Me on editing and humor, in case you care

This, from an email to a friend of mine in the publishing business:



"Here's my general feeling on editing and humorous prose: when in doubt, don't. Robert Gottlieb, the editor of Catch-22, rejected A Confederacy of Dunces; many times since, even after Dunces had won the Pulitzer Prize, Gottlieb has reiterated that he'd reject it again. That's insane--and that's Robert Gottlieb, probably the greatest editor of his generation, with the kind of credentials editing humorous novels that no other editor can match. Experience has taught me that the best way to learn how to edit humor is to write an incredible mass of it yourself. That's the only way to develop enough sensitivity to the proper things. Thurber's fights with Gus Lobrano were legendary. Perelman fought, too. Benchley's stuff was, I suspect, uneditable--it's too light. Editors are constantly trying to give humor more weight--turn it into a form of journalism or essay or in general make it like some other type of writing that they can understand better, but this is a real mistake, because the first thing to die is the writer's voice, which is the single biggest factor in whether a piece is funny or not. I'm an obsessive about this, and I couldn't tell a Henry Alford piece from a Bruce McCall piece from a Hart Seeley piece, just by reading it. This isn't their fault--their pieces have to go through the editorial sausage grinder--but it has, and probably will, keep them from ever being considered great humorists. Out of the people working now, I'd trust Dan Menaker at Random the most, because he spent so many years editing casuals at The New Yorker, but I'd also be wary of him with something like the college book, precisely because it's as different in audience and intent from a NYer casual as chocolate cake is from cherry pie.



When it comes to humor, most editors must be viewed as simply particularly close readers--a humorist can't let the editor get too empowered with a funny manuscript, as much as that editor is used to being empowered, because humor is in some sense the imprint of the writer's ego hidden by craft. The better hidden it is, the funnier the book is, but the better hidden it is, the greater the chances that an editor--regardless of background or skill--won't really understand how it works or doesn't work. Often times, the humorist doesn't really understand him/herself. Humor is some weird mix of the personality of the writer, and a painfully learned ability to predict the psychology of an absolute stranger--the reader. It's a bizarre and difficult transaction.



If a pre-publication reader sees a structural or logical flaw, I want to know. If there's confusion, I want to hear about it. Heck, I even want to hear which jokes they liked--all feedback is useful when's in the proper context. But (the inevitable but), one of the hardest things about doing what I do is that nobody else I know of is really trying it--there are loads of fundamentally serious novels with flashes of comedy, but very few fundamentally comic novels with flashes of seriousness. I suspect that's because if you have the chops to be funny, why not make a boatload of money writing things that are a lot less time-consuming and financially risky than a novel? I'd write sitcoms too, if I could--but I can't, so I write prose instead. That's apparently pretty unique, and while it does give me a lot of room to manuever, it also makes it less likely I'll find editors who can really help. Any novel that's the least bit pointed or ironic is christened "a satirical romp" or "a comic tour-de-force," but when you put them up against The Daily Show, which makes you laugh more? And that's the test of a humorous piece of writing--does it make you laugh?



I've had decades of practice reading, writing and editing humor, and know exactly what I'm trying to do (whether it's possible to do, or whether I am talented enough to pull it off, are separate questions). No editor has put in that time; you can't become a snake-charmer by working as a lion-tamer. Overinvolved editors do as much damage to a humorous project as help it. The Barry books have gotten better as books as I've written more of them (whether they've gotten funnier is up to each individual reader), but that's been me practicing structure and learning how to balance plot, character, and jokes. My editor suggests, but mostly he tells me where he laughed, where he was confused, where the story dragged--he lets me drive, and that's worked well.



Everybody's got a sense of humor, so everybody has an opinion on a funny piece of writing. With humor, there are no preexisting boundaries to the editorial process, and that's a real danger--not for the editor, but for me. If I was writing books about the care and feeding of butterflies, there would be a point at which both the author and the editor could agree, "Well, x is simple scientific fact, so that's staying in." There is no fact in humor, so I have to be very protective of my material, no matter how much goodwill is behind an editorial suggestion.



If you have critique, finish the book first, and send it to me. I'd love to see it and will be grateful for any improvements that I can make as a result. But don't be surprised if there's much more going on with any one decision (or even joke!) than you suspect--the whole trick with humor is to make every decision feel effortless, but it's not, and once you dig down into the mechanism, you always find that it's like the back of a watch. With something as fundamentally ineffable as humor, one tinkers at one's own risk--and I include myself in that."