I am a strong believer that you should always include at least one funny moment or character in your stories. Even if your story is about a serious subject, it is important to look for opportunities to give your readers some comic relief.
In my Figgy books the character Nana is probably the funniest character. He is funny mostly because he doesn’t intend to be – he is very confident, honest, sometimes quite idealistic and just so unashamedly himself that you can’t help laughing along with him. Nana is not always funny. No three dimensional, realistic character is! He has had a difficult childhood and is sometimes sad, frustrated and withdrawn. But I love the complexity and energy he brings to my books.
We learned about a person who liked laughing and practical jokes when we visited Schlosspark von Hellbrunn (or Hellbrunn Palace) in Austria. The Palace was built in 1613–19 by Markus Sittikus von Hohenems, who was the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, and it was designed to be his day residence during the summer. The Palace boasted impressive rooms and beautiful gardens but the best thing about it was its trick fountains.
Markus Sittikus was a bit of a trickster. The gardens were filled with statues, ponds and monuments, along with hidden fountains that sprayed guests if they happened to walk past at the wrong moment. My favourite trick fountain was the large stone dining table surrounded by stone chairs. Markus Sittikus would invite his guests to sit around the table and then, during their meal, he would activate a mechanism that would cause them all to be sprayed with water. Cleverly, one of the seats always remained dry – that was where Markus Sittikus would sit.
We managed to stay mostly dry during our tour until the end, when a deer unexpectedly spurted water out of its antlers when we were walking past. It was a hot day so it was actually nice to get a bit wet! One of the funniest things when walking around the gardens was watching other people screaming and jumping out of the way when they were surprised by a spurt of water.
Of course, not everyone finds the same things funny. Markus Sittikus obviously liked practical jokes. Other people like to tell clever riddles. Some like knock knock jokes. Some like to tell extremely long stories that aren’t funny until they say the punch line. And some people don’t like to be the teller of jokes but they love to laugh. And maybe their laugh is itself very funny – a loud hoot, or a cackle, or they laugh silently with their shoulders shaking.
Not all stories are funny but I would argue that almost every story needs at least one moment of humour. Think about it next time you are writing a story – where can you inject a bit of funniness?
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