Yes Virginia, There is a Way to Learn to Write Humor

Some thoughts on fixed mindsets in the humor world

Photo by Kah Lok Leong on Unsplash

I recently did something that I typically try to avoid doing and read the comments on a freelance piece I had written. While I do read comments on my social media posts and Substack, I often avoid reading them on freelance pieces because trollish comments can get lodged in my head for a few days to years.

(It’s a truth universally acknowledged by writers that the one negative comment in a sea of positive comments is the one you will focus on.)

The comment I recently read was basically something that amounted to “People can’t learn to be funny.”

This particular thought is one that I’ve heard people express before. People have growth mindsets about learning all sorts of things, but when it comes to humor, many people think that you can’t learn to be funny or write funny.

Do some people have more of a natural comic sensibility than other people? Perhaps. But the idea that you just are inherently funny and no amount of help or practice will change that isn’t one that I agree with.

I’ve read enough memoirs by comedians and humor writers to report that they all work hard at their craft. The improvement can come in different ways—sometimes it’s just a lot of practice doing (and often bombing) at the thing, and sometimes it’s taking classes or working with a mentor or some combination of all of these.

What has worked for me

In an effort to improve my own humor writing, I’ve taken several classes on the subject and can point to very obvious gains I made with those classes:

• I took my first humor writing class through Mediabistro when I was living in New York. I learned about techniques like the “rule of three” and using hard consonant sounds and I got a grounding in humor writing that led to my first humor publications.

• Several years into writing humor, I took an online satire writing class through Second City (Writing Satire for the Internet). At this point, I had had some success writing humor by reading a lot of humor and using the techniques I knew. But the class gave me a whole new set of brainstorming techniques, helped me understand some of the basic components of satire writing, and helped me see some of the underlying structure in some pieces (shout out to Caitlin Kunkel who designed the curriculum and Brooke Preston who taught the class). A piece I workshopped in that class is the first piece New Yorker Shouts ever accepted

• A couple of years after that, I took a humor writing class that Elissa Bassist was teaching and it helped illuminate another humor format for me and helped me hone pieces that went on to be accepted by McSweeney’s and Shouts.

Of course, taking a class alone will not magically bestow upon you the wit of your favorite humorist. It still takes work to improve your craft and it’s also not necessary to take a class to learn how to write humor. But in my experience, it has helped.

Even though I’ve been writing short humor for a long time and know a fair amount about it, I’m always learning more. Sometimes through classes, sometimes through studying pieces and breaking them down on my own, or sometimes through just talking with and trading feedback on drafts with other writers.

Ye olde fixed mindset problem

Growing up as a Gen Xer the “growth mindset vs. fixed mindset” idea wasn’t something I ever remember being discussed, but I definitely fell into the fixed mindset thinking as a kid. Luckily, I convinced myself fairly early on that I was good at writing although I obviously had a lot to learn still.

But I convinced myself I was bad at plenty of other things and I still have those thoughts about some of those things today despite knowing that I could get better at them if I tried.

As an undergrad creative writing major, I still had some natural talent thoughts about other writers in my program. A couple of them were very talented writers and I assumed that was just something they were born with, but in retrospect, I realized that they were likely working hard at their craft.

When I went to grad school for teaching writing I had the epiphany that if I was going to be teaching writing I would probably need to really get behind the idea that people could get better at writing by being taught it.

Plenty of people still debate whether creative writing can actually be taught. I do think that classes and workshops can help improve writing, although not all of them are created equal. I’ve gotten very helpful and very unhelpful feedback in workshops and feedback swap situations, but I think there are ways for these things to work well.

And while some people may have some wiring that makes writing or math or Karaoke come more easily to them, that doesn’t mean practicing won’t help them improve.

I also think comic sensibility is something that you can develop over time. At times, it feels like learning a second language did for me.

In college, I spent a semester abroad studying in Spain. I’d taken several Spanish classes before going and could get by with some basics, but at the beginning of the semester when I was speaking Spanish I was often pausing to go through a mental verb conjugation table in my mind to come up with the right phrasing.

But somewhere during my semester that stopped and the sentences and phrases started flowing without me having to actively think about the construction. I started to just naturally know how to say things.

Humor has worked in a similar way for me. I started out using structures and techniques to build pieces and now I can write a piece more quickly based on comic feel, which has come partly from writing and reading a lot of comedic pieces.

But I still also fall back on some of the tried and true humor techniques (for a fun bonus game—try to identify the “rule of three” I used earlier in this piece). But all of this is to say that I do think people can learn to write funny.