6 Serious Tips for Writing a Comic Novel

A dangerous assignment, explaining humor. I’m tempted to cut my tips down to “one neat trick,” write “BE FUNNY,” and be gone—but the kind people at Writer’s Digest are expecting between 600 and 1,200 words, and I’m not a scaredy cap. Besides, a little danger is appropriate.

(5 Steps to Write Funny Nonfiction.)

There is nothing I approach with greater solemnity than the composition of a comic novel. And, it must be said, I have a new one to promote: Medium Rare—a tragicomedy, to be more precise—about a regular guy who fills out a perfect March Madness bracket.

So, here they are: my six serious tips for writing a comic novel.

Sitting at your desk chortling over the sublimities of your own wit is no guarantee that anyone else will when your book comes out however many years later. But if you’re not eliciting the readerly response you’re looking for from yourself while drafting? Bad sign.

No one is likely to find your jokes funnier than you do, at least not those of the intentional variety; nor will you encounter a visceral response more verifiably authentic than your own. Be a good first reader to yourself, and make the writer listen to them. Throw tomatoes if needed.

Okay, but what does “be a good reader to yourself” actually mean?

Above all, judging the sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and totality of your manuscript as you would with any other name at the top, from author unknown to Jane Austen. Achieving the sort of egoic dissociation required to do this is hard, even painful, especially at first, and especially especially if your ego is as big as mine. It took a full year for me to unlock this state—akin to if not synonymous with “flow”—before I could start writing my debut novel in earnest.

For Medium Rare it came more easily, but only because I’d done it before. I am not aware of any shortcuts.

Humor is an agile, protean beast, able to nest (with skillful direction) at any and all levels of the novel. That said, going whole-hog at the highest via a “bizarre premise” seems to be a disproportionately effective strategy. Funny overarching conceits not only require the sort of sustained commitment that thrives on deep interest and expertise conducive to high quality, but also generally have the advantage of being “high concept.” They are easier to summarize, easier to elevator-pitch.

You can see this advantage in action above: Medium Rare is high concept, its bizarre premise readily communicated in half a sentence. A regular guy fills out a perfect March Madness bracket. Whether or not you fancy this particular conceit, its communicability alone is no small advantage in the ultra-competitive literary marketplace.

“Impropriety is the soul of wit,” wrote W. Somerset Maugham, accomplishing the rare feat of matching Shakespeare’s. While the 19th-century novelists were unfair beneficiaries of its fullest suite of benefits—there was simply so much Victorian prudery to trounce—authors can still leverage taboo to great comedic effect.

The challenge used to be courage; it is now, ironically, restraint. When there is little shock to shock alone, taboo humor becomes an exercise in nuance and sophistication. I find its comedic potential most abundant these days when unleashed in the raw pursuit of truth independent of social convention rather than in contrarian opposition to it.

Satire, too, presents tricky, but navigable, contemporary challenges. Self-caricatures abound in political and cultural life; headlines in the New York Times are already straight out of the Onion. So what’s a latter-day Swift to do? One option is to toe the line between satire and realism, highlighting absurdity through zhuzhed fidelity over wild exaggeration.

I find this sort of “pretending to pretend,” with its pleasing recursivity, unusually conducive to capturing the ready humor of unbelievable realities. Both of my novels do it—but it is especially pronounced in Medium Rare, which features Donald Trump in the only role I find him qualified to assume: minor character in fiction.

Comedy is popularly associated with levity, with lightness—but paradox is humor’s apex, and its lightness thrives in the dark. I refer not only to black and gallows humor, but wit’s every cast and shade.

To write a comic novel is to contend with leggerezza’s heft and the depths of triviality; a task every bit as serious as its tragic counterpart. In the best cases: arguably one and the same. “Life is a tragicomedy!” exclaims the cunning Lady Delacour in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda. “Though the critics will allow of no such thing in their books, it is a true representation of what passes in the world.”

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