Humor
How to Improve Your Satire Writing by Reading
An addendum to the Greener Pasture’s Podcast
Welcome to the addendum of the Greener Pasture’s Podcast. Our weekly podcast is a place to explore satire writing through interviews with amazing writers (Eli Grober, Devorah Blachor, Brooke Preston, Leslie Ylinen, Chris Monks, Scott Dikkers, Carlos Greaves and so many more!) and chats with the editors of the podcast (like this this and this). If you haven’t yet, please give us a listen on Apple or Spotify!
On this week’s podcast, Cassie Soliday and I discussed some of our favorite satire pieces and how we can use them to improve our own writing. The team at Greener Pastures met through the Second City satire program (which I highly recommend), but there’s still so much to learn. One way I’ve found to improve my craft is to study the pieces I love. Here’s the technique I described in the podcast. I hope this works for you too!
READ
It should go without saying that technique requires reading. The more, the better. You’ll then take what you’ve identified from the exercise below and try it in your own writing.
Print out your favorite pieces (or save them as a PDF if you don’t have a printer).
There’s something about having a physical piece of paper to write on that I think activates a different part of your brain, but if you have to do it on your computer or tablet, do that.
IDENTIFY FORMAT
First up — identify the format. Is it a monologue? Quiz? Mapping? Word Problem? List? This or That? Flow Chart?
Once you’ve done this with a lot of pieces you like, you’ll likely see a pattern.
It’s also helpful to have a list of formats so when you have an idea, you can see what might work best. I keep a list on my notes app.
I do a quick word count too. See what length pieces feel best as a reader — and keep that in mind when you’re revising.
UNDERLINE JOKES
Now mark them up. Underline every joke. (If you want bonus points, underline jokes that make YOU LAUGH in one color and jokes you realize are jokes but don’t elicit much emotion in another).
Now you have a visual representation of joke density in the piece you liked. Are you drawn to pieces that are incredibly joke dense?
Examples of joke dense pieces:
- Gracie Beaver-Kairis’ A Typical Friday in Oregon, as Imagined by My East Coast Friends where almost every sentence is a joke.
- Ruyi Wen’s I’m Captain Ahab and I Say We Must Never Transition Away From a Whale-Based Energy Industry that has managed to pack every paragraph with tons of jokes.
Examples of pieces with more context/facts to root the reader in the joke:
- Chas Gillespie’s Innocent Children Are Dying in Unconscionable Human Warehouses on the US-Mexico Border, but I’m Going to Use My Political Capital to Complain About the Non-Existent Coddling of Millennials where the first paragraph is long and full of pretty depressing statistics but ends with a hard hitting joke.
- Matthew Brian Cohen’s This City Pledges to be Carbon-Neutral by the Time It’s Too Late where the first paragraph sounds like a typical statement on climate change, one we’ve heard hundreds of times, but ends with a huge twist (which makes it funny!). Since he set up the context in those first few sentences, the rest of the piece is more joke dense, proving you can combine these approaches.
It’s okay to like lots of different styles! But if you find yourself laughing more at one style, then that’s good information to have.
CATEGORIZE JOKES
Now that you’ve marked up all the jokes on the piece, go through and categorize joke types. Scott Dikkers — the founding editor of the Onion — presents 11 different funny fillers in his book, How to Write Funny: Your Serious Step-by-Step Blueprint for Creating incredibly, Irresistibly, Successfully Hilarious Writing. I highly recommend reading his books and understanding these filters. But go a step further — identify the types/categories of jokes you like. Grouping them in smaller categories can make them seem more concrete and because you’ve indentified the cateogry, it will be unique to your taste in humor. Identifying them this way can also give you an idea of how the joke was constructed.
Categorization doesn’t need to be formal or clever. We’re not trying to replicate Scott Dikkers’ work here. This is a shorthand so you can understand the types of jokes you love. Let’s take the four pieces listed above and look at the first paragraph in terms of joke density and MY joke categorizations:
Some of the categories I identified as I read the four pieces above include:
- Literal vs. figurative
- Other people say “XXXXX” (A sneaky way to get in your POV without breaking voice)
- Something that didn’t happen but could have happened
- Ask a ridiculous question. Answer
- Reversal
- Change an old quote
- Funny acronyms
- Take a well-known idea, tweak the end to change the meaning
- Using modern concepts but writing them in antiquated language
- Relating two totally un-relatable pieces
PRACTICE
Now that you’ve created your own list of joke categories you like, try it out in your own writing. If you’ve got a joke that’s not quite working, go to your list. Would a different category work better?
Or, as you’re writing, have a list of joke categories you want to try. If you’ve outlined your reps (or the points you want to hit in the piece), see if one point naturally fits with a category. You could also try writing each rep in a few different categories to see how it lands and if you find one category easier to write than another.
REVISE
Read your piece — is it as joke dense as the pieces you like? If not, where can you revise to add in more jokes?
USING THIS TECHNIQUE WITH PIECES THAT DON’T LAND
You can also use this technique in the reverse — take publications you love and find pieces that don’t land for you. Read them, mark them up, categorize their jokes — this will give you information about your taste. (No need to publicize what you don’t like — let’s all be nice here).
NEW PIECES
Have an idea that you think is similar to pieces you’ve loved, in either format, joke type, etc? Find all the pieces you can that you liked and do this exercise with them. If you can get at least three pieces that all have a similar format or approach, you can use those to help you craft your piece. You’ll notice similarities between those pieces in their approach, the way they structure their reps, how many of each joke categories they use. While this isn’t a fill-in-the-blank exercise, being mindful of having a wide breath of joke types can add variety to your piece.
FEEDBACK
If you try this out, let us know how it goes. What did you learn? What am I missing? What else do you want to hear us dive into on the podcast?
LISTEN
If you’ve found this helpful, I’ll bet you’ll find our interviews and editor chats insightful too! Give us a listen wherever you get your podcasts and if you like it, please give us a 5 star rating AND share with your writing friends.
