What's so funny?

If it makes you laugh, it will make the reader laugh. Trust yourself, especially about humor. Humor is the highest art form. Satire, irony, whatever you choose to call it. If you think it's funny, the reader will too.

Ellen Gilchrist, The Writing Life

Ellen Gilchrist

The above is what novelist Ellen Gilchrist says she tells the students in her creative writing classes. She is right, I think. But she is also wrong.

First, why is she wrong?

She's wrong because people laugh at different things. Many share my delight in P.G. Wodehouse. Many others don't. The same is true of any other humor writer you might mention. I wrote a few months ago about a novel (Nobody, Somebody, Anybody) that the book jacket described as "laugh-out loud funny" but which I did not find funny at all.

My late wife and I rarely laughed at the same things. We shared laughs when we watched Laurel and Hardy together, some situation comedies and some romantic comedies, but not much else. She never found anything funny about Abbott and Costello, Woody Allen or Mel Brooks. Her favorite comedian was Red Skelton, and in fact he may have been the only comedian she enjoyed. Yet I think she laughed much more than I ever did. She just laughed at things I didn't find amusing at all. Whenever I laughed,  she looked at me as if to say, "What so funny about that?"

So if something makes you laugh, it won't necessarily make a reader laugh.

But them why is Gilchrist also right? Because you can't write humor for someone other than yourself. If you write something that seems funny to you, it may not be funny to someone else; but if you write something that isn't funny to you, it almost certainly won't be funny to anyone else either. If you are going to try to write humor — and it's not easy for most writers — you have to write what seems funny to you and hope others will share your delight. It's the only way.