Yet it often happens that if you sit down with the full intent to write humor, your brain will go blank, as you force yourself to be on stage all of a sudden without a set, without an audience, anything. As despair crashes upon your soul, you realize you could well spend thousands of years waiting for Godot.
In those white-knuckle situations, I remember what Yoda, that dear, wrinkled sage of the ages, may his tribe increase until we're knee-deep in little aliens with long, flappy ears, said. "Do or do not. There is no try." Then it comes to me like a flash: do not write humor.
Instead, I will write about something as seriously and as truthfully as I can, in excruciating detail, bringing in all random associations possible, with my pen grimly plowing through all the angst and self-loathing of humanity-- until something snaps, and I start making paper airplanes.
Whoo! These are fun. I have ten different ways to make them-- planes that always crash, planes that always loop, planes that fly in spirals., planes that glide long distances, planes that peter out quickly, fast and slow airplanes. I wish there had been an paper airplane-making guild or club in high school, I would have shone, possibly have won a scholarship to study at NASA. Or at least, I'd have proven to my physics teacher I knew something about physics despite flunking his silly formulas that he obviously made up everyday. I knew this for a fact because he couldn't define the letters in those formulae for me..
"Gee, didn't you learn your ABC's already?" He'd imply, or directly claim he'd already explained it, when he had just went off on a tangent about basic math.
And all the time I was thinking,:"What's h dressed up as today? One day you claim it's about height, the next day it's a constant plank, and now you're claming it's a field. Quit the Jack Daniels' and start teaching real physics."
Memo to all teachers: less shorthand, more explanation-- and more paper airplanes for extra credit.
Back to Yoda, who had mastered "h" in all its guises, I'm absolutely sure, because he never had my physics teacher... okay, deep breaths. My apologies for the temporary author malfunction.
Yoda's simple statement also teaches polarity, the graininess of the universe, the lack of in-between-ness; crystal clear logic which sucks up all doubt like a cosmic vacuum.
Do. Do not. No "try to decipher my homemade mumbo-jumbo and vague handwaves instead of getting on with actual science."
When I find myself hornswoggled as to how to write humor, I may also just pick something to write about and see where it takes me. Like, for instance, I might write all I know about accounting, which is zilch to the Hth, yet I somehow haven't managed to sink multinational corporations into bankruptcy or undermine global economies. Maybe that's the paper airplanes; they must be good luck charms.
Why not? That's about as sensible as claiming light has a constant plank height on a field. Which is a stinking, baldfaced, pestiental lie. I've photographed planks of all size and orientations in fields, and I can prove the light's height, width, intensity, etc. changes as the sun (or plank) moves. Did that teacher ever spend any time outdoors? Hmm. Perhaps not, he was kind of pale..
At least our star, merry ol' Sol, is far less erratic than his teaching methods were-- hmm, maybe they might have been a tad clearer if I had used one of these required decoder rings. Honestly, I tried to buy one, but that comic book shop around the corner creeped me out big time. Ick.
Fortunately, I've had better physics teachers since. I even understand how to propagate uncertainty, which is totally unlike vegetative propagation, but sort of similar, if you think of propagating uncertainty like propagating mutant vegetation, but then that idea gets too comic-booky for me.
When I'm NOT writing humor, I also might write a few random things down and then find common associations between the two. So for instance, if I listed writing and sewage control, I would naturally come up with a story about a poetry slam. Then I'd dig even deeper and find a more unexpected and spiritual connection, such as a haunted sewing-machine factory that starts writing Proust at night, every night. Fresh Proust, that is, with admirable detail on bustle-craft and fashion through the ages. And no, it wouldn't be funny because I would write it completely seriously from the viewpoint of the sewing-machines themselves as they grapple with À la recherche du points perdu.