Short takes from NTTBF: how to write jokes

 I admit – I can’t think of anything harder to write than humor. But between the COVID-19 pandemic, economic catastrophes, and – in my part of the world – an apocalyptic power outage – I was desperately in need of a dose of good cheer.

The title of a session at the recent North Texas Teen Book Festival was “Jeff Kinney on writing jokes.” The Jeff Kinney, whose Diary of a Wimpy Kid book series could brighten even the gruesomeness of adolescence? I added it to my “must-see” list. And that was before learning it included junk food. (Double-stuffed Oreo cookies are among his inspirations.)

Asked how he writes stories, Kinney said, “I always start with the jokes,” but how he comes up with those has changed over time.

Jeff Kinney 

He originally started, as writers often do, with what he knew – collecting all the funny things he could remember from his own life. That aspect alone spanned nearly four years. But the series grew. And grew. And then the hard part came – creating new jokes.

He tried all the usual methods for juicing creativity: taking walks, mowing the lawn, (probably) devouring junk food. This actually got him through nearly a dozen books. Then he found a method. (Were Oreos still involved? Inquiring minds want to know.)

The method was called systematic creative thinking, a methodology originally designed for engineering problems, which can only show how truly desperate Kinney’s search for humor had become.

You can look it up. Or you can use the three-part cheat sheet Kinney devised:

1.     Take something and count its individual parts

2.     Take those parts and add, subtract, or divide them

3.     Ask whether the result is something is a product somebody could actually use

Here’s Kinney’s simplified illustration. Take a pair of eyeglasses, which have only two basic parts: lenses and frames. Consider taking away the lenses and ask, could anybody use a pair of eyeglass frames on their own?

Surprisingly, the answer is, yes. “How about celebrities who want to look intellectual for a camera shoot but don’t want those distracting reflections?”

Even easier, consider removing the frames from your eyeglasses. Shrink the resulting lenses down and you have contact lenses.

Useful, but not particularly funny. (Except in the case of the vain would-be intellectual.) But for a Wimpy Kid book, consider starting with a kid on an airplane and listing all the parts on that plane (“including the barf bags,” Kinney noted because, hey, he’s Kinney).

Then, think about what can be subtracted. How about the pilot? To most of us, a pilot-less plan would be the stuff of nightmares. Luckily for anyone with a fear of flying, in Kinney’s case, it became the basis for a joke in his 12^th book, The Getaway. From then on, systematic process became Kinney’s joke-generating mechanism of choice, the superpower that enables him to write two books yearly.

It’s not his only superpower, of course. There’s also his now-revealed secret COVID-era writing place – the local cemetery (nice and quiet!). And snacks. Plenty of snacks. Because writers got to keep their strength up! 

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Still to come from the North Texas Teen Book Festival – what do fantasy writers sleep with (please, the PG version!), what’s great about reading things too old for you, the secret age gap of YA heroes, and more!