Humor writing gets very little respect these days

I’m a humor writer. Been one for a number of years now. Sometimes it involves fiction; other times it’s incorporated into non-fiction. Either way, it is something I enjoy doing.

What I have discovered is that no matter what genre or style I utilize it in, it rarely gets a lot of respect by anyone in those respective fields. And that’s what I’d like to talk about today.

First, as most people who attempt to write humor know, good humor is very difficult to write. You either know what you’re doing, or you don’t. Those who don’t know how to write good humor end up writing really bad humor, but think that they’re funny. Such writing is very difficult to read, and quite often these conversations go something like:

You: “Um, I really like what you did with this piece.”

Attempted Funny Person: “What did you find funny about the piece?”

You: “Um…” Which quite often is followed by you dropping one of those smoke pellets that were used in cartoons and really bad spy films, where you make your get-away, realizing that if you don’t disappear quickly you’re somehow going to have to answer that unanswerable question.

Which then leads to the mistake so many people make when they think that humor must be so easy to write, and anyone can do it, even though they personally can’t do it themselves. This culminates in the erroneous postulation that humor is never to be taken seriously, so therefore it is not important…