Being Serious and Being Funny
Write Better Now
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about being serious and also being funny and how that works in writing nonfiction.
I know! I know!
I’m a novelist, right? I am a published novelist who has made a living writing fiction, so why am I talking about nonfiction?
Well, it’s because I do that, too. I have a background as a newspaper editor and reporter. I currently have a hyper-local news site, and I also have written nonfiction picture books.
BEING SERIOUS
In the news world, especially, that serious tone tends to feel more objective, less biased, right? The news is often harrowing, often somber. A storm beats against a town’s roads and homes. People might lack food. Someone hurts someone else. Government officials might be corrupt.
We want the voice on the page (or screen) to really reflect that reality because to not reflect it would feel horrible: harsh and mocking, insulting, uncaring.
But sometimes, nonfiction doesn’t need to be quite so heavy.
My blog posts about the craft of writing, for example. I’m going to throw in an example with a zombie hamster once in a while when I’m talking about pacing or story structure.
Is this because I’m obsessed with hamsters. Cough. No. I would never cheat on my manatee obsession like that.
Is this because I’m easily bored? Possibly. Okay. Probably.
But it’s also because levity can help give weight to the serious bits that you, the writer (or speaker), are putting down.
PRESENTATION MATTERS AND SO DOES INTENT
Mark Twain wrote, “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”
That’s not a great idea for unbiased journalism, but it leans toward something else: the motivation behind writing. When you write your news story or blog post or writing tips or memoir, how you present the facts of the story tweaks the story’s presentation.
Even the shape of a paragraph and sentence, the white space between them, the words you chose, who you quote from a meeting, tweaks the presentation.
So, humor?
Levity?
Those are big tweaks. . . powerful tweaks.
Dinty Moore once wrote, “Every successful comic and humorist knows that the line between an uncomfortable truth and a good belly laugh is remarkably thin.”
HUMOR HAS POWER
“By using humor as a vehicle for social critique, journalists and satirists can effectively challenge the status quo, expose hypocrisy, and spark conversations that lead to meaningful change,” Yellowbrick posted back in 2023.
Sometimes that vehicle can blur lines between journalism and satire like in The Onion or The Daily Show, but there is some power there, too.
Hanaa' Tameez wrote for the Nieman Lab specifically about John Stewart’s Daily Show, “Stewart may not consider himself a journalist, but news coverage from the early 2000s regularly mentioned how much viewers trusted him. A Pew Research study in 2007 found that ‘16% of Americans said they regularly watched The Daily Show or the Comedy Central spin-off, the Colbert Report. Those numbers are comparable to some major news programs. For instance, 17% said they regularly watched Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, and 14% watched PBS’ NewsHour with Jim Lehrer regularly.’”
In my town of just 5,000 people, for a couple of years, a woman and her son passed out a fake paper on the Fourth of July during our parade. It was mean to the people they didn’t like (I was called milquetoast), but it was also super funny in spots and searing in its point of view.
Similarly, there are a couple anonymous social media accounts that use satire in image and meme to get their points across about our small Maine island’s politics and have-and-have-nots.
HUMOR IS A STRATEGY
Writing is communication and humor is one of the tools that writers can use to communicate, to get their point across.
It’s just one we seem to forget about a lot.
Leigh Anne Jasheway for Writers’ Digest has tips about how to integrate humor into writing here.
You should check that out. But I want to paste in part what she says here because I think it’s so important about the link between humor and our own very nonfiction lives.
She writes,
“You may think that when it comes to writing, humor is best used only in fiction or satire. But while we think of comedy in terms of exaggeration or fabrication, effective humor can be just as much about creative misdirection—engaging readers by taking them someplace they don’t expect to go—and subtly choosing metaphors and words that make readers giggle without even knowing why. And a smiling reader is one who’s paying attention and eager to read on.
“Sociologists, linguists and biologists say that our ability to laugh and desire to do so isn’t all fun and games, but actually serves two essential life functions: to bond with members of our “tribe,” and to lessen tension and anxiety. Both of these are also excellent reasons to incorporate humor in your nonfiction. As a communication tool, effective use of humor can humanize you, cementing your bond with readers. It can also help your work stand out in a crowded market. And as advertising studies have shown, humor enhances how much we like what we’re reading and how well we remember it afterward.”
Humor is a strategy. It lessens tension. It connects us. It makes our writing more powerful. And us nonfiction writers should really lean into that tool, too.