Why Is Funny So Hard?

Nicole Kidman said so

Three days into the new year, I wish you a very good 2022. I didn’t want to flood your inbox with another new years greetings over the weekend! Not a resolutions maker, however I did tell myself to be better about coming up with at least one cartoon every single day, that way, there is no crunch time when it’s submission day at The New Yorker. So I drew one on Saturday, two on Sunday, one today. More today and tomorrow. Submission day is Tuesday. Wish me luck.

Creativity is often a collision of unexpected things. Below are some pages from my notebook, I have kept one of these going for years. I doodle in it, put words, catch phrases, trends, and sometimes they collide into a cartoon. It takes work; you sit there and stare at the page of all this stuff and imagine. Flip the page back a few weeks and repeat. You create sentences in your mind, put words in people’s mouths. Put said people in a situation and then have them say something to someone else. Dress people (or animals or inanimate objects) in odd clothing, have them sitting (or walking or dancing) on an unexpected thing. Combine, combine, combine. Switch it up, ask yourself, what do I feel like drawing? Another question: what’s funny about that? If you laugh, others might. But it’s not assured.

Nicole Kidman recently played Lucille Ball in the new film “Being The Ricardos.” It’s a pretty good movie, but I have some issues with it, for another post. What comes through is how hard creating humor is, how good comedy (cartoons, humor) is part work, part craft, and part intuition and gut (which Lucille Ball had in spades). Kidman said in interviews after she finished the movie—and I am paraphrasing because I can’t find the full quote—

“Funny is hard.”

Why is it so hard?

I don’t think I know. All creative things require, to different degrees, audience response of some sort. As much as some might not admit it, all creators need to think about their audience. Humor maybe more so because one is trying to elicit a particular, specific, response. Do we all share the same response to a tragedy? I think not, so why would humor be more difficult?

Perhaps funny is hard because humor is so subjective, but isn’t everything subjective?

I’ve always accepted the badge that what I do is difficult, and admit it is, but why is it? Is it really any harder than writing tragedy? Is it easier to elicit tears of sadness than tears of laughter?

I have been a cartoonist since I was seven, and my goal then was to make my mother smile. She was an easy audience, of course. But the motivation was hardwired in me at an early age.

E.B. White once said about humor,

“Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process.”

In other words, we know it when we see it and don’t mess with it.

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