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Fiction Corner

Alison Hawke

Make them laugh

I recall very little of my university course on Thermal Physics, but I will never forget that it was a postgraduate student who proved the Einstein Podolsky Rosen (EPR) paradox, thanks to Dr Jim Al-Khalili. It stuck in my mind because I learnt this in a Quantum Mechanics lecture. Dr Al-Khalili was walking back and forth across the room describing the paradox when he mentioned it had been proved by J.S. Bell in 1964, a postgraduate student working on his thesis. Dr Al-Khalili, a Quantum Physics researcher himself, paused a moment, exclaimed a derogative on the Bell's parentage, smiled at the class, and continued the lecture like nothing had happened. I remember trying not to laugh out loud that a mere student had beaten our lecturer to it. After that, the whole class listened attentively for at least a week, in case he did it again

By contrast, I can almost guarantee that I never laughed at anything my Thermal Physics lecturer said in class.

Humour sticks in people's minds. We swap jokes over coffee, watch comedians and clowns, and repeat funny things kids said. It gets your attention. Weave some into your fiction and the results can be wonderful. I can still quote verbatim large sections of Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, even though the last time I read it was years ago. It stuck in my mind, taking up space that should have gone to Bessel functions and other mathematical equations.

This quote is one that I have been wanting to track down for ages. It is from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, another Douglas Adams book. I haven't read the book since at least 1993, and don't own a copy of it any more, but I remembered the quote.

When I took a comedy writing course a while back I learned the grim truth that writing humour can be a cold blooded business. It doesn't just happen, you have to sit and think up something that might be funny, play with it until it works, and then write another one. Write ten more, discard nine of them, and write another ten. And keep going. John Vorhaus's book The Comic Toolbox: How To Be Funny Even If You're Not was a great manual on writing humour. I've found it creeping into other writing sometimes, a turn of phrase, an exaggeration, a fish out of water situation, a contrast, things with the potential to be funny.

It is worth learning something about humour, even if it's not your main focus, because it can bring fiction alive, breathe life into nonfiction and make your words stick long after you have moved on.