Laughter Through Tears: Using Humor to Great Effect (Afternoon)

with Steven Rowley

Dolly Parton’s character Truvy in Steel Magnolias perhaps said it best. “Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion.”

Everybody likes to laugh, even (or maybe especially) when reading a tearjerker. But humor in long-form writing is not judged by joke tonnage, or the number of laughs per minute. It succeeds (or fails) by what you use humor to say about the world and the human condition, and how well the laughs are integrated into your writing.

It may sound easy, but crafting humor properly is serious business. What are the different ways to include humor in long-form writing? How best to balance humor with other emotions to not undermine the tone of your work? How can you bank on something being funny in an ever-changing landscape and ensure that your book has a long shelf, speaking to readers for years to come? How do you decide on perspective, and how does one refine their own comedic voice without copying another writer’s style?

Join Steven Rowley, New York Times bestselling author and winner of the prestigious Thurber Prize for American Humor, to discuss all this and more in this deep dive into using humor to great effect in crafting your novel or memoir — even when the subject itself is not all that funny.