Humor in YA
Writing Humor for Kids
By Julie Tollefson
For Geoff Herbach, being funny comes naturally. “It was my defense mechanism as a kid,” he says. “I was super weird but could also make those who might bully me laugh, which kept things in balance.” As a writer, Geoff leverages those experiences to fill his young adult books with ridiculous situations, dark humor, and laughably inept characters that bring light and understanding to the hard realities facing youth today. Here, Geoff offers five tips for using humor in writing for kids.
1) Write what you find funny — Like ruffles or plaids in fashion, types of humor — puns, dad jokes, slapstick — cycle in and out of style. What one generation finds funny, another finds silly.
“Humor is weird,” Geoff says. “I have students right now who absolutely die over puns. I do not get it!”
But humor rooted in shared experiences will always hit home with an audience. And for an adult writing for kids, tapping that vein is vital.
“In fiction, the best humor comes from good characters and the situations they find themselves in,” he says. “The just hilarious awkwardness of growing up, unintentionally doing weird things, thinking you have stuff figured out only to find out you’re utterly clueless. That all remains both gut-wrenchingly funny and painful. Good grist for YA.”
2) Bring light to dark issues — Geoff’s books wrap humor around such weighty issues as bullying, prejudice and privilege, and teen pregnancy.
“I think courage, process, and kindness are at the heart of every book I write,” he says. “Facing hard truths, getting in some kind of process-oriented plan to handle that truth, and finding compassion for others and kindness from others in the process.”
Humor is both integral to drawing in readers and a natural byproduct of the themes that he addresses.
“Some dark stuff is naturally funny,” he says. “Having been a bullied kid, I know there are really funny parts of being bullied, not that I’d wish that on anyone. I used to run out of my school building and around to the other side to enter a different door, because I was terrified of running into one kid who liked to threaten me. Even at the time I found it vaguely hilarious to be sprinting around a middle school in all kinds of weather. I would picture my principal sitting by his window drinking a cup of coffee as I ran by — ‘Oh, there's goes Herbach, again. Poor kid…’ Cracked me up.”
He also considers humor the “necessary sugar for reader kids who need to be entertained before getting dipped in trouble.”
“I like to think my books, although dark sometimes, are light on their feet,” he says.
3) Mine character and plot for comedic gold — In Geoff’s Gabe Johnson Takes Over, the young characters concoct an elaborate plan to rob a soda machine with mixed results. They succeed in breaking into the machine but find it holds only a few quarters. A character in Anything You Want drives his car into the side of a Taco Bell to make a point to his younger brother. In each case, bad decisions and bad actions play off each other to comedic effect.
“This is both character and plot, I think,” Geoff says. “Absurd acts are at the heart of what I find funny.”
4) Go hard from the start — Geoff’s background includes stints producing radio comedy shows and touring clubs “telling weird stories.” Good training, as it turns out, for writing witty and engaging books for kids.
“If anything, that experience told me to go hard right from the start, because audiences will check out quickly if you’re not giving them a gift immediately,” he says. “Nothing like doing live comedy in front of an audience of people looking at their phones — or worse, shouting at you to get off the stage.”
If you don’t have — or don’t want — a comedy stage background, turn a serious eye on the stories you find funny.
“Figure out what makes you laugh, and see if you can put those things to work in your own writing,” Geoff says. For instance, he did not expect to find Mick Herron’s Slow Horses thrillers funny, so when he did, he asked himself why.
“I realized Herron writes disasters in this really sort of casual (maybe deadpan is the right word?) way,” he says. “Jackson Lamb is totally disgusting and you realize as a reader at some point that he’s trying to be. That cracks me up. The backstories of how each of the spies were relegated to the team are disastrous and then you carry that backstory with them into their future tragedies and triumphs. Herron has a comedy set up for books that are legitimately scary and tense.”
5) But don’t try too hard — “If you’re straining to make the joke, you’re probably not making a good joke,” Geoff says. If the joke doesn’t land, you risk losing your reader. And that would turn comedy to tragedy.
“Reading was such a big deal to me,” Geoff says. “It didn’t come that naturally, though. I had to have someone putting the right books in my hands.”
As an author, he writes for natural readers as well as the kids who don’t pick up a book until they’re forced to. Humor is one tool that helps him connect.
“Reading is more than just a joy,” he says. “It occupies the mind in a way that digital entertainment doesn’t. I want to have books available for kids who don’t want them, so when they have to read they find the buried treasure.”