Oh no I came on to talk about numbers because I have a kind of unique perspective of that but I just realized it’s a days old topic
But its Humor Time and I think I can talk a little bit about that. I’ve drawn strips and comedy series with some level of success for the past few years as a full time gig. I feel like I don’t necessarily write “jokes” so much as I write comedic sequences and have comedic dialogue.
I feel like it comes pretty naturally to me in the sense that I’ve always been a person who sought to entertain people. Sometimes I rip dialogue straight from something funny that happened with my husband in the kitchen and I feel like being kind of goofy in my speech IRL is my default setting whether I want it to be or not.
I think having comedic elements in a story can be vital. Even now I’m working on more dramatic works that are less straight forward “comedy” and more drama and/or horror. But having strong comedic elements in more “serious” works is such a helpful way to deliver a gut punch. It’s not there to be an antithesis to the dramatic elements but to help bring some levity to something that might otherwise be too heavy or veer into just being straight up boring. It also just creates a really interesting friction. Shows like Fleabag where you’re laughing at a character’s mishaps and then mourning a loss with them a scene or two later really highlight how much comedy can be used to highlight the hard stuff. Even Get Out employs a lot of comedy to the point where a lot of reviewers thought they were watching a horror/comedy film but it doesn’t negate the story; it makes the heavy stuff feel more heavy if you’ve just come back from giggling at a funny scene or a silly piece of dialogue.
It’s also less of “how may jokes can I get away with” and more “how is the humor driving the story forward?” In Get Out humor is used to sort of reveal the evil; the girlfriend’s father talking about how he supported Obama, the girlfriend eating fruit loops while listening to “I’ve Had the Time of My Life”, the scene of Lakeith Stanfield’s character in the party scene manages to both be funny and completely eerie. Fleabag uses humor to show the downward trajectory and fuel the events that end up forcing her to learn how to move on and move forward. It’s all a part of the same thing and that’s just presenting who characters are and moving the plot forward. If it’s just a silly scene for the sake of levity I think its best to look at it and figure out how, if at all, it helps move the story along.