Sometimes My Heroine Cracks Me Up

When I watch America's funniest videos, I always laugh the hardest at the ones where someone or something jumps out and scares some unsuspecting soul. One of my favorites is when a group of school kids (8-12 years old) pass a snowman in a front yard, and the snowman jumps at them. Throwing their books in the air, they run like there's no tomorrow.

What does that say about me? That I have a sick sense of humor? Then there's the one where some young men run a mouse on a string across the floor in front of an unsuspecting frat brother who screams like a little girl and jumps on the counter. That one usually brings tears to my eyes. And a drunken Red Skelton and Mickey Rooney in the cave with Elliott the Dragon in Pete's Dragon can set me off just thinking about it.

In my latest book, MURDER FOR THE HALIBUT,  I had an opportunity to include a scene like that, and I jumped all over it. The problem was I couldn't stop laughing. Since my culinary tastes tend to run like my Clueless Cook’s, I nearly gagged right along with her.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. In this scene, my clueless cook is judging a cooking contest on a cruise ship. (Think Top Chef meets Chopped!) A little backstory is that my heroine is really a wannabe sports reporter who can only find a job writing the personals. When the culinary reporter gig falls into her lap, she jumps on it as it comes with her own byline. The problem is she’s a fast food junkie, and she can’t cook a lick. She’s managed to fool everyone so far and now has been asked to judge the contest.

Here’s the scene.

Glancing down at the appetizer, Jordan was surprised to see that it resembled a chicken nugget. So far she'd made it through four of the appetizers without making a complete fool of herself. She was pleased to see that the last entry might be something she actually enjoyed.

Reaching for one of the chunks, she dipped it into the sauce. As soon as she popped the morsel into her mouth, she let out a relieved breath. Although it didn't taste exactly like a chicken nugget, it was close enough that she was ready to declare Marsha and her sweetbread the overall winner.

She ate the other two chunks, pleased with herself for having survived the evening. With her lips still burning from the jalapeño dip, she wiped her mouth with the clean napkin then pushed the plate to the side. Choosing the scorecard with Marsha's name, she scribbled a big 4.5, taking off half a point for the sauce. If it had been served with a nice avocado ranch or a creamy honey mustard dip on the side, she would have given it a perfect score.

“It looks like we’re ready to hear the judges’ decision,” Emily said, moving to stand beside Marsha. “This is the all-important vote where we find out who is eliminated tonight and who wins and gets an advantage in tomorrow night’s competition. Judges?”

Somehow Marsha had managed to open the top button of her purple sweater. Even though most of her chest was covered by the apron, a tiny bit of her ample cleavage peeked through. A visual designed to get the judges’ attention, which it definitely had. Poor Beau was nearly foaming at the mouth.

What was it about men and boobs?

“George, what did you think of Marsha’s sweetbread?” Emily asked.

     Christakis eyed her for a moment, glancing once toward Beau, making Jordan wonder if he knew something was going on between him and Marsha. Then he held up the card with a large 3 scribbled on it. For a minute, Jordan thought the audible gasp had come from her, but then she realized it had actually been Marsha, who was now staring at Christakis in disbelief.

     “Although I love sweetbread and I appreciate the rich white sauce you made, I found the glands to be overcooked and gristly. It would have worked so much better if you had spent a little more time sautéing them rather than frying them in the oil.”

Glands? Jordan squeezed her eyes closed, grabbed the napkin, and spit into it, but the morsels were long gone. Catching her breath, she looked up to see that everyone was staring, and she felt heat crawl up her cheeks.

“You cooked glands?” Her eyes begged Marsha to deny it.

“Yes. It's one of my favorite appetizers.”

Jordan took several deep breaths in a row, hoping to push back the lump in her throat threatening to ruin her debut as a cooking judge. “What kind of glands?” she whispered, so low that only those close to her could hear.

Christakis twisted in his chair to face her, laughter in his eyes. “The thymus gland. What did you think sweetbread was?”

There was no way she'd admit she thought she had eaten chunks of fried chicken. “I figured it was glands, but I wasn't sure what kind,” she lied.

Mentally, she slapped her head for the lame response. She knew it was glands but didn't know what kind?

Crap!

The point I'm trying to make with all this is in that short period of time when I was writing that scene, I was actually Jordan, discovering I had just eaten glands. (My friends did this to me with squid. I thought I was eating purple onions in a salad. I spent the entire night waiting for the little buggers to pop out of my stomach like the little space creatures did with Sigourney Weaver in Aliens.)

So my question for you all is do you ever find yourself in that situation? Do you ever imagine yourself as your heroine? Does it help writing certain scenes? I would love to hear your story.

HOW LAUGHTER HELPED ME HEAL

There’s an anniversary coming up soon that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. Actually, a day hasn’t gone by in the past 10 years that I haven’t thought about September 11, 2001. I remember every moment of that day. I was getting dressed to go into Manhattan that morning. The Duchess of York was touting her children’s book on Good Morning America when the cable went out. At least, at the time I thought it was the cable. I finished dressing, headed downstairs, and flipped on the radio. The first thing I heard was that a plane had flown into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. I turned the TV on in the den and started flipping channels until I found one that worked, The Financial News Network. Moments later, I watched in stunned disbelief as another plane flew into the other tower.

Afterwards, I considered myself lucky. Although many people who lived in my town never again came home, I lost no family, friends, or even acquaintances that day. However, I do know many people not as lucky. The guy who lives two doors down from me lost his sister when one tower fell and his nephew, her son, when the other tower fell. There are countless other heart-wrenching stories throughout our area.

The lives of every American changed that day, no matter where you live, and we’re still dealing with the aftermath. We probably always will. The world is a more dangerous place now, filled with angry people who have no regard for human life, and their numbers are growing in staggering proportions. No one is immune. When I think about how our lives have changed since that day, the changes go far beyond the inconveniences of security checks at airports, bomb sniffing dogs at Penn Station, and surveillance cameras on every street corner.

For me, though, that day had a profound effect on my writing. Prior to 9/11 I wrote dark romantic suspense. After 9/11 I couldn’t write. Terrorism was all around me. I didn’t want to create more of it on paper. I stopped reading suspense and thrillers and no longer watched murder and mayhem on television or in the movies.

A week and a half after 9/11 I was back in Manhattan. My girlfriend and I had tickets to see The Vagina Monologues. The theaters had reopened, and the mayor was imploring people to go on with our lives. We couldn’t let the city’s economy go bankrupt. We couldn’t let the terrorists see us cowering. My girlfriend was too spooked to go into the city. I refused to let the terrorists win. My husband didn’t want me going alone, so he came with me, one of two men in the audience. Had he realized what he was getting himself into, he probably would have opted to let me go by myself!

I laughed that day for the first time in 12 days. It helped. When I began to feel that I could write again, I thought about that day in the theater. I had desperately needed to laugh. The healing process was long, and the wounds of that day will never entirely heal, but that first time I laughed 12 days after 9/11 was the first step toward healing for me. And that’s when I realized, I needed to write humor.

I discovered that writing funny is a lot harder than writing scary, but for me switching genres made a huge difference in my life. I may go back to writing suspense at some point. I have a few stories parked in the corner of my brain, and someday I’d like to put them down on paper. However, I doubt I’ll ever stop writing humor. I’ve received too many fan letters from readers who have told me my funny books have helped them get through trying times in their own lives. That’s all the validation I need to keep writing funny. Laughter really is the best medicine.

Lois Winston writes humorous amateur sleuth mysteries. She recently finished up the third book in her Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries series. The first book, Assault With A Deadly Glue Gun, was a January 2011 release and received starred reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Booklist. Death by Killer Mop Doll will be a January 2012 release. Visit Lois at her website and Anastasia at the Killer Crafts & Crafty Killers blog.

April Fool!

I write humorous dialogue one-liners, but in real life, I’m one of those curmudgeonly writers. Leave me alone in my corner with coffee, lots of paper, and my fountain pen, and no one gets hurt. My husband, however, makes jokes all the time, and loves puns. I would love to write a character that drops puns that easily, but my brain simply doesn’t work that way.

I’m a Marx Brothers fan. I love their subtlety and lightning-fast wit.

My father, husband, and sons are huge fans of the Three Stooges. Should I say “Of course”?

Nearly every male I know is a Three Stooges fan. Sometimes I think it’s genetics.

And, since today is often about practical jokes, I’m forcibly reminded of this:

My sons got one of these things when they were in grade school. Nothing on the planet was funnier to them than that farting sound. That’s when it hit home: Humor is a very personal thing. My entire family loves The Muppet Show, but the boys like Family Guy (we don’t) and no one else shares my Monty Python addiction.

So, writers and readers: What’s your style of written humor? PG Wodehouse? Pearls Before Swine? Elmore Leonard? Doonesbury? Scott Adams? I'm a die-hard Pearls fan. In honor of today, I’ll be hiding in my house, avoiding the practical jokers and watching Muppet Show reruns.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One

by G.M. Malliet

Actually, just stop me.

I was recently asked to take part in a mystery conference panel. The subject of this panel was the use of humor in the mystery novel, and I was enormously flattered that the organizers thought of me in this context.

I had a scheduling conflict, however, and would in fact be sitting on the tarmac waiting for my plane to take off about the time this panel convened, so I had to bow out. I must confess, though, it was with a hint of relief that I realized there was a conflict. If people think I write humorous mysteries--and my reviews indicate that people do--nothing would scotch that belief half so quickly as seeing me on a panel trying to make people laugh.

Any humor I manage to produce in my books comes at a cost of an entire day's work, more often than not. It's seldom spontaneous, and putting a microphone in front of me is probably guaranteed to make matters worse, not better.

When and if the funny thought arrives, I swear it seems to come out of absolutely nowhere, and then only if I've sat at my desk a long time, staring at the words on the screen until they rearrange themselves into something funny. It's a total blessing when it does happen, and I generally send up a little thank-you prayer for it.

The Midnight Ink authors who use humor in their books will probably back me up on this: If it looks like it just fell off the pen, it probably took the author hours or weeks to get there. It's supposed to look easy, and shining a light on the process by having something like me talk about the process...well...that's just too scary a thought for me. In fact, I could just see people leaving at the end of this panel, shaking their heads, and saying to each other, "That Malliet person thinks she's funny? Sheesh! I want my money back." My book sales would plummet. Returns from the bookstore would skyrocket. Total disaster.

Back me up, Inkers. Many or most of you have an element of humor in your books; many of you are just plain funny, in person and on the page. I won't embarrass you by pointing you out--you know who you are.

But...how easy is it for you to write those killer sentences and paragraphs?

Photo of Steve Martin from guardian.co.uk.
Photo of Eddie Izzard from video.tvguide.com.
Photo of Gilda Radner from dvdtalk.com.

G.M. Malliet http://gmmalliet.com/
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Writing Funny is Hard Work

by Julia Buckley
It was once said that writing is hard work, but writing humor is really hard work. Or words to that effect. So what does it take to write humor? Well, I would suggest that the first step is to have a sense of humor. This would be easy for an author to determine. They could just ask a few honest friends: Do you think of me as a funny person? If the answer is no more than once, then an author probably shouldn't attempt humor writing, since they would lack an authentic voice.

But what is funny, and how would a writer know that it would be funny to all people? Read the works of certain classic humor writers and you'd get a sense of this. Read Erma Bombeck, for example. Or P.G. Wodehouse or James Thurber. Their humor is timeless, like the humor of the Marx Brothers. Consider some classic examples from the authors just mentioned.

If you're writing a dialogue about a teenage boy having breakfast with his family, and he wants someone to pass the jam, you might write, "Phyllis, please pass the jam."

In the hands of the great PG Wodehouse, this becomes "Jam please, Phyllis, you pig." (From Mike at Wrykyn).

This is still a quote bandied about in my family, even though my brother, who read it aloud to us when he was in the eighth grade, is now 45 years old. Why? Because it's funny.

It's also funny that James Thurber, in "The Night the Bed Fell," focused not on the falling of the bed, but on the eccentricities of everyone in his family, including his odd cousin Briggs Beall, who had a fear that he would stop breathing in his sleep, and kept spirits of camphor next to the bed in case he needed reviving; or his strange aunt, who was so afraid that a burglar would come and chloroform her in the night that she would stack all of her possessions near the door each night and leave a note saying "This is all I have, so please do not use your chloroform, as this is all I have."

Also a family classic, and an American classic, to be read over and over again, because humor is timeless. That's why I still laugh when Groucho Marx says to poor Margaret Dumont: "Do you know why I was having dinner with her? Because she reminds me of you."

And what person couldn't appreciate the simple, but hilarious, wisdom of Erma Bombeck? For example, her take on matrimony: "Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery."

Reading humor is a good litmus test for whether or not you're cut out to write humor, in my most humble opinion. Another is whether or not you make people laugh on a regular basis. If you do, start jotting down some of those bon mots and see what you create.

This whole article is moot when you consider the idea that funny can't be explained. If you have to explain it, they say, it's not funny anymore. So I guess it would be hard to put into words why the picture above always makes me laugh--but it does. And twelve years later my son doesn't see what makes it so hilarious. :)