Lesson 4 - Humor Writing Mistakes
The 15 most common blunders that hold back your humor writing.
This is lesson 4 of 8 from Alex Baia’s Forever Workshop “Humor Writers, Get in Here!” It feels silly to bullet what we will learn since the lesson itself is in a list format sooo let’s just get into it then.
Hey, friends. Welcome back to humor land. We’re officially in lesson four of the workshop. Today, we’re talking about humor writing mistakes.
This is not so much a single lesson as it is a laundry list of bloopers and false paths to avoid.
Now that we’ve covered the bare bones of the humor piece, as well as the process of drafting from a headline, let’s expand on those general observations and look at some ways that humor writing can go astray.
Some people get argumentative over the word “mistake” here. “Don’t tell me what’s a mistake!” “Let me decide what’s funny!” “Don’t weigh me down with dumb rules, all of this stuff is subjective!”
I’m not saying that every possible funny humor piece completely avoids all of these “mistakes” that follow. I am saying that, in my practical experience as an editor and a writer of short humor, these are some of the main things that can hold your humor back. I have made many of these mistakes dozens of times.
So, as you read this, realize that there may be occasional exceptions to these mistakes. I am generalizing here, and I believe that knowing these generalizations will help you tremendously.
I have mentioned a few of these mistakes already in past lessons, so some of this is review. But that’s okay. Wax on, wax off. I want the list to be comprehensive. I want you to have a nice big checklist you can easily reference.
Here we go: The fifteen most common humor writing mistakes!
1. Not using a funny, clear title.
The title of your humor piece should let your readers know here’s exactly what’s funny, or interesting, about this piece. It should reveal a compelling, specific premise that gets people to click.
If you’re a famous writer who regularly publishes humor in The New Yorker, you can probably afford vaguer or more literary titles. But for the rest of us who are publishing short humor online: use a clear, funny title!
A title like the classic, “It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfucker” (which implies a specific type of funny narrator) beats a vague title like “Gourd Season” (which implies very little).
2. Not solidifying your comedic premise within the first paragraph.
The first few sentences of your piece should deliver on the promise of your title and quickly hit the reader with an LOL-worthy moment. If you need a setup, make it concise.
I want to emphasize that solidifying your premise quickly doesn’t merely entail solidifying it early. It also entails not taking too long to set things up.
Experienced comedy writers dive right into the funny. Here’s a solid example: the opening paragraph from, “This is Not a ‘Breakup’ it’s a ‘Pivot Toward Life Without Denise’,” by Erica Lies.
“Dear Tanner: Due to changing projections in my quarterly emotional needs model for fiscal year 2019, I am pivoting our relationship from domestic partnership to acquaintanceship. This revolutionary new policy is effective immediately.”
Here we have an absurd breakup notice delivered as a jargon-laden business email. After reading the piece headline and the first paragraph—just 33 words—we know exactly what the joke is and where the piece is going. That’s a good setup.
3. Having more than one premise (“going off focus”).
A premise-driven short piece should have one clear humor premise, not more. I often see pieces where the author introduces—perhaps inadvertently—jokes or ideas that don’t fit their original, primary idea. This is called “going off focus.”
In the first piece I wrote for Slackjaw, “Facebook Algorithm Upgrades,” the premise is that Facebook users would be happier if Facebook reduced the newsfeed to nothing. That’s the only premise. If the piece started talking about how tech companies misuse personal data or if it turned into a rant about social media, these things would be off focus from the premise.
It is easy to go off focus. It still happens to me when I draft fresh pieces, and it helps to have a good outside reader—e.g. a writing buddy—to catch it. Develop hawk vision for this question: what’s the premise here, and is every sentence in my piece furthering this one premise and this premise alone?
4. Using jokes or topics that are familiar or clichéd.
The worst version of this mistake is using comedy clichés, e.g. “That’s what she said!” Even if your topic, or your take on that topic, feels too familiar, your piece won’t be as funny. Instead, explore under-explored topics. Or mine territory that’s personal and unique to you. Or, if your topic is familiar—say, you’re writing about how commercial airlines are unpleasant—give the reader a totally original take that she’s never seen before. Be original and surprising.
5. Not being concise.
Good humor writing is tight. There are no wasted words. Always ask: “Do I need this? Is this sentence advancing my premise? Is this actually funny?” Then cut, cut, cut.
6. Not heightening enough.
Recall Mike Lacher’s definition of heightening: “expanding your premise in new and surprising ways that still connect coherently to what you’ve set up earlier.”
Key words: new and surprising. All good short humor has forward momentum at each step: Each sentence and paragraph unfolds a new, interesting consequence of what was set up at the start. There is no treading water in humor writing, only forward motion.
When you read over your draft, ask yourself: Does the piece keep pushing into new and stimulating territory, slowly but surely revealing amusing new surprises?
7. Not being hyper-specific.
Use interesting, unusual specifics. They make your writing pop. Another selfish example (a piece I co-wrote with two friends): “What Your Favorite Piece of Furniture Says About You.” The joke of this piece is that your taste in furniture predicts your personality in absurd ways. We included weird furniture like, “1992 Goodwill futon with dog bite marks,” and “Assorted crystals hanging from wall-mounted driftwood.” If we had instead used “futon” or “chair,” it would have been boring. In fact, I owned an ancient futon with dog bite marks in grad school. It was an abomination. It’s easy to pull weird specifics from your life.
8. Not ending on a joke.
In general, each sentence of your humor piece should do one of two things: (1) Give necessary information or set-up, or (2) Deliver a joke. By a joke, I just mean, “something funny.” And each paragraph should end with a bigger, satisfying joke.
Remember: The funny thing goes at the end. How many of your sentences end with jokes? If it’s too few, this could be a problem.
9. Including sentences or jokes that you don’t love.
Very simple test: “Do I love this joke / paragraph / sentence / word?” If you don’t love it, cut it. By the way, loving it is necessary but not sufficient for keeping it. Sometimes you should cut it even if you do love it because the cut serves the piece as a whole. (See mistakes 3, 5, and 6!) In humor writing, as in all writing, love is great—but love is not enough.
10. Not getting outside feedback on your drafts.
When you’re trapped in your head, your humor will suffer. I’ve been there for months, spitting out draft after draft where the premise was unclear, or the jokes misfiring. You need a reality check. Get outside feedback—a writing group, a friend, a teacher, or a coach—to read your humor and tell you if it’s working or not.
Does every single humor writer need feedback on every single draft? No. The more experienced you become at humor writing, the more you get a feel for when your early drafts are good. But feedback greatly improves the vast majority of humor writing. Especially in the earlier stages of your humor writing journey, not getting any feedback ever is a huge disadvantage. And there’s no reason to give yourself that disadvantage when classes, writing groups, and writing buddies are readily available.
Writing and “failing” is fine. Keep stumbling and learning. But don’t live in a palace of delusion, thinking your comedy is hilarious when no one else does. Get feedback, take the ego hit, and start improving.
11. Not sufficiently revising and reworking your piece
Perhaps it’s an overquoted Hemingway line about craft, but it’s still a good reminder: “The first draft of anything is crap.” I don’t think that’s true 100% of the time, nor should we believe it just because our lord and savior Ernest Hemingway uttered it. But in humor writing, Hemingway’s dictum holds with about 97.1% accuracy.
You almost always need to revise and rework your humor draft, sometimes multiple times. Revisions can include:
Structural changes to get the flow and the comedic escalation right
Cutting the chaff (the less funny parts)
Cutting the parts that are off-premise
Simplifying and trimming out unneeded complexity
Rewriting to make your individual jokes funnier
Tweaking or adding specifics to make things clearer or to make the details funnier
Those are just a few common types of rewriting in humor pieces. How much revising should you do? However much the piece needs.
Occasionally, your first draft is strong, and everything comes out on-premise. Congrats to you, my friend, when that happens. More often, first drafts are like a hideous clay lump with some hidden beauty inside: they need a lot of kneading to come out right. Thinking that your first humor draft should generally be good enough for your readers is lazy and entitled. Instead, think of yourself as an artisan, or a sculptor, with a vision: you will rework until you get it right. But no pressure. The world has enough clay to last a lifetime. However hilarious or terrible your initial attempts, there’s always more where that came from.
12. Not ruthlessly cutting the overall length (word count) of your piece
If you think I’m really harping on revision and concision, you would be correct-a-mundo.
This mistake is related to the “not revising and reworking” mistake above. This mistake is a subset of that mistake, in fact. This mistake is also a subset of mistake 5: “Not being concise.”
However, this is such a common and harmful error that it needs its own section. I will elucidate this mistake by simply citing a physical law of the universe that was laid down by our creator at the instant of the Big Bang:
Humor Verbosity Law: 80% of humor pieces are 20% too long.
As an editor of a humor publication, most submissions that I read are outright rejected. And a few are accepted as is, because the piece is good, and the writing is tight, and no changes are needed.
But there is another subset that I accept with a request for some edits. And what do you imagine the most common request is? Well, here is the type of note I have given as a Slackjaw editor too many times to count:
“I like this but it feels too long. Can you cut this draft from 850 words down to 700 words or so?”
(I give that note with varying word counts, depending on the piece.)
I have given this general note over and over. Probably at least 143 times. The failure to ruthlessly cut the overall piece length manifests in two ways:
(A) The piece runs out of steam and feels like it drags on for too long, even if it is an otherwise very funny piece.
(B) The piece feels funny from start to finish, but it feels like a few sections are slightly less funny and perhaps slightly repetitive.
The ideal length of your piece depends on the piece. Some pieces really earn a longer word count. Others need to be short, short, short.
The easiest way to identify if you’re dragging things on too long, honestly, is through peer feedback. But you will also notice that as a humor writer gets more months and years under the belt, the writing tends towards tightness and ideal length. The maestros all love concision.
13. Using a headline or premise idea that does not easily generate clear, on-premise jokes
When you have a good humor premise, you should be able to immediately write some jokes using that premise. If you cannot generate clear comedic ideas from your headline premise, this is an indication that your premise may not be working. Or, if you generate ideas from the premise but they come out muddled, this could also be evidence that your headline premise isn’t working well. (Admittedly, it can also just be a sign that you need a nap.) But all of that said, a great humor premise typically leads to a joyful profusion of joke ideas.
14. Using a headline or premise that’s too vague or broad
Strong premise-driven humor thrives on specifics. The same is true for the humor premise and the headline itself. As a humor editor, I sometimes see submissions where the writer had some vague idea for a rant, or they had some collection of witticisms that they wanted to publish. The humor piece might have a title like this:
“Things that really piss me off about life!”
Or like this:
“Some amusing thoughts I had about dating and relationships.”
These pieces usually come across as jumbled and random. They are also a bit indulgent: the author couldn’t be bothered to package their humor in a way that’s precise and coherent, so they just threw their witty thoughts down on a draft with a vague and bland title.
Here’s the fix: Instead of a general piece titled, “Some Amusing Thoughts I Had About Relationships,” try something more like this: “Some Thoughts I Had About Relationships The Moment My Drunk Husband Fell Overboard On Our Norwegian Cruise.”
Counterexample? In Jack Handey’s New Yorker piece “Recent Articles Of Mine,” the title is rather vague. However, the actual piece is not vague at all and is about an extremely specific and funny situation. Also, the piece was published in a very popular print magazine where it is less crucial to hook the reader with a specific, funny headline.
Can vague headlines, vague situations, or very general premise ideas translate into strong humor writing? Yes, it’s possible. Anything is possible. But starting more specifically is usually the stronger choice.
15. Not identifying your mysterious narrator
A writing teacher of mine, Allison K Williams, occasionally asked me a good question:
“Who is speaking here and why?” In humor writing, and perhaps in all writing, when the answer to this question is non-obvious or nonexistent, the reader is confused.
One example case where I see the mysterious, unidentified narrator come up is when a humor piece is written from the POV of a publication or a reviewer. Example: “We are reviewing Charlie’s ninth birthday party today, and, overall, we found it severely lacking.”
I’ll always ask: Who is ‘we’? Is this reviewer a writer for a newspaper or huge publication? A random, deranged podcaster who sneaks into and reviews children’s birthday parties? Or is the speaker one of two twin brothers who go to school with the birthday boy?
Easy solution: When your humor has a narrator whose perspective or identity matters, quickly identify them and give us the basic background details. So often, this can be done in a sentence or two, or in just a few words.
Not every narrator needs to be uniquely identified. In, “It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfucker,” the narrator is an F-bomb-loving, overly-enthusiastic guy raving about gourds. That’s all we need to know. Beyond that, his identity doesn’t matter.
When you introduce a narrator or character in your humor, ask yourself this: “Is this person’s identity, or the details of their job or their life, germane to understanding what’s going on here?” Then give your reader just enough specifics so that they know what’s going on.
P.s. I’ll give one more shoutout to the live workshop I taught about how to write from a headline. It covers several of the points/mistakes in this lesson. Get access to the free workshop replay here!
Humor Reading
N.Y.C. to L.A. to N.Y.C. to L.A., Ad Infinitum by Cirocco Dunlap
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jekyll by Dan Caprera
We Are ZIPIT™ Convertible Pants, And This Is Our Application To Become The Official Convertible Pants Of The Chicago Cubs by Tracy Silagi
22 Ways I Will Destroy You With Karate by Tom Laplaige
Reading questions: What do you enjoy most in the above pieces? Do any aspects of them not work for you?
Writing Exercises
Trade feedback: In the last lesson (Lesson 3: Editing and Feedback) your assignment was to find a feedback buddy (or two or three) and trade feedback on your humor draft. How’s that going? I hope you have your people by now, and you’ve started to give each other notes. If that’s still in the works, keep going and complete your peer feedback. If you don’t have a feedback buddy yet, post in the Substack comments and find one.
Final draft: Once you have external feedback from your test readers, it’s time to incorporate that feedback and re-write your piece yet again. This should lead to your third-ish (and possibly final) draft. Before you re-write again, peruse the written feedback from your test readers and the list of fifteen humor writing mistakes in this lesson. I want you to especially focus on making your re-write as tight as possible: cut anything that’s wordy, strictly unnecessary, or that your feedback buddies marked as not funny.
Leave a comment: Do the fifteen humor writing mistakes in this lesson bring up any insights or questions? If so, drop them in the Substack comments here.
Good luck with your final draft! Be sure to post in the Substack comments with any additional thoughts you have. See you in the next lesson.
Alex Baia is a humor writer for The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and other publications. He is also an editor of the humor site Slackjaw.
Alex voices the character Lex, The Zen Philosopher of Life Hacking, on You But Better, the number one self-improvement parody podcast on the face of the planet.
6. Not heightening enough - that is gold! I went back to the current piece I'm working on and realized I wasn't doing this. Thank you for this. This alone is worth the subscription!
This has been a really interesting lesson for me. I primarily write poetry, which is a form that is easy to be verbose BUT it also is a form of writing that has several mechanisms for tightening up. When I am writing a piece that isn't as direct as it needs to be, I try to re-write it in a stricter form (like a sonnet, where you only have 14 lines to bring the concept to life).
All that to say, that sometimes playing with the form of writing (poetry, prose, news article, etc) can be a fun and enlightening project that helps strengthen your editing/writing bones.