4 Ways to Make Your Readers Laugh

Adding humor to your writing is more than just telling a few jokes or dropping in some funny sounding names. It's more than relying on tried-and-true tropes and truisms.

It's more about creating unusual situations for characters to react to, or catching your readers pleasantly off-guard with unexpected connections.

A law firm called Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe is only going to be funny once. Two dentists named Ketchem and Pullem has a limited shelf life.

Ken Jennings explained the secret to good humor writing in his book, “Planet Funny.” He wrote, "Don't say funny things, say things funny."

There are as many as 12 different theories and practices you can use to get a laugh with your writing that go beyond advice like “use words that end in K" or “use funny names.”

You can find rich sources of humor if you can tell a story where normal people are in an unusual situation, or unusual people are in a normal situation. That's a comedy screenwriting technique called “Fish Out Of Water,” and you can see it in TV shows like “Schitt's Creek,” “Community,” or “Big Bang Theory,” or even great movies like “Back To The Future.”

You can tell stories like that all day long, mining a variety of situations for all kinds of humor, and never once resort to a name like Harry Plopper.

Let's look at four of the most frequently used sources of humor you can use to get your audience laughing.

1. Iceberg theory

The first is called iceberg theory. It isn't officially a humor technique, but it's important to most good writing including humor.

Iceberg theory refers to the fact that the portion of the iceberg that you can see is supported by the much larger portion that's underwater.

The American author Ernest Hemingway created the idea of the iceberg theory, telling writers that they needed to have all kinds of knowledge and details in their minds when they wrote about a subject. As he said in his story, "Death In The Afternoon”:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

Humor works on the iceberg theory, because you're only describing the parts of the story that are needed to get a reaction out of your reader. You can leave out the extra details, and the readers will think for themselves and fill in the details with...

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