by Pat Dennis

The ability to make someone laugh, whether on stage or in print, is not only a gift but quite possibly a genetic defect. I believe a person’s funny bone is inherited, right along with eye color and feet the size of Toronto.

In other words, you’re born funny. From day one, the humorists amongst us have had no choice but to look at, see, and experience life differently from the norm. It’s as if we were shot into this world, straight from our mommas’ wombs, wearing 3-D glasses perched atop rubber noses.

When people ask me why I choose to write humor, I tell them I would rather laugh at life than cry about it. Like most writers and comedians, I have always felt as if I were on the outside of the party, looking in. In my case, the partygoers included snake-handling, speaking-in-tongues fundamentalists, raging alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, pencil-thin women, loving kin, relocated Southerners, and a mother whose real name was Obedience.

I’ve often tried not to be me. It never worked, or at least not for long. In my younger days I thought being a writer meant solitary walks in the rain wearing a trench coat and tattered beret (the latter bit of fashion being an incredibly difficult piece of clothing to find on the south side of Chicago). But just like my belted, Sears Burberry knockoff, the writer’s costume I wore was as phony as my early writing. I was trying to be something I was not: deadly serious. Turns out, I only became a real writer when I started being deadly funny and seriously me.

I’ve never felt less of a writer because my writing takes a comical bent. I realize it requires as much talent and intelligence to record the ironic as it does to write novels somber enough to bring Oprah to tears. What I do not know is whether someone can actually be taught to be witty.

The funny gene can be inherited or passed on from one dysfunctional generation to the next. I’d probably be both famous and rich if I were even half as funny as my dad. Being funny can also be caught, like a virus, but in this case the carrier wouldn’t be viral. It would be the first-grade teacher who didn’t like you. Or that neighbor kid who called you “four eyes” or made fun of your homemade, bottle cap earrings. Or whoever—or whatever situation—made you decide to use humor early on in life as a defense mechanism.

Humor is something you feel immediately. Whether you share it at the moment, or later in print, is up to you. Some of the funniest stand-ups I know are dreadful bores in real life. I traveled a thousand miles with a comedian who only communicated with shrugs or one-word answers. By the time we reached Albert Lea, I wanted to push him out of the car. But when he stood in front of a crowd, he was a comic genius.

Humor writers can be equally deceptive. Some are the life of the party, while many are not, preferring to save their smiling muse for the page. When I teach creative writing, I can never tell who will be funny on paper until I read their words. The class clown will often be unable to string a sentence together while the quiet nerd in the corner will have me guffawing. And guffawing is not a term we comedians use lightly.

I am not saying the ability to be hysterically funny is only based in destiny or the merging of biological traits. There are a few ways to enhance even the most minute sense of humor. I have read novice comedy scribblers who managed to write an entire 200-page manuscript without once bringing a smile to my face. Years later, I’d read their newly published and highly remunerated humor pieces and be green with envy, while doubling over in laughter. What happened?

Butt time, as in sitting on your butt, that’s what happened.

In the stand-up world, we call it stage time. Give a struggling comic wannabe enough stage time, and she or he will eventually turn into a pro. The same thing is true with writing. If you want to be a writer, then you have to stay in that chair, putting words on the page, over and over again, until you get it right. Getting it right in humor writing, means tweaking and twisting your work until it makes you laugh, and then someone else.

If you’re writing humor, you need an audience, the same as a stand-up comic. You can be the funniest comedian in the world, but if no one ever sees you, then you’re just considered a crazy postmenopausal woman talking to herself in the Lane Bryant fitting-room mirror. For a writer, if no one reads your work, what’s the point? That’s why I strongly believe in both writing classes and writers’ groups. Nothing will bring out your inner funny and motivate you more than making someone laugh.

There’s something else about time you need to know. As in stand-up, timing is one of the most important elements in humor writing. You need to allow just enough words to get your funny across, but too many, and your punch line will be lost in the onslaught. As that laugh-a-day Polonius once quipped, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” (Or am I the only one who finds Hamlet funny?)

What is the most important thing you need to know about writing humor? You need to write it well. Comedic writing needs the same editing, tightening, punctuation, and grammatical finesse as any piece of literature. Don’t think you can get away with bad grammar because you’re going for laughs. Trust me, there ain’t no way that will work. See what I mean?

Pat Dennis is the author of Hotdish To Die For, a collection of six culinary mystery short stories in which hotdish is the weapon of choice. She is the editor of Who Died in Here? and Hotdish Haiku, and her work has appeared in The Silence of the Loons, Resort to Murder, Once Upon a Crime: An Anthology of Murder, Mayhem, and Suspense, Minnesota Monthly, Woman’s World, the Pioneer Press, and Anne Frasier’s upcoming Deadly Treats. Pat is a stand-up comedian who entertains at Fortune 500 special events, women’s organizations, and church basements across the country.