Guest post by Sarah Matalone
Some call him the "Biblioracle," that Internet marvel who possesses the power to suggest your next book based on the past five books you’ve read. But in his mortal life, John Warner is the editor-at-large of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, a Professor at the College of Charleston, and the author of the new satirical novel, The Funny Man.
Last weekend Warner was in town as part of a two-day, humor event at WriterHouse, a haven for those with the writing bug that offers classes, seminars and a cozy atmosphere. Perfectly situated for a humor writing bootcamp, I went over to WH Friday evening for the first part of the program: To hear Warner read from The Funny Man.
Based on a comedian whose gimmick, and mostly undeserved fame, derives from his ability to perform jokes and impressions with his fist inserted into his mouth, Warner’s novel is a satire of American celebrity, a novel that he described as taking seven years to write the first 40,000 words and six weeks to complete the next 40,000.
After the reading, Warner had a lot to say about satire and writing more generally, praising the Onion for its valiant critiques and substantiating our writerly pessimisms when he posed: “Is someone gonna write a book that’s gonna make the scales fall from their eyes? No.”
He didn’t leave us on that note, however. He had one truly inspirational thought to leave us with that night: “Books are the only virtual reality that exists, the only world were you can lose yourself in someone else’s consciousness,” and we must strive to make those scales peel away, no matter how sticky they may be, he said.
Inspired, we participants in the “So You Want to Write Something Funny?” seminar arrived at WH bright and early Saturday morning. Adjusting into our seats around the conference table, Warner prefaced his presentation with this advice: always start a talk with something eye-catching, at which point he clicked to a photo of the world’s ugliest dog (would you expect anything less at a humor writing workshop?).
He then jumped into an informative lecture that covered theories of humor, discussing Henri Berson and Freud and finally helping us how to identify and generate our own funny ideas. After his part, it was our turn to write our own premise-based writing, something akin to the “Short Imagined Monologues” on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. We broke off into our own little corners of WH, struggling for the right incongruous juxtaposition in our 30-minute time bracket, finally returning to the conference room with our own unique ideas (my premise was “In Search of Lost Thyme: Forgotten Family Recipes Remembered and Collected by Marcel Proust,” which I was pretty proud of, considering the time frame.)
I didn’t come into the workshop thinking I was a humor writer, but Warner sold me on this point: Humor writing, a genre where critical thinking skills translate smoothly into other forms, can truly improve you as a writer. “Cast your net wide as a writer,” Warner emphasized to us, and after a weekend with the funny man himself, I couldn’t agree more.