Creating Characters: How to Build Story People

by Swain, Dwight V.

  Finally, scan these lines from Marissa Piesman’s Unorthodox Practices:

  Nina stared at the heading on the Chinese menu. Pork. Chicken. Beef. Seafood. Noodles. Each gave her a little thrill. Nina felt a certain way in Chinese restaurants. A way she felt nowhere else. The way an old-time alkie must feel in a broken-down gin mill. A sense of familiarity and comfort tinged with guilt. Only around Chinese food did Nina drop even a semblance of vigilance and eat like a pig. Like Aunt Sophie at the Viennese table at a bar mitzvah. Like Albert Finney in Tom Jones. Like the girls in the dorm on a heavy marijuana night. There had been a lot of magazine talk lately about comfort food. Cookbooks written on mashed potatoes, chicken pot pie, and macaroni and cheese. Shrimp with lobster sauce was Nina’s comfort food. It certainly tasted better than anything her mother had ever actually cooked.

  The unanticipated, yet applicable, alternative to the should abounds here. The stereotyped norm is under fire from all directions. Thus, people are supposed to order from a menu, Chinese or otherwise, not thrill to the items listed. Her state of mind is compared to that of an alcoholic in a decaying bar, so that she develops a “sense of familiarity and comfort tinged with guilt.” Fastidiousness is replaced by such gross gluttony that she eats “like a pig,” or even her Aunt Sophie or Albert Finney. The whole passage is a paroxysm of exaggeration, warped analogy, and compulsive food fetishism, and the picture it paints gives Nina a dimension of which we were previously unaware, even while it provides amusement.

  How does all this add up to laughter? Let’s take another look at our original hypothesis:

  Laughter is the noise a person makes when he or she attains release from the tyranny of the “should.”

  What is this should I talk about? How is it a tyrant?

  Life gives us our answer: The world is supposed to be a certain way. People and things should act as expected, stay consistent to their established specifications and characteristics and behavior patterns, with fire forever hot, ice cold, guns lethal, and kittens playful.

  Now you and I know, however, that should and is very well may prove to be miles apart, and we have the Kinsey and Hite reports to prove it. But from Socrates and Galileo on down it’s been treason to suggest such. In the view of most people, most of the time, anything that contradicts the way things are assumed and anticipated to be is potentially dangerous. Those who deviate from the foreordained idea constitute menaces to society. And this is the case whether the issue be physical, intellectual, or moral.

  In a word, the should becomes a tyrant to enslave us, rule our lives. We’re brought up in the belief that we should behave according to set standards and convictions of our culture because, implicitly, not to do so may prove disastrous. What started out as rough rule of thumb, a crude map scratched in sand to guide us, now burgeons forth as ironclad law.

  Entering any situation, therefore, you’re to a degree alert, which is to say tense—muscles at least a fraction contracted in preparation for potential fight or flight in case danger looms. Awareness of new experience always creates this tension. If you perceive no hazard, no departure from the way you feel the situation should be, your tension eases.

  But now suppose that what you discover, far from fitting into the preconceived scheme of things dictated by the should, is an extreme and unanticipated deviation from what you expected.

  If the discovery comes abruptly enough, and if elements of similarity between anticipated and unanticipated may be observed clearly enough, and if the new state of affairs, though startling, plunges you into no real danger and does you no real damage, and if you’re in the right mood, then your tension may be released suddenly in that succession of rhythmic, spasmodic expirations with open glottis and vibration of the vocal folds that we call laughter.

  That is, you’ve met the unanticipated, the deviation from the should, and it hasn’t proved disastrous. The shock of discovering it ridiculous instead of dangerous has triggered release of your pent-up tension in a muscular paroxysm, pleasurable instead of painful. You’ve attained release from the tyranny of the should.

  In other words, you laughed.

  Or at least smiled.

  And if you didn’t—?

  Odds are that it’s for one or more of seven reasons . . . seven key points at which anyone’s attempt at humor may go astray:

  1. You didn’t start with a clearly defined should . . . a way things are supposed to be.

  Humor begins with assumption, anticipation. Further, this assumption must be one held by or at least familiar to your readers. If you have no mental image of a standard, how can you be aware of—let alone appreciate—deviations from that standard? For a sweet little old lady’s inappropriate behavior to be funny to you, you must first have a picture in your head of just how sweet little old ladies do or should act. We must have expectations where they’re concerned. Same for cops, robbers, lovers, mothers-in-law, shipwrecked sailors, and all the other traditional comic figures.

  Including unique, individual story people of your own creation!

  The same principle applies to situations, places, things. Funerals are supposed to be solemn, hospitals quiet, cars mobile, and so on.

  Here, however, we need to bear another key fact in mind: People laugh at reaction rather than action—and situations and places and things don’t react.

  Consider, for example, the man who turns on a faucet. Instead of the normal flow expected, a great gush of water spouts forth, drenching him. When onlookers laugh, it’s at the man’s actual or imagined startlement/outrage at the unanticipated turn of events, rather than the event itself. The faucet is only a means to an end. The victim’s reaction is the issue.

  Same way, a major reason people like anecdotes is because they’re interested in seeing how the central character reacts to danger or adversity or embarrassment or the unanticipated.

  Often, of course, especially in jokes, the reaction is implicit. The reader or auditor visualizes what the central character is anticipating—and the shock with which he’ll respond to the unantici pated. You don’t have to actually see someone’s pants fall down in order to know that it will discomfit the person to whom it happens.

  Humor of character frequently is based on emotional reactions inappropriate or incongruous to a given situation. The unique personal approach the character takes is manifested in overreaction, underreaction, or unanticipated reaction. Thus, naive calm in the presence of a man-eating Bengal tiger . . . extreme upset over a burnt piece of toast . . . responding to the butterfly perched on a nude girl’s knee rather than to the girl’s nudity . . . all these are productive of humor, and all are based on the idea that there is a set and accepted way of reacting to such dilemmas and situations.

  The should in language is equally obvious. Its roots lie in our assumption that there is a standard of grammar, of structure, of definition, and that proper people will bow to the rules. Then, along comes dialect, warping all the regulations in the name of the foreigner’s unfamiliarity with English, and we collapse in gales of hilarity. Or a pun harmlessly punctures our pretensions of knowledge, our mental image of the applicability of a given word, and we laugh at how neatly it fits into the unanticipated context.

  A factor which also enters here and in much other humor is inflation of ego—the feeling of superiority that comes when actual or potential ridicule focuses on a character. We know how something’s supposed to be said. When Character reveals his ignorance, we automatically glory in the fact that we know better.

  Process, especially, offers unlimited possibilities for this kind of ego-boo, with a whole series of shoulds linked together. This is why so much slapstick comedy centers on someone trying to hang a screen or paper a wall or bake a pie. One funny twist acts as springboard to another; mirth mounts; repetition of a bit (the so-called “running gag”) intensifies the effect, and the audience rolls in the aisles.

  And so it goes. The thing to remember is that one way or another, implicitly or explicitly, humor alwa
ys is predicated on a should. That’s why it’s so often claimed that there are only a dozen or so basic jokes. It’s not that just drunks or taxes or politicians or stinginess are funny; it’s that our attitudes are clearly set where such subjects are concerned. They’re the areas with the broadest, most familiar shoulds. The rules in relation to Ornithischia or nuclear theory or theosophy may be every bit as rigid, but not as many people know about them. So, the chances of a general reader reacting to humor built around them are likely to be slim.

  Does this mean you must abandon such subjects?

  On the contrary. It merely demands that you build up a picture to knock down . . . create an image of a should.

  After which, it might be to your advantage to take an even harder look at the alternatives that it implies.

  2. The alternative isn’t far enough removed from the should.

  There’s a thing called subtlety. In humor it can very easily be carried too far.

  Contrast is the issue.

  What is contrast? It’s the exhibition of noticeable differences between things when they’re compared or set side by side.

  For most of us, it’s difficult to distinguish instantly between a 1988 Ford and a 1989 Ford. The contrast between them isn’t marked enough, in our eyes. Same way for perfumes, mentholated cigarettes, women’s hats, and old crime movies on TV.

  If you’re reasonably literate, you’ll be amused by such student boners as “An epistle is the wife of an apostle,” or “An unbridled orgy is a wild horse,” or “Ambiguity means having two wives living at the same time.” But there also are segments of the population that will greet such sallies with blank stares.

  The conclusion for you to draw from this is that if the issue is humor and you’re in search of a wide audience, you’d better select an alternative markedly different from the chosen should. So different, in fact—in content or presentation or intention—that it can’t be taken seriously.

  Sometimes direct reversal is the answer here—the Texan who buys his dog a boy, the village where nothing happens every minute, the cannibal who walks into a restaurant and orders a waiter. But more often if suffices—especially in non-joke humor—merely to examine common assumptions about your subject, then deviate as far as your imagination will allow.

  Thus, scientists are supposed to be brilliant. Deviate slightly, and we get an inept scientist—and because he’s merely inept, he’s likely to prove more painful or piteous than funny. Difference from the accepted should is insufficient. It must be different to a degree that reduces the should to absurdity.

  Suppose, then, that instead of just making our scientist inept, we picture him as impossibly stupid—a bumbling little man, a labo ratory janitor, with incongruous pretensions to being a scientist. At once, he takes on comic overtones and everything he does holds the potentiality of humor.

  In the same way, a person with a vestigial tail is victim of a minor physical handicap, to be remedied by surgery as soon as possible. Give the entire human race long, bushy tails and you have an unanticipated alternative to the should of accepted human development that H. Allen Smith built to book length in that wild volume entitled The Age of the Tail.

  How many young women have dated sailors? Ruth McKenney multiplied the situation by five Brazilian naval cadets in a classic of yesteryear, My Sister Eileen. It made her a fortune.

  All of us daydream of transcending physical law. Marcel Ayme translated that fantasy into The Man Who Walked Through Walls. Care to try to imagine an alternative farther from its should than that?

  3. The alternative to the should lacks applicability.

  To have humorous applicability, an alternative must epitomize the contradiction between should and unanticipated deviation.

  Applicability means that a sort of implicit analogy exists between assumption and alternative; a clearly recognizable parallel between what we expect and what we get. The two situations, though not the same, have certain key points in common.

  If such a parallel doesn’t exist, we have difference, but not necessarily humor.

  Take, for example, a cartoon in which a stenographer enters a room where a man lies immersed in a bath. The man says, “Excuse me for not rising, Miss Glutz.”

  The humor in this, such as it is, centers on the fact that for the man to rise would violate our society’s nudity taboo—a strong, sexually oriented should. When he says, “Excuse me for not rising,” he calls attention to this issue with a familiar phrase entirely acceptable to closely analogous situations. And this, of course, pinpoints the contradiction, the contrast between alternative and should.

  Suppose, instead, that the punchline had been delivered by the stenographer: “Shall I take those letters now, Mr. Glutz?”

  Unanticipated deviation from the norm? To a degree.

  Funny? Not very.

  Why? Because the should that surrounds conditions under which stenographers may take dictation is much less rigid than the one governing nudity. Hence, there’s less contradiction to epitomize; hence, less applicability of alternative to should; hence, less humor.

  In other words, applicability, like almost everything else in this world, is a matter of degree, with some alternatives riotous, others tired or dreary, others complete washouts.

  Now let’s try another switch. This time, we’ll leave the punch-line the same, “Excuse me for not rising, Miss Glutz.” But we’ll replace the stenographer with a sexy-looking blonde in a negligee.

  Applicability: nil. Humor: nil.

  Why? Because we no longer have an applicable alternative. Girl in negligee plus man in bathtub equals a sex-oriented situation. So even though the man’s line is unanticipated, it comes out banal instead of funny, because it expresses no real contradiction, no true conflict between should and is. It does not call attention to the point of the gag, because no point exists.

  In contrast, consider Charles Addams’s famous panel that shows ski-tracks on a snowy landscape. There’s a tree in the foreground. The tracks indicate that one ski went on one side of the tree, the other on the other.

  Here our assumption, our should, says that trees are something you go around when you’re on skis. With both skis on one side.

  Unanticipated alternative: In this particular case, one ski goes on one side, the other on the other, in direct violation of physical possibility.

  Which can’t be—but here it is—only how—?

  Contradiction epitomized. Reality contravened. An alternative so applicable yet unexplainable that the cartoon sticks in your memory for years.

  In summary, then . . . the unanticipated alternative must hold strong elements of the familiar . . . must have clear-cut points in common with the should, so that it may capture and pinpoint the ridiculousness of the situation, the absurdity of the contrast between what’s shown or described and what’s supposed to be.

  Naturally, alternatives that fill such a bill of particulars are ever so easy to find. Ask any humor writer along about 2:00 A.M. some morning, when he finally gives up hunting for the apt phrase and deft twist and heads for the nearest bottle because he’s too frustrated to go to bed.

  But at least now you know just what it is you’re hunting!

  4. The differences that distinguish alternative from assumption aren’t sufficiently emphasized.

  Earlier, we said that contrast lies close to the heart of humor. It’s rooted in the disparity between assumption and alternative, should and is. But it’s one thing for a disparity to exist; another for your reader to recognize and laugh about it.

  Your two most useful tools for bringing this disparity into focus, and thus sharpening your humor, are exaggeration and incongruity. The one throws a spotlight on the point at issue. The other places that point in a situation where its difference from the norm stands out.

  Exaggeration means overstatement, understatement, distortion. You may exaggerate situation, character, reaction, language—you name it. Exaggeration of anything, carried to an extreme, equals reduc
tion to absurdity.

  You overstate when you refer to a woman after a Cub Scout den meeting as a “broken figure.” Or when, as an example of her husband’s penuriousness, you say that he expects their children to make all-day suckers last a week. You understate when you claim a girl’s figure makes a fencepost’s look good, or that you need a job so bad you’re willing to pay the boss to let you work. You distort when you give a man’s Adam’s apple inordinate attention, or emphasize a dowager’s pouter-pigeon bosom to a ludicrous degree, or otherwise overstate or understate part of a whole.

  Incongruity, in turn, strikes a jarring note between elements with which you work. It’s the beautiful girl with the 96-pound weakling as a favored suitor; the prospector boiling the beans who offers his partner a menu; the rabbit riding in a kangaroo’s pouch. The inappropriate, the inconsistent, the contradictory, the paradoxical, the reverse English twist—all are incongruous and, hence, help to intensify our awareness of contrast, deviation from the norm, and humor.

  5. Awareness of the contrast doesn’t come abruptly.

  A joke is like a scorpion. The stinger belongs in the tail.

  Similarly, in non-joke humor, timing is crucial.

  What do we mean by timing? We mean that you present a key fragment of material at the moment when it will achieve maximum humorous effect.

  When is that moment? It’s when the shock of contrast between assumption and alternative is most marked, most clearly defined.

  In other words, the thing you need to strive for is to throw the elements with which you’re working into juxtaposition in such a way and at such a time as will enable your reader to see for himself, instantly, that the result is funny, as illustrated in examples earlier in this chapter. Failure to do so will put you in the position of the speaker who forgets the point of a joke.