Comments on: History and humor

By: thatsnothistory

thatsnothistory — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 23:09:22 +0000

Late to the party, but I want to put in another vote for Katherine’s anecdotes and detail. If you can convince your reader that the characters you write about are real human beings, with all the quirks, whimsies, and foibles that real humans have, and that they experience the same kinds of special little moments that make each life unique, you’ll engage that reader even without the funny.

By: Comrade PhysioProf

Comrade PhysioProf — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 01:50:18 +0000

Where I live, there are nuns all over the frucken plce. NO JOKE.

By: Historiann

Historiann — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 23:46:02 +0000

CPP, I don’t believe you’ve seen a nun since one smacked your knuckles with a ruler in grade school. If then! (I think you’re too young to have been of that generation, anyway.)

By: Comrade PhysioProf

Comrade PhysioProf — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 23:42:00 +0000

I follow nuns around and make farting noises to cracke *them* uppe!

By: Historiann

Historiann — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 13:33:39 +0000

I have that article! I should go back to read it. . . IIRC, it’s mostly about traditional Anglo-American anti-Catholicism, which ultimately isn’t funny at all.

My former employer, which I like to complain about so much, was a Catholic university that was bombed by the Klan in the last century when it was still called St. Mary’s College for Men. At that point, the uni changed its name to a municipal-sounding one.

(See what I mean? Maybe the problem is me. Maybe I have no sense of humor or fun about this project.)

By: Feminist Avatar

Feminist Avatar — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 10:51:07 +0000

Which reminds me of this –

Frances E. Dolan, ‘Why are nuns funny?’ Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 70(4) (2007), pp. 509-535.

By: Tenured Radical

Tenured Radical — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:00:04 +0000

No wonder you became Historiann if your mother told you things like “Nuns don’t fart.” I bet Comrade PhysioProf follows nuns around making little farting noises to make children crack up.

By: Historiann

Historiann — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 16:35:06 +0000

That’s it! My next book will be a study of 17th-19th Century sex toys in crazy religious communes. Kind of like a non-fiction, earlier period version of T.C. Boyle’s The Road to Wellville?

Thanks for all of your comments. I guess what I’m looking for is what Susan and others have suggested–not HA-HA funny, but irony or something to lighten up a story filled with so much suffering and death. I like Squadrato’s and Katherine’s suggestions that interesting detail can serve to divert and entertain, even if it doesn’t crack readers up. I think that’s what I’m up to with some of the environmental history and material culture I’m getting into, anyway. Finding cool new facts and putting them together in interesting ways can be a way of leavening the story.

I have it on expert authority from my mother, who attended Ursuline schools before Vatican II, that nuns don’t fart. Or, at least, the layers of fabric they were wrapped in prevented their students from hearing or smelling them. Then again, my mother reports that nuns also never ate in their presence, and tried to cultivate the effect of gliding down the halls in their full habits (rather than walking or loping or galumphing) so as to enhance the mysteries of religious life.

By: Tenured Radical

Tenured Radical — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:48:14 +0000

I can find humor in my work — endless radical feminist meetings where no one can go home until they reach consensus about whether a dolphin vibrator is a penis provide plenty of fodder for retrospective yucks. But then I have your problem as well. Lots of personal testimony about rape, incest and pornography is incredibly sad. Furthermore, even though you have to explore the liberatory power of sex work and porn, the fact that it is frequently used to subjugate socially powerless people even further often makes me feel like I am wading through sewage by the end of a writing day.

By: Tony Grafton

Tony Grafton — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:39:52 +0000

My protagonists–scholars, astrologers, historians fromt he fifteenth to the nineteenth century–have always yielded me lots of unexpected jokes–especially when I get to read the marginal notes in which they express their true, unguarded opinions of other peoples’ writing, in wonderfully Kakutaniish language. I too have been the idiot cackling in rare book and manuscript rooms and over microfilm readers. But in the last book I did, which was collaborative, my partner and I found that our Christian scholar hero, though not without a sense of humor, actually moved us when he, frail and aging and soon to die, he saved a Jewish friend from deep trouble and forcible conversion, at considerable personal risk. I’m wondering if your story might also be one of those?