Your Complete Toolkit for Developing Funny Characters
Lesson 3 of Comedy for All: How to Make Your Writing Funny
Hey there, comedy writers. How did your funny personal essay draft go last week? Do you have any observations, or did you run into any walls? Feel free to post in the comments and let us know.
Today we’re digging into one of my favorite topics in comedy writing: characters. The plan is to first quickly review voice as it pertains to character writing.
Next, we’ll try to understand what comedic characters are, fundamentally, and how to create them from nothing.
From there, we’ve got a super fun writing challenge where you’ll create a character and give that character a voice.
Today’s writing challenge is especially valuable for fiction writers, but it will help everyone who wants to hone their funny voice and write humor of any kind.
Also, today marks the half-way point! Good for us. If you’ve been enjoying yourself so far, I’d love it if you joined me over in Comedy Bizarre for weekly comedy writing tips, deep dives, Q&A, and more. Also, if you’re looking for a comedy writing feedback group, I’m organizing some of those too.
Okay, let’s get cracking!
1. The three comedic voices redux
Let’s remind ourselves of the three voices we dissected last week:
Light character voice: The narrator adopts more or less the author’s natural, unaffected writing voice. The voice may be comedic (it may read as funny), but the narrator does not read as a character who’s distinct from the author.
Medium character voice: The piece adopts a slightly unusual or special voice that aids the comedy, however the voice is not an extreme departure from the author’s natural writing voice. Think of medium voice as a 50-50 mix between the author’s natural voice and the affectation of a character. When someone writes a piece as a “heightened version of themselves,” that’s one good example of a medium voice.
Heavy character voice: Heavy voice occurs when the humor of the piece is heavily or primarily driven by adopting a special narrator’s voice that drives the premise. The voice sounds unique and interesting. It sounds like a character.
In the comedic personal essay, I encouraged you to go for a light-to-medium voice. This means that your narrator’s voice is either your own natural writing voice, or a heightened version of it.
But this week, we want to explore heavy character voice. This means that you will intentionally adopt a voice that’s distinct from your natural writing voice. You will adopt the voice of a comedic character. This is a fantastic engine for generating humor.
Character voice is a powerful tool for funny writing because it hones your ability to find interesting and comedic points-of-view. It allows you to step outside the confines of how you normally think, write, and speak.
And it’s really fun.
Before we get into our writing exercise, let’s try to understand comedic characters. What are they? How do we create them from nothing?