305. How to Add Humor to Your Writing with C.J. Spataro

Author and professor C.J. Spataro discusses how to create a book that's funny, including how not to write characters, where the humor could be falling flat, and much more in a special bonus episode before the year is out! Happy Holidays!

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Visit C.J.'s website:
https://www.cjspataro.com/

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https://www.cjspataro.com/books

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Transcript

Jennia: Hello, I'm Jennia D'Lima. Welcome to Writing and Editing, the author-focused podcast that takes a whole-person approach to everything related to both writing and editing. Humor can be difficult to pull off in writing because we can't incorporate those other sensory elements like visuals, tone of voice, and timing. So how can we write it in a way that makes our readers laugh? C.J. Spataro, author and the director of the MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Publishing programs at Rosemont College, is an expert on this subject and she'll be sharing her tips on making sure your humor doesn't fall flat. This is "How to Add Humor to Your Writing."

Jennia: First, welcome to the show, C.J.!

C.J. Spataro: Thank you so much, Jennia! I'm really looking forward to this.

Jennia: Yeah, me too! To start, what are some of the benefits to adding humor? Why should we even care about this?

C.J. Spataro: Oh, that's an excellent question. I think humor can be used for all kinds of things. I always try to have some elements of humor, although I've certainly written some stories where there are—there is no, probably no humor. But I think it helps moderate the mood or tone of a piece. So the darker and more serious the situation, the more humor can help balance that out for the reader. And also in the case of More Strange Than True, my novel, it is just a really absurd situation. So I felt like I owed it to myself and the story to kind of lean into that. 'Cause it's just—yeah, it's such a ridiculous situation that I found the humor came pretty organically and didn't have to really work at it too hard. In some ways, I actually had to kind of ended up pulling some of it back, so.

Jennia: That leads to something that I think is going to be very interesting to talk about. And that is when do you know when to pull back? How can you recognize that maybe you're leaning on that too heavily and it's starting to turn into a running gag instead of a story?

C.J. Spataro: Yeah, so I think that's a really excellent way of putting it. So I had kind of this long journey getting this book published and I had been looking for an agent and querying agents. And I had an agent that was interested. I met her at a pitch event and she read the book and got back to me and said, "You know, I really like your writing, I really like the story, but there's something about it that's kind of holding me back." And I had been getting similar comments from other people, but nobody had been really specific. It'd been more like, you know, "There's something, but I can't really put my finger on it." Well, she put her finger on it. And for her it was that it seemed like Jewell, the main character, was in love with her dog and not with the man that he becomes later in the story. And, I mean, at least that was something concrete for me to go back. And she said, "If you rewrite"—you know—"If you want to address this and rewrite it," she was like, "I would really like to see it again." And I was like, "Great! Okay." So—Hardly ever get an opportunity to do that with an agent.

Jennia: So true.

C.J. Spataro: So as I was going through this revision—we agreed I was gonna get it to her at the end of the summer. So I had about three months to work on it, which was a good amount of time. So as I went back and reread the book with those words in mind, I realized what I had been doing was exactly what you said. I've been hitting the gag too hard. Like, every opportunity I had, I had some stupid joke in the book about how Oberon used to be a dog. And because it—to me it seemed super funny, but I realized that I was just hitting it too hard by having the characters make those jokes all the time. I wasn't really letting Oberon really evolve into a man and be a man that they all related to and cared about. So I went back in and I pulled so many jokes out. So many. And I really tried to tighten a lot of stuff up. And I don't know if I would have figured it out without those comments from that agent. I think sometimes that's why it's important to have people read your work. I mean, and I've had plenty of readers, but—

Jennia: Mhm.

C.J. Spataro: —nobody really came back to me with any concrete feedback like that. So once I had reworked the book, I sent it to a couple of other people that aren't writers and said, "This is what the agent said to me. When you read the book, will you kind of read it to see if I've hit the mark?" I think, you know, sometimes you're in a writers' group for a long time and you're with people that you love and you trust.

Jennia: Mhm.

C.J. Spataro: I get good feedback. I get critical feedback. But sometimes it's probably not as pointed as it could be, or they're just not reading it the same way. So I'm just kind of through this whole process. I've decided, you know, I'm gonna start utilizing non-writing readers at some point, so.

Jennia: Well, and then like you said, specific feedback. So it's not enough to just say, "I think there might be too many jokes," or, "The story just isn't coming across for me," or, "It's not sticking with me." Right, we want to know why. We want to know where are there too many jokes, maybe. Is there one chapter where it's really serving what's happening there? And another where it's pulling away? Because, again, we talk all the time about how we are too close to our own writing to really see that. So, yeah, you do need that level of specificity when it comes to the feedback too.

C.J. Spataro: Yeah.

Jennia: Do you think that it's important to know your audience? So, for instance, your genre, your subgenre, who usually reads that to make sure that you have jokes that are likely to really come across to them, or what might be things that they find funny versus not funny?

C.J. Spataro: That's interesting because I don't think everybody necessarily finds my book funny. Like, my mother, for instance, told me she didn't really think it was that funny. So I think it just kind of depends. I don't know. I don't really necessarily think about that kind of stuff when I'm thinking about humor.

Jennia: Mhm.

C.J. Spataro: For me, it's like if I see a situation that has potential for a humorous something, then I will usually lean into that. I guess I kind of think of myself as my ideal reader, which maybe is a mistake, I'm not sure. But I try to write things that I would want to read. And maybe that seems obvious, but I don't know that it always is obvious. And audience-wise, I do think it is important to kind of keep your audience in mind. You know, I tend to swear a lot, so I—My characters, usually the first draft, everyone's cursing like sailors. And then, you know, second draft, I have to go in and pull all the cursing out, or most of it. You know, most people don't swear like I do, and a lot of people get really offended by swearing. Yeah. So there's just things like that.

Jennia: I feel like you've answered this a little bit already. But do your characters have the same type of humor that you do, and is that something, if they do, that you'd recommend other authors employ?

C.J. Spataro: Well, I certainly think it's probably the easiest way to go. And I would say yes, I do try to make my characters quite different from me in most regards. I know writing teachers love to, you know, talk about writing what you know, but when I talk to my students about writing what you know, I'm usually referring to sort of, like, the emotional heart of the story—

Jennia: Ahh.

C.J. Spataro: —or the characters, as opposed to sort of getting caught up in, like, the external details of things that you might know about. I mean, it's important to, like, not create characters that you have absolutely no knowledge of. You know, like, if you make a character a lawyer and all you do is watch Law and Order, you're probably not gonna create a very accurate lawyer.

Jennia: Right!

C.J. Spataro: But yeah, I would say I am definitely the kind of person that sort of leans into the sarcastic and the observational. I took a humor writing class, MasterClass once with Steve Almound, and he talked a lot about humiliation and how humor comes out of humiliation. And that was really an interesting exercise. You know, he had us write about something very personal that we found very embarrassing. And it did create a lot of very funny anecdotes. So, you know, it's just being able to kind of, like, step back and take a look at things, the situation of whether it's fiction or nonfiction, and be, like, is there an opportunity to kind of present this material in a way that's not going to be super serious and a big bummer? Right?

Jennia: Mhm.

C.J. Spataro: Yeah.

Jennia: I'd love to hear more about that class. Was there anything surprising that you learned from it?

C.J. Spataro: Really, I mean, I knew he also uses a lot of humor in his work, so yeah, Steve was really good. It was—it was a long time ago, that MasterClass, at least 10 years ago. It was fun. Yeah, we did talk about humiliation and embarrassment quite a lot because he said he thought all humor came out of humiliation. I don't know if I necessarily agree with that. And maybe I'm remembering wrong. It was a long time ago . . . On the off chance he hears me saying this (Jennia laughs), I don't want him to get mad at me.

Jennia: Asterisk on that disclaimer.

C.J. Spataro: Yeah (laughs). So, I mean, that's certainly one kind of humor. And, like, if you look at what has become really popular humor-wise, like on TV, you know, there's that whole sort of cringy humor. I mean, obviously a lot of people really like it, you know.

Jennia: Right.

C.J. Spataro: Like, you know, Michael Scott—That character Michael Scott in The Office was so cringy, right? But you kind of almost had to laugh because you couldn't do anything else.

Jennia: Right. Otherwise it would just be uncomfortable. Like, you're watching someone be—completely suffering. So then what kind of person does that make you if you're laughing at it and it's not meant to be a joke?

C.J. Spataro: Right, exactly. And you do know it's supposed to be a joke, so it kind of gives you permission to laugh at these things. You know, or a comedian like Will Ferrell, that's his entire schtick, right? It's like he wants you to laugh at, you know, the absurdities of life and the things that make you really uncomfortable. I admire him so much because he's just all in, like 100 percent. He never holds back. He's just all in.

Jennia: Yeah. So how can you do that in your writing? How can you go all in on the page and not feel like you're holding back or have it come across like you're holding back?

C.J. Spataro: Yeah, that's tricky. Learning how to not hold back in any regard. So, yeah, I don't know—I think the thing is, like, with the example with my novel, you can always pull back. So I always encourage students to, like, kind of swing for the fences, as the cliche goes. And then you do always have the opportunity to kind of pull back.

Jennia: There you go. Save it for editing.

C.J. Spataro: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I think it's just a commitment that you have to have in your mind. It's like, okay, I'm going to just go for it. Like, there were a lot of moments when I was writing More Strange Than True where I was just like, I'm not really sure what I'm doing in this moment, so I'm just gonna go for it. It's either gonna work or it's gonna stink. And if it stinks, I'll figure something else out. I think sometimes what happens with writers is they come to that kind of a crossroad and instead of just saying, "All right, I'm going to just try it, I'm going to just go for it," they just don't do anything.

Jennia: Ahh.

C.J. Spataro: You know, they let themselves get blocked.

Jennia: Well, since you mentioned taking a class, do you think that humor is something that can be taught?

C.J. Spataro: I know there's a lot of people that are like, "You're either good at something or you're not." And I'm not one of those people. I am the kind of person who is definitely a firm believer in you can definitely be taught things. For me personally, it kind of comes instinctually. It kind of just comes naturally. I don't always even really consciously think of things being funny until I read them in front of an audience and then people start laughing—

Jennia: Ahh.

C.J. Spataro: —but I think you definitely can be taught all kinds of techniques. Right? And is that going to make you a great writer? Is that going to make you a best selling author? No, not necessarily. But is that going to help you get to a different place than where you started? Absolutely. Especially if you practice it. You know, it's just like anyone can learn to play the piano. Not everyone's going to be a concert pianist, right? Not everyone's gonna be able to sit down and play Rachmaninoff or whatever, but anybody can learn how to play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on the piano. It's just you have to really want to do it, first of all. And you have to be willing to practice and you have to be open to criticism and being able to improve. Writing, a lot of it is being willing to try new things; push yourself to places that you didn't necessarily think you could go.

Jennia: Oh, exactly. So how do you practice humor then? Is that something, too, where you might read a passage out loud to people where they had just enough so they had context for studying the scene and then you waited to see if the joke landed or not? Or is there another method?

C.J. Spataro: Yeah, that's funny because like I said, a lot of it, for me, comes somewhat instinctually.

Jennia: Mhm.

C.J. Spataro: Sometimes I try to work a joke and I would try it out. My husband also at one point was, like, a stand up comedian, so—

Jennia: Oh, there you go! (laughs)

C.J. Spataro: I actually learned a few things about comedy actually from him while he was taking, you know, stand up classes and—

Jennia: Yeah, let's hear it!

C.J. Spataro: —writing his routine and stuff. You know, so there's this classic callback technique that comedians use a lot. So they'll tell a joke like at the beginning and then they'll go off on this long sort of—Sometimes it can be meandering and there'll be jokes in between or whatever. And they might call back more than once, right? So that they make a reference to the joke they made at the beginning and it ties everything together. See, that's kind of what I was doing in my book too much. I was calling back to the beginning—

Jennia: Ohh.

C.J. Spataro: —you know? And it just—I just kept pounding it and I didn't even realize I was doing it. So you have to—you have to be careful. You need to do things in moderation, right? But that's one really good technique. And the other is like what Steve Almound was talking about is, like, putting your characters in awkward situations. I don't know that they need to be humiliated, but awkward or embarrassing situations, absurd situations. You know, because people experience absurdities. You know, there's a lot of things that you can glean from that and just think about.

Jennia: Yeah, those awkward moments can be really endearing, too, with characters where it's even someone who maybe has been rather cold or stuffy before then. And all of a sudden you see them having that awkward moment where they can't get their tie tied, for instance, or something, and makes them more human.

C.J. Spataro: Absolutely. And again, it made me think about also making your characters vulnerable, which is one way to, like, also make them relatable. You want your reader to connect to your characters. You want them to care, even when they're not necessarily the good guy, right?

Jennia: Yeah.

C.J. Spataro: So I think giving your characters an opportunity to be vulnerable is also another entry into humor, but it's also a way to make them more relatable to the reader.

Jennia: Do you ever take inspiration from real-life funny events that have happened or jokes that have just come about, and they were so good that you had to insert them?

C.J. Spataro: So I wrote a short story quite a long time ago. When I first moved to Philadelphia, I worked as a singing waiter at a restaurant. And one night I had a customer—and it was an Italian restaurant; we served Italian food. And one of the dishes on the menu was calamari fra diavolo. So for the uninitiated, that's squid in a spicy red sauce. And I had a customer ask me—and people would ask this. A lot of people don't like to eat the tentacles of the squid. He asked me to leave the testicles off his calamari, and I just about lost it (Jennia laughs), so—And he didn't even realize what he'd said until—

Jennia: Which makes it so much better when they don't, yes (laughs).

C.J. Spataro: So I actually—One of my unpublished novels is a—Actually it's an adaptation of the Marriage of Figaro set in the singing waiter Italian restaurant. And actually I published what ended up being, like, the third chapter in the book as a short story in a magazine—a journal called Italian Americana, where that was kind of, like, the big joke in the chapter in the story. It's probably the most autobiographical thing I've ever written. Because I was very curious to kind of, like, write about what it's like to sing in a language that you don't understand—

Jennia: Ohh yeah.

C.J. Spataro: —Like, what goes through your mind while you're singing. Here you are, you're, like, slinging spaghetti, getting people their drinks, doing all this crazy stuff, and then you have to stop (Jennia laughs) in the middle of it all and, like, belt out an aria. And then everyone claps. And if you're lucky, they might slide you a little extra money. And then you go back to, you know, doing your thing. It's crazy. So, yes, to answer your question, that's a very long roundabout—I definitely will take humorous things from my personal life if it's appropriate and it works in the story and work it in.

Jennia: Are there any mistakes that you see authors make—maybe your students, published authors—when they're trying to cram humor in where it doesn't belong?

C.J. Spataro: You don't often see that in published work, you know, because usually it has an editor's eye on it. If it's just really not good, it doesn't usually make it to print. I think sometimes people, especially with students—I don't see this very often, but I have seen it a few times and probably been guilty of it myself—you know, the jokes just aren't funny. You know, it's just really not that funny of a situation. The writer hasn't set it up in the right way for it to be funny. Or it's just offensive. You know, I think that's the thing people have to be careful about is not being offensive. I think you have to be really careful about, you know, how you tell a joke and who's the butt of your joke.

Jennia: Right, yes.

C.J. Spataro: Right? I mean, I feel like now the one sort of discriminatory kind of humor that's still allowed, is we still make fun of overweight people. And that makes me so mad. It's so cheap. I do talk to my students about when they're creating characters. Like, you know, the buffoon doesn't have to be the fat guy. Right? I think sometimes writers sort of, like, fall back and you see this—Like, for instance, a really famous example is in The Da Vinci Code. Right? So the villain is an albino, which makes him othered immediately—

Jennia: Right. Yeah.

C.J. Spataro: —But instead of creating a character, right? We just have this person who unfortunately has this genetic disorder that they have no control over, but somehow that makes him evil and a psychopathic murderer and whatever. Right?

Jennia: Yeah.

C.J. Spataro: And I feel like—I just was actually—just for the heck of it—I was watching a TV adaptation of another Dan Brown book. And he did the same thing. He did the same thing. Like, the villain was covered from head to foot with tattoos. It's something that I really kind of try to get my students to avoid doing. Because you see it reinforced over and over and over again in storytelling—

Jennia: Right.

C.J. Spataro: —that it kind of—especially with young, beginning writers where they're not really processing everything, exactly. That they fall back on these tropes because it's stuff that they see every day. To be fair, there have been comedians like Chris Farley and John Belushi and John Candy, you know, who were big men and that was part of their comedy. That was part of what they did, is they used their bodies in those ways. But that was their choice, right?  That's probably—If I was gonna give people a caveat about humor, I would be, like, just think about who the butt of your joke is going to be and how you're presenting that, you know.

Jennia: Which is excellent advice. And I feel like we could almost have another episode after that based on the stereotypes we use to villainize characters and how we are using "other" in a way that is harmful. But on a more light-hearted note! (laughs). How do you—

C.J. Spataro: Yes, that was kind of a—(both laugh).

Jennia: Yeah. So how do you feel about authors who show characters laughing as a way of trying to show that something is meant to be funny? Hmm.

C.J. Spataro: Hmm . . . I think if it's something that happens a lot, again, it's like, okay, work a little harder. And I'm also a very firm believer—and hopefully I achieved this in my work—of just letting the situations, letting the stories sort of speak for themselves.

Jennia: Right.

C.J. Spataro: Um, And sometimes I think people get caught up in the, like, "Oh I wanna make sure that the author [reader] understands what I'm trying to say." It's like, well, if you write the scene in a way that they feel like they're part of the story . . . That idea of if you're writing the kind of fiction in which you want the reader to sort of become part of that fictional dream, right? And to just kind of let your walls down and let the reader just become part of the story, you know, you have to let the story speak for itself.

Jennia: Right.

C.J. Spataro: If the author gets in between the story and the reader and is, like, "Here, let me make sure you understand this is funny because these characters are all laughing. Ha ha." Like, that creates a barrier between the reader and the story. So yeah, I don't think that's always a great idea.

Jennia: I agree.

C.J. Spataro: Yeah. And not just with humor, but also, maybe even more importantly, with things that are really, really serious.

Jennia: Ah, yes.

C.J. Spataro: Like, somebody dies, something really awful happens in the story. It's like, just let the horrible event stand for itself. Like, you don't have to tell anybody, "This is horrible." Like, it's horrible.

Jennia: Exactly. Yes. I always think of it—when I'm thinking of it in terms of advice, it's the opposite of that scene from The Emperor's New Groove where Kronk is saying, "The poison. The poison for Kuzco. The poison we made specifically for Kuzco." It's funny in that movie, but don't do it in your writing (laughs).

C.J. Spataro: Right. I mean, and again, you have to think about the kind of humor you're using, what kind of story you're telling. If you're writing a story or a book that's kind of slapsticky, you know, then you're going to be describing physical humor in a way that you might not normally in

Jennia: Are there any authors or books that you'd recommend to listeners of people who do a wonderful job of adding humor to their writing and on a consistent basis?

C.J. Spataro: Yeah. So definitely Mat Johnson. So I've read three of his books, so I can definitely recommend three books of his that I've read. Loving Day, which is a book that I teach a lot. Pym, which is crazy, wildly absurd and hilarious, in my opinion. Which is kind of a retelling of a Edgar Allan Poe story. So not only is he sort of lampooning Poe and Poe's sort of inherent racism, it's also, like, putting his characters in these really absurd situations. And it's extremely funny. And also, like, when people want to write satire. I know this is gonna sound so, like, old lady professor, but I really highly recommend people read Candide by Voltaire. You know, it's really funny and it's absurdist humor at its best. And of course, George Saunders. So he's like our contemporary Voltaire, in my opinion. There's nobody doing it better. So just read about anything that he's written. My favorite is an early short story collection of his called Pastoralia. I could go—We could do a whole podcast just on Pastoralia. Anyway—

Jennia: Coming up in January (laughs)

C.J. Spataro: Here we go! (laughs)

Jennia: All right, well, thank you again!

C.J. Spataro: Well, thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Jennia: Yeah, it's been great!

Jennia: And thank you for listening, and be sure to check out the show notes for additional information. And then please join me next week when Eric Simmons will be here to tell you how to get your book into a library. And if you enjoyed today's episode, I'd greatly appreciate it if you took the time to leave a rating or review wherever you download or listen. Thanks again!