 Comedy: November 21, 2007 Issue [#2077] |
  Comedy
This week: Edited by: Kate - Writing & Reading  
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”The most protean aspect of comedy is its potentiality for transcending itself, for responding to the conditions of tragedy by laughing in the darkness.”
Harry Tuchman Levin (American Literary Critic and Scholar)
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I am honored to be your guest host for this week’s edition of the Comedy Newsletter. If we look, we can find humor in most anything. As writers, we strive to expose and adroitly express that humor in prose and/or poetry. Humor is healing, rejuvenating, and provides a welcome respite from tension.
The writer who can impart a few moments of humor, whether it be straight comedy or a comedic twist in another medium, is welcomed into homes, businesses, with open arms and a smile. - Do you see the returning readers
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Okay, cliché time ~ “Laughter is good medicine!.” It’s being tested (and perhaps proven) daily in worker productivity, social altruism, and family harmony (or lack of overt hostility). Medical science is even jumping on the bandwagon, scientifically postulating that humor is good preventive medicine. Recent studies propound that laughter releases beneficent endorphins into the bloodstream. Laughing has even been touted as an easy, age retarding, low impact physical exercise, requiring merely seven muscles to raise a smile , as opposed to twenty-some for a line-scoring, drooping frown .
Humor is out there, seeking but the discerning eye and open mind (which writers, by nature, must have ). Comedy today has very few taboo subjects, and quite a variety of forms for expression, from slapstick and physical compedy to the sardonic and wry wit of political jokes. Just think about it, who wouldn’t laugh as the convenience store robber, running for the exit, holding tight his bag of cash from the register, finds his unbelted ‘fashionable’ droopy drawers falling to his ankles. He has to stop and bend over to pull them up, an apparent invitation to the arriving cops to cuff his wrists and retrieve the money, his pants effectictively still shackling his ankles. Here, a potential crime becomes a comedic repast. (This is, by the way, a true crime, about a year old.)
As you see, humor can be subtle or satiric, as well as out-and-out funny, like the joking miming clown (physical) or stand-up comedian telling jokes. To be effective (and get a laugh or smile), what they all require is a sense of pacing - a writer who can see the humor in something others may overlook or bypass as white noise, and build up to it by expectation or with a twist. Comedy, I think, more than other forms of writing, needs to follow the old Writer’s Rule of Three.
I first heard the term Writer’s Rule of Three many years ago in a school writing class, and am still attempting to master its parameters in all my writing. It’s an interesting way for me to recall the components of a good story – that it have a beginning (to set it up), a middle (to define/describe it), and an end (resolution). Whether it be political satire or slapstick, comedy writing really needs all three of these elements to make the reader see the humor the writer sees. If the plot is too involved or convoluted, or the setup is misleading, or the ending simply abrupt, the humor is lost – the reader won’t ‘get it.’ All comedic forms require tight, vivid writing to make the reader see, hear, and experience with all the senses the comedy within the mystery or potential tragedy, the humor driving human or other faux pas or foibles as envisioned and depicted by the writer.
I invite you to spend a little of your time with some of the writers in our Community and partake of their comedic repast. I’m sure they will be pleased to hear whether or not you ‘get it.’
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Enjoy this repast from our Community of some poetry, prose, to tickle the 'funny bone' and/or incite the muse comedic this Thanksgiving week
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Have an opinion on what you've read here today? Then send the Editor feedback! Find an item that you think would be perfect for showcasing here? Submit it for consideration in the newsletter!
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Thank you for allowing me to invite myself into your home this week. I hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of the Comedy Newsletter. I invite you now to give it a try, write a story or poem with a comedic theme, or twist, and give yourself an age-reducing, healing laugh; then share it with others and watch them work off their Thanksgiving repast with a relaxing seven-muscled face-lifting smile
Until next we meet,
Keep Writing!
Kate
{user:manga_kate)
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