An Anatomy of Humor - Guest Post by Cynthia Port
An Anatomy of Humor Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. - E.B. White Because I write humorous fiction, I am often thinking about humor itself. For example, what makes it funny? What qualifies a novel as humorous fiction rather than some other category of fiction that happens to have humor in it? In other words, let’s kill some frogs, shall we? I’ll begin by paraphrasing (liberally, and with apologies to a great man) Winston Churchill by saying that good humorous fiction is a chuckle wrapped in a guffaw inside a knowing smile. More simply put, true humorous fiction is all about layering. In this post I’ll be exploring the simplest layer—the famous, but oft-maligned, one-liner. Did you hear the one about the One-liner? One-liners are quick, one-dimensional jokes that most anyone can write now and then. Part of the reason one-liners are so easy to write is that there are a myria...