Why So Serious? Using Humor in Your Memoir
Publicity photo for Gilda Radner -Live from New York Broadway show 1980
I was editing my book Burn Your Journal when I got a phone call.
“What are you up to this week?” asked my stand-up comic friend Kelly with a Big Ol’ K.
“I’m sure you’ll tell me,” I said.
I knew I was getting called into her version of jury duty. And I’d have to put my own work on hold.
Oh yes, this is my circus and these are my monkeys.
What’s my circus you might ask?
My time in burlesque. Once in burlesque, always in burlesque.
Because you now understand super weird stuff like how dancers adhere pasties to their boobs using carpet tape. And you may have even used this trick in shows yourself. And you might still keep a roll of it around even though you don’t perform anymore.
That’s why your entertainer friends will continue to assign you jobs out of the blue. I mean, you’ve got the skills, right? It’s a little like joining the mob.
“Just when I thought I was out,” I mug my best Silvio Dante, “they pull me back in.”
We’ve all been there—the former performers, that is. We can never just sit in the audience and watch our friends entertain the crowd. Oh, no!
“Can you hold these 16 candles and this enormous can of lighter fluid until my second number?”
“Can you roll me up in this shiny fabric and unfurl me out of it at exactly 2.34 minutes into the song?”
“How about handling the snake? You can hold the snake until the second act, right?!”
SUUUUUUUUUUURRRRREEE! Whatever you need.
So, I never had to hold the snake, thankfully. Gah! But there was a real snake who was a cast member years ago, so I’m not sure how I escaped snake-sitting duty.
Yes, it’s good to be needed. If by needed you mean the universe—in Robert De Niro’s voice—is demanding, “You just shut your trap. You signed the contract. You’re in for life. Now get back to work.”
Whether you were the best stage kitten ever. Or you knew where to get the cheapest ostrich feathers plucked straight off the bird. Or you were just a damn good writer. Yep. You will be called back to work—usually for free. But with tremendous appreciation in the world of theatre and burlesque forever.
But I wasn’t going to be working for free.
Oh no! Big K wanted me to create an entire website in 4 days on a meager budget. Surprise!
I’d been after her for years to get a real website up, but she waited until now. NOW?! 4 days before she took the stage as the comic opener for Oingo Boingo Former Members—a big show—to ask me to scramble and get it done.
Aren’t I lucky?
You think I’m being sarcastic. And when I say I wasn’t working for free, you think I’m talking money.
No. And nope.
Truth is an opportunity to work with Kelly means a kickstart to my own creative juices. So, I do feel lucky and I know there’s value in our projects together.
The short version of our story goes like this:
In 2009, to get back into shape, I started taking pole dance classes—a gateway drug to emceeing burlesque shows for Pyrrha Sutra (who now runs PS Presents. If you’re in Phoenix, go check out a show!).
I started performing student numbers with Pyrrha’s company Scandalesque when Kelly was a standup comic turned emcee for the troupe. The first time Kelly spoke to me was backstage before a show:
“You have great tits,” she fawned, “but when you turn around, there’s nothing back there.”
I knew I loved her from this very minute! She was hilarious. Honest. And she knew how to turn all your faults into your biggest assets—even if you were short on assets. Isn’t that what best friends are for?
On stage she’s Sam Kinison meets Melissa McCarthy with a dash of Deepak Chopra thrown in. It can happen.
It’s why I stop my work to create for her when she calls.
It’s why I write comedy skits for her.
And why we’re constantly dreaming up new ideas together.
It’s also why I’ve spent the last four hours searching for the perfect freakin’ marquee font for her website, damn it! I’ll never be free. And I’m okay with that. My imagination can use a little of her creative juices.
My background in theatre was the traditional, dramatic 4th wall kind of stuff. Back then, I could never imagine walking out on stage without my lines memorized. And an audience? What audience? Do you mean there were real people out there watching me act? Audiences don’t exist when you stick to a script.
During my theatre training, I gravitated towards playing mentally ill women and pregnant nuns.
You know, because I wanted to be taken seriously as an actor and shit.
I stayed far away from the big C—COMEDY—until many years later when I took an improv class with Kelly.
Kelly with a Big Ol’ K was born out of her training at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade and the one-woman shows she created in New York City before hosting Scandlesque. She flourished in improv, but improv terrified me.
How could anybody get on stage with no script? Standing before all those faces with no anchor?
I felt completely exposed in her class. But I kept doing it. And I kept dancing in student burlesque numbers, too.
But as the shows unfolded, so did life. And that Big K went and got herself knocked up.
I was producing the 1st Annual Phoenix Burlesque Weekend—there would never be a second one—but my job was mostly handling the backstage stuff. When the venue owner opened up the main stage an hour before the show was scheduled to start, the audience poured into the open room and started demanding a show. The only person holding off a riot was Kelly in-between puking from morning—or in this case evening—sickness. Kelly worked her tits off that night trying to keep the enormous crowd at bay.
A preggo comedic soldier, she singlehandedly commanded the restless crowd and kept them from going rogue.
She wouldn’t make it back for the second night—time for maternity leave on the spot. That’s when Pyrrha Sutra shoved a microphone into my hand and said, “introduce us.” And I became the troupe’s new emcee.
That was in 2010. I’ve long since hung up my microphone and pasties and Kelly has returned to the stage. But she’s never truly relinquished me from my duties. When she needed to write lyrics to her song Heartburn to the tune of Fever, we riffed off each other until the song was complete.
🎼 You give me heartburn!
Green chilis on my nachos
BBQ with Doritos, too.
Quesadillas & chicken tacos
Chili cheese and chocolate, oooooo!
You give me heartburn! 🎵
When I thought my child’s black poop was a sign of Ebola before I figured out she’d eaten an entire package of blueberries, I wrote a comic monologue about motherhood and death. It landed in Kelly’s hands to perform on stage.
And now, I’m writing, well, I’m writing her.
Go check out her bio on her brand spanking new website.
Here’s the secret for my audience only: I can write Kelly better than Kelly can write Kelly. Ssshhhhh!!!
Oh my god, yes, she’s an amazing writer of her own material. Her comedy is on fire, but she rarely contains it to the page. Her improvisational style is lightning fast. And her words change as quickly as her audience’s reactions. So her material stays in her head.
Enter me.
The one who gets her style so much I can make her website speak just like she talks. And you thought A.I. was just for robots.
I’m a writer. More specifically a ghostwriter who has a knack for listening to other people’s speech and capturing their dialogue, inflections, and deepest desires in words. But no matter the differences in our creative styles, it’s the funny that’s non-negotiable.
Working with Kelly, I've learned the art of a well-placed zinger.
She inspired me to create comic tension in my memoir. Even when it’s subtle and I’m writing about serious stuff. Maybe you’ve thought about adding some humor to your memoir, too. Or perhaps you just want to pick up the pace a bit. Comedy can help you do that.
But first, let’s clear up two misconceptions about using humor in your writing:
Memoirs aren’t funny.
Oh, reeaalllly! What’s that you say?
I still can’t believe some people think memoirs can’t or shouldn’t be funny. Holy hell people when you’re out there drowning in a sea of your own child abuse sometimes your only lifejacket is a well-placed inappropriate joke.
Use it.
And do not believe the lie. There’s nothing wrong with adding some humor to a memoir.
Humor does more than just make something funny. You can use it to add dimension, break up the tension, or keep the story from getting too morose.
As long as it’s in keeping with your memoir’s overall tone and you don’t…
Use humor to hide heavy material.
Like the swinging of a pendulum, so are the days of memoir writing.
We’ve just gone from no humor at all to too much humor in all the wrong places.
#2 is also a lie.
Unfortunately, there are memoir writers who believe comedy is an easy way to gloss over all the hard stuff.
This isn’t true on stage and it’s not true in your writing, either.
If you use jokes only to mask difficult experiences you aren’t using humor effectively.
Comedy should reveal truths, not cover them up.
There’s often real pain behind laughter and for your memoir to pull at all the right heartstrings, it must combine humor and honesty effectively.
So for those of you ready to poke at your funny bone on the page, here are 5 beginner tips for incorporating humor into your memoir:
Write like you speak.
When people begin writing they often go into their mock professional voice. It’s not uncommon. Hell, I have one of those professional voices, too. Lucky for me, mine looks like Lenny Bruce in the 1950s, so he’s wearing a suit, but he’s still funny.
Unfortunately most people’s “professional” represents some kind of crazy 1980s business type—think Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl. If she’s your “professional,” I feel for you. She’s not nice.
She will stop your writing in its tracks and make it read like a stiff college essay or a bad job interview.
Start training yourself to write like you speak not like you’re reporting on shipping dry goods overseas.
This is one place where you can steal the advice of marketers for memoir writing.
Your memoir should be conversational.
And you’ll find that an informal tone will loosen up your writer’s voice. You’ll get more personal and as you let your guard down, not only will you be more truthful, you’ll find a natural sense of humor.
Get physical.
If the above doesn’t come naturally to you. Forget the paper altogether. At least for right now.
Stand up. Talk out a scene. Improv your ideas. Listen to some music that helps you move. Actually, move. Find a rhythm.
Comedy is a dance. There’s a syncopation between landing a joke and receiving the audience’s laughter. You won’t have actual laughter when writing in your living room, but you can anticipate it. Or hey, use a laugh track. I bet you could find one on youtube.com.
As an only child, I’m still being interviewed by some pretend person even as an adult (I didn’t have imaginary friends as a kid, but I did a lot of imaginary interviews). And you can do this, too.
Just let the people that you live with know you aren’t crazy. Then verbalize one of your written scenes out loud.
Start to open up your voice and your body and see if the new words, ideas, and humor don’t hit your page more easily.
Change your ideal reader.
I still believe identifying an ideal reader is the best way to write the first draft. But what if your ideal reader is deadly serious?
When I first started writing regularly, my ideal reader was… guess who?
Yep. Big K.
I had left my teaching position and was performing burlesque. I was also on the verge of divorce. I would take a hot yoga class every morning and come home and send PMs to Kelly who was so preggo she couldn’t move much behind her desk at work, so she was forced to read everything I sent her.
We’d chat about show ideas. And I’d recap reruns of Little House on the Prairie. Like “why’d they stop in Minnesota? Why not just go to Florida or California? I mean you’re already in the wagon. Just keep going.”
Kelly dug my little insights into life. And I loved to see if I could make her laugh.
Had I started writing by envisioning say my grandmother reading my work, I would not have been half as funny.
Maybe you’ve got a hilarious grandma. Whoever it is, pick an ideal reader who allows you to loosen up when you tell your story.
And that brings us right up to one of the most important rules of writing comic material—don’t edit out your weird!
If you’ve gotten past that professional voice and have moved onto the editing process, don’t revert back to stiff man’s land by removing all of your kookiness.
Many new writers exchange their “professional” for their scariest high school English teacher during the editing process. And hey, I used to be an English teacher so I’ll gladly have a word with your internalized English teacher and tell her…
Stop it!
Stop cutting out the most interesting, intriguing parts of your writing.
You will need to edit your work, sure. But do NOT edit out your writer’s voice. It’s your thumbprint.
Editing for good story structure is essential.
Editing out your odd is not.
In short, keep your secret sauce. Let that weird simmer until it rises into a well-baked peculiarity pie.
We want you weird!
Punch up not down.
This is a big one that I can’t emphasize enough.
I’ve been to many stand-up shows with Kelly. Envision this crazy broad in a lineup of nothing but men and you’ll soon get what she’s up against. The dudes just love the racist jokes. They love the fat jokes. They love to keep propelling this notion that it’s fine to target anyone and everyone for the sake of humor.
I’m not a fan of censorship. But I dislike this comic style. I think it’s lazy.
You only tell those kinds of jokes if you aren’t clever enough to figure out how to punch up, not down.
Kelly is a master at the punch-up.
She knows how to be a great human and a great comic, too. It’s damn impressive. So why do so many other comics pick apart the little guy or the person on the fringes when they have the entire status quo to unravel? I don’t get it.
Watch any episode of SNL and see how they spoof the President. Not only is it funnier to hit the mainstream, but it shows us where we should improve as people. Did you know that legally satire is protected speech? Yep. That’s why SNL can use real names and not get sued. There are a lot of things we need to challenge about our current American society but we do have the ability to use humor to dismantle the status quo. I love that about us!
This is how both burlesque and drag developed.
Burlesque wasn’t originally all about sexy striptease. It was first introduced as the mockery of social norms. Men in dresses and women showing their ankles weren’t staples of polite society until burlesque intervened. These early performers put things on stage that were never accepted on the street.
And we’ve all developed a broader sense of humor because of it. So, thank a drag queen.
And find ways to enhance your funny in a memoir. It doesn’t have to be much. A small line or paragraph can ease your audience into heavier material as long as you tell the truth. Striking that balance between humor and serious stuff can help your readers trust you because you’ll sound like a real person. Not some preachy book expert.
But what happens when you get that one call? You know the call I’m talking about.
When your friends and family start to know you as the writer, so they start making requests.
Can you write some material for this banquet I’ve got to attend?
Will you make a speech at our wedding?
Now, I know most writers like to stay cozy in their bathrobes, typing away, but if you keep at this art you’ll eventually have to take it to the stage.
Now a word from our sponsor. Kelly’s interrupting my work as usual.
**Here’s Kelly with a Big Ol’ K to introduce How to Present Your Writing with Humor for the Very First Time:
“Guuuurrrrllll. I see you out there!!!!
I know you’ve never performed before, but you’re such an insanely good writer people want you to speak at their weddings or at the Kung-Fu Hall of Fame.
You can do it! I believe in you as much as I believe in the power of Super Cling-on Level 5 bad spandex shorts! You need to show ‘em all what you’ve got.
Do it, guuurrrllll!
Here are some tips that can help you be funny your first time on stage:
Learn your material so well that you won’t need to follow a piece of paper. This will allow you to look and act more natural.
When you stand up, stand in your power. Front and center. Ain’t nobody in that room have a hold on your power but you. So bring it right here, into your guts and your cockles. And if you’re standing there, showing off your cameltoe in white pants, embrace that, too.
Keep your mouth close to the microphone, but if you can taste metal, you’ve gone too far. The make-out sessions will happen only after you become a speaking superstar, which will be soon. So don’t rush it.
Before you say one word, make sure to relax your shoulders. Do this by bringing them back and down. Remember, your power’s in your center, not your neck.
Look left and right, but do not cross the road. (If that’s your first joke, you may want to reach out to me or Blissom.) You’re getting a feel for the room. But when you start talking keep your gaze towards the back wall of the audience. This will open you up but you won’t get thrown off by landing on any one person.
Warm up your body in the space by making some small body movements with your hands or just slap your hand on your hip. This will keep you anchored to the physicality of your performance. We don’t want no talking heads—great band, bad concept for performing. You’ve got to embody the space fully. If you feel comfortable standing there, other people will feel comfortable, too. And if you get stuck, just drop into the splits. People love that shit!
If anxiety or self-doubt creeps in, own your goofiness. Call it out. Get honest. People connect with someone who owns their truth. And when you laugh at yourself, people know it’s okay to laugh, too.
And finally, if nobody laughs at your jokes eat all the skinny people. That’s right! That’s what they get for being a bum audience. Plus, I know you’re hungry. I’m kidding. But no matter how you do on stage, go reward yourself for getting up there. So dive into a big ice cream sundae.”
There ya go, folks. Thanks, Big K.
If you’d like more quick and dirty presentation tips, I created a post called The Naked Stage. These are simple techniques for newbies based on how I managed my anxiety as I started emceeing burlesque shows.
Until next time…
You’ve been an amazing audience.
Thank you and goodnight.
