As I was riding across the steppes of Outer Mongolia (it hurt to sit down for a year afterwards), beneath horizons that appeared to be of limitless blue, I thought this was a country that called for an elemental style.
I’ve always loved Cormac McCarthy and amongst his many talents is the nature of his prose. “Clean and hard as pebbles,” says the Independent on Sunday; “language as subtly beautiful as its desert setting,” the Sunday Times. His style has been likened to The Old Testament and described as, “formidable,” “overpowering,” “transcendent.” To me his writing is beautiful and direct, naked and almost pagan in its connection to the landscape and base human nature.
by Joe Bunting |
Being funny just seems to come naturally to some people.
We all know the class clowns, office jokers, and court jesters that make us laugh.
We know our favorite TV sitcoms and comedies that crack us up.
And we serious writers may be thinking to ourselves, “I could never be that funny. I could never be that clever.” And maybe we’re right.
But what if we could be funny in our own way? What would it take to find our own humor voices?
by Joe Bunting |
In our visually-focused age of memes and imgur, one thing you may not realize is that people can also be funny with words. In fact, we’ve done it for thousands of years, from the boring and hard to understand William Shakespeare—nice try, Bill—to the more manageable Dave Barry. People have wooed lovers, conquered nations, and embarrassed their children with effective humor.
But how do they do it?
by Liz Bureman |
Puns!
Puns, puns, puns. You either love them, or you are wrong. Charles Lamb and Edgar Allan Poe both had low opinions of those who did not like puns, with Lamb going so far as to say, “I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man.” So if you don’t like puns, well, you must not be a very pleasant person to be around.
by Joe Bunting |
To be fair, I don’t really consider myself a humor writer. I’m more like a half-assed blogger whose personal dysfunction makes people laugh out loud in airports, coffee shops, and cubicles. (Wow. It’s actually kind of sad when you think of it like that.) Whatever. Here I am, contributing to a series on humor writing – so, for today, let’s pretend that I’m a humorous writer, sharing the secret formula to being hilarious.
Get ready for it. Pretty sure I’m about to blow your mind…
