Write With Humor, And There Perchance To Be Funny, Or To Remain Dull, That Is The Question

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One of the best ways to help students understand how literary craft works is to have them write emulations of a text, adopting the form and style of that author while providing content.

Such emulations can teach much about an author's stylistic fingerprint, for example, Hemingway's preference for the simple sentence or Alexie's penchant for the rule of three, and they can teach much about the formal aspects of shorter humorous pieces.

With novels that contain humor, I frequently ask students to do the following:

1. Identify the funniest passage.

2. Explain why it is funny.

3. Write a brief description of "how to write a passage like this."

4. Write a brief emulation that captures the form and style of the chosen passage while ...
... using content of their choosing.

With texts that are not humorous, I give students the opportunity to transform serious pieces into humorous ones, moving us to the entertaining world of parody.

Many people misperceive parody as something of a frivolous exercise, yet to do it well, one has to read carefully and pay attention to such technical features as syntactical patterns, word choice, sentence and line length, meter, rhyme, and tone. When asked to do this in a serious way, most students' cringe, but when given the opportunity to make fun of the author and the world, a chore is transformed into an opportunity.

The trick is to choose texts that are distinctive in style and form. Stories that have unique narrator voices work well (see the next activity on Anne and Holden), authors that have easily identifiable styles, or passages that are marked by a particular literary element, for example, the metaphor-laden short chapters of The House on Mango Street.

The easiest texts to emulate or parody, however, are poems. By their nature, poems present a more complicated challenge in which form becomes as important as style in creating a good imitation. In addition, there are anthologies of poem parodies that might serve as springboards for the assignment. Just use Google to search for a famous poet's name followed by the word "parody" and you will find plenty of examples. One of my favorite models is Poetry for Cats, which retells classic poems through the eyes of a cat persona. As Hamlet's cat says:

To go outside, and there perchance to stay

Or to remain within: that is the question. (Beard 8)

To begin such an activity, I generally ask students to make a rubric of the formal and stylistic features of the poem—number of lines, line length, meter, rhyme scheme, syntactic patterns, etc.—as well as to identify any important phrases to retain to make clear the source of the parody. Students then use this list as a guide or rubric, adding to it the requirement to use surprising, humorous content in relation to the original.