Ha-Ha, part one

A cou­ple of times a year I vis­it my den­tist for a check­up. He’s an excel­lent den­tist, does a great job and is a real­ly nice guy. His quirk: He obses­sive­ly tells jokes while I am sit­ting in his chair, mouth plugged by a vari­ety odd shaped tubes and sharp probes. So while he, non-stop, tells his jokes, puns, quips, I can­not laugh or groan, or react in any way oth­er than, as each joke rolls out, I give a thumb up or down. I assure you, the thumb goes both ways dur­ing 45 min­utes. I guess that is what is called a fun­ny situation.

What most amazes me most is his recall of all this humor. He thinks fun­ny. Fur­ther, there is the real­iza­tion that a joke is, in its way, a very short story.

There are writ­ers who think fun­ny. Among my friends are Bruce Cov­ille and Richard Peck, and they think fun­ny. I once met Dave Bar­ry, and he clear­ly thinks fun­ny. Gail Collins, the NY Times polit­i­cal colum­nist, must think fun­ny to write the way she does. While I adore humor, admire wit enor­mous­ly, and am told I have a decent sense of humor, I don’t think fun­ny. I have writ­ten humor (I think Who Was That Masked Man Any­way? is my fun­ni­est book) but I do not  gen­er­al­ly, think funny.

That said, com­e­dy has long fas­ci­nat­ed me. It’s very ancient, hav­ing stayed remark­ably the same since the dawn of west­ern lit­er­a­ture. Yet, while peo­ple love to laugh, humor is gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered less of an achieve­ment than oth­er forms of lit­er­a­ture. What comedic nov­el has won a big award? We say, “He is a clown,” and that’s not a nice thing. We say, “He is a trag­ic fig­ure,” and there is a sug­ges­tion of grandeur.

This comes up because I recent­ly sold a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries to a pub­lish­er, sold, that is, with one con­di­tion: “One of the sto­ries needs to be fun­ny. Can you do that?”

How do you write com­e­dy? Is that laugh­ter I hear?

[To be continued]