Previous
Chapter 18
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in On Writing Well, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Human Element
Simplicity vs. Clutter
Process and Organization
The Gift of Writing
Summary
Analysis
Through humor, writers can make points that they could never make seriously. For instance, satires like Catch-22 and Dr. Strangelove often make for the strongest political critiques. By exaggerating “some crazy truth,” humorists make its craziness obvious. For example, Zinsser noticed lots of women wearing hair-curlers in public in the 1960s, so he published a series of parody letters to the editor for a fake magazine called Haircurl. In other columns, he parodied more serious topics, like the peace negotiations after the Vietnam War. These columns closely parodied serious journalists’ style, and Zinsser made a serious point through his humor. He’s part of a long tradition of influential American political humorists. But humorists don’t have to write about national events—they can also just write about everyday life.
Humor only works when the audience gets the joke. Therefore, more than most writers, humorists have to connect their work to matters of public interest—or at least common experience. This also means that they can influence popular opinion more than most writers. However, this gives them a serious responsibility to speak the honest truth. Humor writing is difficult because it requires extremely careful attention to form: for instance, Zinsser’s Haircurl letters were as much a parody of journalism as a hit piece on hair curlers. Humorists have to find personas that are somehow both absolutely serious and completely absurd. This is the only way they can speak in their own voices without being completely sincere and make serious points while continuing to entertain the reader.
Themes
Zinsser has several rules for humorists. They must learn to write “good ‘straight’ English” before they switch to comedy, they have to joke about relatable topics, and they shouldn’t try too hard to get laughs. Many attempts at humor fail because readers and editors simply have different tastes, but humor doesn’t need to be funny to everyone.
Zinsser teaches a whole course on the history of American humor writing. He starts with George Ade’s clever “Fables in Slang,” like the parable about a worker who tries to organize a union, then gets paid off by management and switches sides. Ring Lardner’s plays parodied the conventions of American theater, Don Marquis wrote poems in the voice of a cockroach named Archy, and writers like Robert Benchley made humor more personal through free association and self-deprecation. S.J. Perelman mastered this free association style: he undermined conventional ideas and literary clichés by contrasting them with absurdities. Finally, Zinsser’s class ends with Woody Allen’s magazine pieces, like his memoirs in the voice of Hitler’s loyal barber.
Whether they know it or not, American humorists are automatically part of a long tradition. At a minimum, Zinsser believes, they ought to understand and learn from this tradition. Although most humorists respond to the specific events of their era, their jokes and techniques are timeless. But where many standard writing techniques (like the interview) never get old, humorists can’t keep making the same jokes, so they have to balance tried-and-true techniques with innovation in order to find a personal style. All of the humorists Zinsser cites managed to do this successfully: they’re outrageously funny because they each found a hilarious individual voice.
Themes
Contemporary humor writers carry on this tradition. Zinsser cites Mark Singer’s satirical reporting on the obnoxious New York businessman Donald Trump as an example. He also discusses Garrison Keillor’s parody articles: Keillor writes about the police arresting the U.S.’s last smokers in a sting operation, which parodies changing national attitudes about cigarettes. In another article, he compares the George H.W. Bush administration bailing out the savings-and-loans industry to the government letting Huns sack Chicago.
All three of these examples show how humorists can criticize social and political trends while avoiding the soapbox and remaining fresh and entertaining. However, Mark Singer’s article on Donald Trump probably stands out the most to readers who have lived through the Trump presidency. Singer’s reporting shows how writers can serve the public—often without fully realizing how—by portraying the people, policies, and trends that most powerfully shape society.
Themes
Get the entire On Writing Well LitChart as a printable PDF.
Finally, humorists don’t always have to make a specific point. For instance, Ian Frazier’s “Dating Your Mom” is hilarious because it defends an absurd idea, and John Updike’s “Glad Rags” mocks major political figures by commenting on their fashion sense.
Humorists don’t always have to advocate for some specific idea, but like all nonfiction, their work still has to be organized around one unifying idea. Frazier and Updike’s articles are hilarious because they’re each based around a single, totally absurd premise: that people would seriously consider dating their mothers, and that political figures should be judged by their fashion choices.
Themes
Most importantly, humorists have to show the reader that they’re enjoying themselves. This means that they have to find the humor in their own voices, not just make a bunch of jokes. For instance, Zinsser’s students learned a lot by imitating other humor writers, but they quickly got tired—until they found their own voices. Writers like E.B. White, Stephen Leacock, and James Thurber manage to incorporate humor throughout their work. Zinsser concludes that aspiring writers should focus on writing the truth and figure out how to make it humorous, rather than focusing entirely on how to be funny.
Humor doesn’t require earnestness or sincerity, so humorists can try on other people’s styles more easily than writers in other genres. However, Zinsser emphasizes that they will never truly succeed until they find their own distinctive voice. Ultimately, then, humor is just one among many kinds of nonfiction—and they all follow the same rules. In fact, Zinsser uses these comments to set the reader up for the last section of his book, in which he goes on to argue that all writers have to be enthusiastic about their work and find their own authentic voice in order to be successful. Still, these two factors are especially important to humor, which is first and foremost about entertaining the reader.
Themes
