Content area
Full text
Trying to Find "The Funny": A Teacher Writing Group's Inquiry into Humor Writing
Christine Dawson, Kelly Hanson, Christina Ponzio, Eleanor Liu Robinson, and Jillian VanRiper
"How does David Sedaris do it?! He can take the most random or uncomfortable topic and make it hilarious! I can't figure out how to do that." Our writing group was meeting in the fall of 2010, and Nora was sharing a draft of what she wanted to be a humor- ous essay. The problem was, even though her writing was strong, it still had a more serious tone than she wanted.
By this time, our writing group had been meeting for more than two years. We had begun our relationship during a series of university English methods courses, when Christine had been the instructor. When those classes ended in the spring of 2008, we decided to pursue a mutual inter- est in writing and form an online writing group. Because we are geographically dispersed, we meet online, using Skype or Google Hangout for our conference calls and using a password-protected wiki to share our writing (for a more complete discussion of our writing group, see Dawson et al.). We meet approximately twice a month, and we usually each bring a piece of writing or an idea for future writing to discuss.
We were looking to try some- thing new, and Nora's question about David Sedaris appealed to all of us. Thus launched our inquiry into humor writing. We set out to discover how Sedaris and other humor writers make people laugh, and to try to use those techniques in our own writ- ing. We also set out to explore new ways to have fun as writers.
Researching Craft: Reading David Sedaris
Nora kicked off our inquiry by selecting several essays by David Sedaris, which we each read dur- ing the two weeks before our next meeting. We ended up focus- ing our discussion on "Go Caro- lina" (where Sedaris exploits his childhood experiences in speech therapy) and "Big Boy" (Sedaris's account of a rather unusual expe- rience at an Easter dinner). These were the kind of laugh-out-loud stories we wanted to write.
When we met, we asked a lot of questions, trying to unpack exactly what Sedaris had done...