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Q&A Sense of humor in your sci-fi stories

Humor in fiction, sci-fi or not, needs to feel organic and natural occurring, like something that might actually happen or be said spontaneously in real life. If it is a joke, it must fit the chara...

posted 5y ago by Amadeus‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#4: Attribution notice removed by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-19T22:13:49Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/46463
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T12:23:13Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/46463
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by (deleted user) · 2019-12-08T12:23:13Z (almost 5 years ago)
Humor in fiction, sci-fi or not, needs to feel organic and natural occurring, like something that might actually happen or be said spontaneously in real life. If it is a joke, it must fit the character telling the joke. If it is just a humorous situation, it needs to seem likely or probable that the character might get into that situation.

We have all heard straight up jokes, in stand up comedy, or children's interactive jokes or riddles, knock-knock jokes, "What do you call ..." jokes, etc.

The place for those in fiction is with characters playing those roles: A stand-up comedian, a night-show host, or kids interacting with adults or each other.

Humor in fiction is wonderful if you can make people laugh (besides yourself). It IS part of the experience of life that once in a while someone will spontaneously say something so funny you double over laughing.

But as always, you don't want to break the reader's story immersion by having somebody say something entirely out of character, or referring to some current real-life phenomenon outside their time line. If your reader laughs, you want it to be because they felt like they were _there_ when a person they know said something hilarious.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2019-07-05T15:09:39Z (over 5 years ago)
Original score: 1