Go Deep Without Getting Wet: How to Invite Reflection and Still Get the Laugh (On Humor)

Erma Bombeck once wrote about the thin line between laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt. She would know. She wrote about laundry and carpools for 30 years, and somewhere in the middle of a paragraph about a washing machine, you would suddenly find yourself thinking about mortality, and then you would laugh again, and then you would put the paper down and stare at the wall.

(How Open Mics Will Sharpen Your Writing.)

That is comedy at its best. Readers do not come to humor writing to be shallow. They come to laugh, yes, but they stay for the small flash of recognition underneath the laugh—the sense that the writer noticed something true and decided to be funny about it. A joke with nothing under it is a balloon on the ceiling. You acknowledge it, then move on. A joke with something under it is a balloon tied to your finger, and the knot is not coming out.

The problem is that depth is easy to overdo. Nothing kills a humor piece faster than a writer reaching for profundity like it is the last biscuit. Here are five ways to go deep without looking like you are trying.

Bring in Socrates. Bring in Kierkegaard. Bring in whoever you had to read in college and immediately resented. Then undercut it.

Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates also never had to examine a Costco receipt at 9 p.m. under a parking lot light, wondering how he spent $340 on paper towels and a rotisserie chicken.

The quote does the heavy lifting. It signals to the reader that you have thoughts. The undercut signals that you are not going to make them sit through the thoughts. You get the credibility of the philosopher and the goodwill of the guy in the parking lot. That is a bargain.

Make sure to quote accurately. Look it up before you use it, because somewhere out there is a reader who already has, and he will write you about it.

When I need an idea with weight, I read poems. Poets have already done the excavation. They have spent four years and a small breakdown getting to a single image—the color of plums, a horse in the fog, a mother’s hands. They leave it sitting right there on the page for anyone to pick up.

Read Mary Oliver on paying attention. Read Billy Collins, who is funnier than most humor writers and never announces it. Read Rumi if you want to feel simultaneously enlightened and underachieving. You are not stealing. You are borrowing a lens. The poet found the true thing; you are the one who noticed it is also funny.

Somebody wrote a poem about geese leaving. I watched a plastic bag do the same thing over the Publix parking lot, felt something, and am not proud of it.

I have gotten column ideas from poetry packed with meaning and metaphor and other big writerly words I cannot think of right now. Poems are also the only thing I read that does not make me want to lie down.

You can write about grief, faith, exile, aging, and the general disappointment of being the person you are, but you cannot cannonball into it.

Wade in ankle-deep. Mention your father once and move on to the hiccupping lawnmower. Reference the war you left without describing the war you left. The reader’s imagination will do the submerging.

My father wore Old Spice. I wear Old Spice now. My wife says it smells like a barbershop in 1974, and she is right, and I am not changing.

Restraint reads as confidence. A writer who lingers on the sad part is asking for a reaction; a writer who touches it and keeps walking gets one.

You can write about death, or you can write about expired yogurt.

There is a yogurt in my refrigerator that expired in March. I move it every morning to get to the milk. I will not eat it, and I will not throw it out, because the man who bought it—early riser, yogurt eater, 90 years old someday—no longer lives here.

Big abstractions—time, loss, love, meaning—are inert on the page. They only come alive when they are wearing a disguise. A junk drawer is a museum of intentions. A group text with your siblings is a family system with better emojis. A dying houseplant is every relationship you did not water.

Specificity is depth. The concrete detail is the deep one, and it has the enormous advantage of also being funny.

You do not have to be wise all the time. Hand the profound line to somebody else and stand there looking like the slow one.

My mechanic said you can tell how a man has been living by his tires. He looked at mine for a long time, then he asked if I was okay.

That works because I am not the one being deep. I am the one with the bad tires. The reader gets real insight and never has to watch a writer congratulate himself for having it.

Mothers are excellent for this. Grandfathers. Barbers, cab drivers, the woman working the meat-and-three counter. Children especially, who are ruthless and have no idea. Anybody who says a true thing without knowing it was a true thing.

Your job is humor. Not philosophy. Not therapy. Not a lightly funny TED talk. If the reader is not laughing, none of the depth counts. An unfunny humor column is just a sad essay with bad posture.

At the same time, you are allowed to appeal to the intellect. Once or twice a piece, let a line land harder than the reader expected. Allow them to reflect. Then get back to the jokes.

Deep enough to be felt. Shallow enough to breathe.