Chuckle Time

It’s Monday!

First and foremost, I want to say thanks to everyone who came out for the Gallup Library this past Saturday. It was so much fun to see all of you, and to see so many local authors gathered together in one place. Can’t wait to go back next year!

Secondly, let’s get onto our topic of the day! As you know, this month we’re talking all about genres, and studying a little bit deeper into why we like certain genres and why we should write them. And this week, I picked two fun genres that I don’t write—but ones that I do read, from time to time.

Comedy

Yeah, I admit it, I read comedy. Satire is great fun, but I prefer satirical books over websites. They make more sense to me, and don’t get so convoluted. It can be a really fun genre to read, especially if you haven’t had a good laugh in a while.

This one is going to seem incredibly obvious, but, why do we enjoy it?

We like to laugh! Of course we do. We like to be happy and jovial and to have something to smile about. And so we read comedy, because it gives us all those things. It gives us a reason to smile, something about which we can be happy. We enjoy it because sometimes a smile is a precious commodity, and anything that can make us smile is worth spending time on. And sometimes, we enjoy it because it’s a thing to unite us all in laughter. Sometimes we also read it because it's a lesson in disguise, as can be found throughout Craig Ferguson's book.

So, then, what do we gain from it?

Honestly, I was initially inclined to say that there’s not much gain out of comedy, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized how wrong I was. 

Comedy is something we gain a lot from. It’s something that teaches us about the world, in a way nothing else can. If you want to teach someone a lesson that they will never forget, teach them with something funny. Make them laugh while you’re teaching them, and they will never wish to forget that memory. When we learn hard lessons, we don’t like to remember what taught the answers to us—all because it was hard to go through. But sometimes, we learn lessons through joy—and those lessons are the ones that will never ever leave our memory, because we have no desire to forget the circumstances by which we learned them.

So comedy is one of the best teaching tools available to us.

And that, dear friends, is why we should both read and write it, especially if we have something important to say. 

[love]

{Rani D.}