Humour Writing with Neil Humphreys
The Writer’s Guild gets up to some funny business.
Just a few weeks ago, the Writer’s Guild invited renowned author and journalist Neil Humphreys to RI to host a workshop on writing funny stories. Now, this may seem like light work to some of you, but there’s a few tricks to it – not only how to make the audience laugh, but how to get away with it without offending anyone.
On our very first session, it was clear from the moment we stepped into the room that the atmosphere was already charged with energy. Mr Humphreys was sitting in front of the room, chatting with our members even before the session proper had started.
Every session kicked off with a round of icebreakers to both liven up the mood and to get the wheels in our head turning. It was, after all, a little early in the morning for some of us.
Once everyone was warmed up for the day’s work, we’d begin the workshop. Mr Humphreys would begin by telling stories from his many experiences in Singapore, from a “hawker centre/cannibal ritual” to somehow leaping into the arms of a poor bus driver at midnight. The best part? These stories were 100% true, and he’s catalogued these experiences and more in his writing.
As each story came to the punchline, the scattered giggles around the room from those who were already predicting what would come next would turn into raucous laughter. How was it that not a single story failed to hit the mark, every single one evoking chuckle after chuckle?
That was what was so special about this workshop. Each and every teaching point came out of personal, first-hand experience, unique and believable but all at once hilarious. Not only that, but through these stories we could identify the patterns of what made a story so funny, and how to replicate these secrets in our own writing.
After listening to Mr Humphrey’s stories, our members then set about ideating our own comedy pieces. We began with life experience – from misunderstanding the word “restroom” to a confrontation with a cat, from a mishap at a cosplay convention to a tattoo of the Maclaurin’s Series, there was no end to the variety of bizarrely amusing things that have happened to us. From there we swapped stories, sharing them with the whole club to better understand what could make any funny story hit all the sweet spots.
Once all our original experiences were in place, we took to expanding them. We looked for additional layers we could add – types of humour, self-deprecation, wider comments on society – and melded them with our stories to make them even better. We learned to create empathetic characters, ones that our audience would love, and to use these characters to approach social topics from unusual and definitely funny angles.
This workshop is quite different indeed from what most imagine the Writer’s Guild to be – our members during these sessions were far from a bunch of brooding, tortured poets. In the midst of laughter and some chaos, we discovered a whole new way of writing short stories.
A big thank you to Mr Humphreys for coaching us so masterfully! Dearest readers, do look forward to more pieces from the Writer’s Guild that will have you ROFL-ing (metaphorically or literally doesn’t quite matter.)
