Using Characters to Create Humor

When it comes to writing humor in my fiction, I usually resort to a few things: forced humor, irony, sarcasm, and using characters. To say the least, humor doesn't come naturally. My writing is very dark, and focuses on the dramatic side of life more than the light and humorous. I don't have a single book where at least one character died.

Sometimes, especially in a dark book, we need a little humor to lighten things up. A dark book without any humor is like trying to swallow a dead weight. It's possible, but hard. My main concern is that readers will feel like they are ploughing through chocolate pudding trying reading my books, because the darkness of the story weigh them down.

So I add some level of humor, though some attempts are more successful than others. Most leave me thinking, okay, that was stupid. Some, like in my WIP, hand me the perfect humor opportunities.

My current writing project, a dark high fantasy novel, landed a funny character in my lap. He's a gnome that has a very strange way of talking that reminds me of Yoda, but even more mixed up than him (if you can imagine). Since it was a natural part of my gnome, whose name is Ungar, it was very easy for me to employ humor.

For instance, one of my main characters, Hans, was browsing Ungar's bookshelf, and came upon some strange titles: "How One May Build a Den that Can Be Made to Grow Old", "Behaviors of Human Beans", and "The Stone of Mountain Tsyroh is Broken by the Elf Plythyon" are just to name a few. I was in kinks the entire time I was interacting with Ungar, and perhaps it was a good thing.

I haven't read enough fantasy to know if this sort of thing was already used, but it worked great to lighten up my book during the midpoint.

How about you? What is your favorite way to add humor in your stories? Let me know in the comments; I would love to hear about it!

And as always, happy writing!