1. Keep your notebook within arm’s reach at all times
On Saturday, KYD were hosting an afternoon of 15-minute events at Magazine – a Yarra-side shipping container, done up like a Fitzroy bar. One of those events featured Estelle Tang (our online editor) interviewing Ben Law and Michaela McGuire on humour writing. Just seconds into the talk, I was itching for my notebook, but had left it at the front of the stage and couldn’t get it without being excruciatingly rude (and ruining the video of the event being recorded by Ben’s mum, who was sitting next to me in the front row). So, I simply tried to commit two crucial moments to memory, scribbling them down post-session.
1) Asked about how she’d developed her ‘voice’ as a humour writer and if she’d consciously constructed it, Michaela said, ‘My style is dry and scathing, so I find if I’m a jerk about myself, it’s okay to be a jerk about other people.’ This rang true: it’s a golden rule of likeable humour writing, but she put it perfectly.
2) Ben Law, responding to a question about how he manages to write about people he knows without ruining relationships, quoted David Sedaris’s advice to him during an interview – Sedaris had said he tries to write about people who don’t read. This made the crowd laugh, as intended, but there’s a grain of wisdom in it too. (I guess I liked it because I’ve been guilty of applying that handy maxim myself.)
On a more serious note, Law added that he allows his family to vet his writing about them, and admitted he was lucky, as a writer, that they are generally pretty accommodating. He also said that even though his writing is very revealing – including writing about his mother’s descriptions of childbirth and what it does to a woman’s vagina – and it may seem that he has no boundaries, he does in fact have quite careful boundaries, with certain things he doesn’t say about his family and their experiences, things they want to keep private. I thought this was a really interesting point, and one I’ve heard before from renowned autobiographical writers – that good writing in this genre has the illusion of no boundaries, but is generally really frankness within particular (personally negotiated or judged) boundaries.
2. Never, ever categorise a gathering of fiction writers who use humour in their work as ‘Comic Fiction’. Or they will rebel.
Tony Wilson, Marie Munkarra, Andrew Humphreys, David Musgrave and Peter Rose made it abundantly clear during their session that they not only hated its title, ‘Comic Fiction’, they felt insulted by it. As I took my seat, a few minutes late, they were taking it in turns to talk about why they were unhappy. ‘You think comic fiction, you think “funny, and that’s all it is”,’ said Andrew Humphreys. ‘You don’t want to be seen as somebody who’s just trying to make people laugh.’ Tony Wilson said that as a writer who writes humour, he often ‘feels bludgeoned’, like he’s not being taken seriously as a writer, though he takes his work just as seriously as any other writer. ‘All of us would say we’re writing satirical fiction,’ he said, and the panel generally agreed they would’ve been happy if the panel was titled, ‘Satirical Fiction’. Andrew Humphreys (who said he writes ‘dark comic fiction’) joked in response to an audience member who asked what the authors would like their session to be called, that it would be, ‘Insecure Writers About Comedy Who Want to Be Taken Seriously’.
It was, despite the title fracas, a really interesting session, with a range of thoughts on using humour and fiction – and some interesting reflections on the role of humour by some of literature’s greats. Andrew Humphreys and Peter Rose admired Evelyn Waugh, particularly Scoop, and Humphreys controversially called Brideshead Revisited ‘Waugh’s worst book’. Rose said that in the modern age, ‘too much categorisation goes on’ and pointed out that ‘a strong pulse of humour’ runs through the works of many classic writers. Talking about whether they use autobiography in their work, Humphreys said ‘no one wanted to publish’ the most autobiographical book he’d ever written – the reason given was that the characters were ‘so horribly unlikeable’. Since then, he’s steered away from autobiography in his work.
