The easiest piece to write is sarcasm. The difference between sarcasm and satire is that satire has a point, while sarcasm has none, except maybe to offend, at worst, or rib, at best. Sarcasm is a backbite often confused with humor. “It’s not funny,” the bitten one says, the sarcastic one curling up smiling like Uriah Heep in his sorry ways, heaping more free helpings upon his plate to stowaway for future use.
Irony can be used as a tool to tickle or torture, its mixture of satire with sarcasm effective as a rhetorical device, intended at bottom to persuade, of what, exactly, the audience might remain unaware, this too funny: A muse meant nothing by it. What was meant or not its placement lost can only confuse.
Hemingway utilizes irony in his book “The Sun Also Rises”:
“Show irony and pity.”
I started out of the room with the tackle-bag, the nets and the rod-case.
“Hey! Come back!”
I put my head in the door.
“Aren’t you going to show a little irony and pity?”
I thumbed my nose.
“That’s not irony.” (102)
Later, Bill and Jake replace irony with utility, but it’s the same idea:
“Let us rejoice in our blessings. Let us utilize the fowls of the air. Let us utilize the product of the vine. Will you utilize a little, brother?”
“After you, brother.” (109)
Irony is explained by Charlie in Steve Martin’s film “Roxanne,” in the scene where he’s walking with Roxanne back to her place to help her regain entry after she’s locked herself out. Charley pretends not to understand why Roxanne turns down his offer of a coat on such a cold night. She explains she was being ironic, and Charley says he didn’t understand that because they don’t use irony in the town anymore. He was the last one to use it, and he gave it up because people were staring at him. Irony often means the opposite of what’s said. It can be confusing. Martin’s film is a rewrite of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” the 1897 play (which takes place in 1640 France) by Edmond Rostand. I only mention that now should any readers think I was unaware of Martin’s source. “Cyrano” was assigned reading in the 10th grade in the high school I attended. It’s theme is panache, which I doubt I understood in the 10th grade. Not sure I understand it now, ten decades later. More irony there than I care to pursue further at this point.
The so-called dry sense of humor is favored by the higher class comic, whose main focus is to keep out of the pit, where things get wet and muddy. In that sense, the dry humorist is aristocratic, surrounded by the minion followers who protect his repressed emotions with gratuitous likes and guarded comments. The noir detective sometimes makes use of the dry sense of humor, though hardly an aristocrat, but he often finds himself in service to society’s higher-ups. A dry wit seems to suit a hard boiled attitude, and the Dick has many followers, among them many cynics.
The facetious humor accountant will often make fun of himself, pretending, for example, to be stupid – but that’s to show actually his superiority to his target. He will be droll, flirting around with what’s considered serious or not, with what is serious or not. Tongue-in-cheek provides a vivid cartoon illustration opportunity.
Then there’s the wisecrack, the comment, usually shouted but as effectively whispered, croaked anonymously from the audience, which may have come to resent being pandered to, the speaker now a standing joke and nothing further said can mollify or sooth the hurt feelings of failure. But, after all, it was only a sketch. But when does sketch become sketchy? A standalone wisecrack probably won’t qualify as a sketch, more the property of the cartoon.
Charles Dickens wrote sketches, though not necessarily with humorous intent. In his preface to “Sketches by Boz,” written long after the sketches were first published in newspapers and magazines, Dickens almost apologizes for their style or substance, in spite of their obvious popularity. He said the sketches were “sent into the world with all their imperfections (a good many) on their heads,” and that he’s “conscious of their often being extremely crude and ill-considered, and bearing obvious marks of haste and inexperience.” But again a Boz sketch purpose was not primarily humor. They were accompanied by drawings and were essentially goings on about his London parish at the time – the 1830s. The subtitle of the book collection reads “Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People.” And within the Dickens sketch anyone indeed could have, probably already did, see or observe the very thing Dickens was writing about. But to see it in print, Illustrated, no less, not as news, by which is meant an edited selection of events to emphasize a certain viewpoint (selection itself – among all the events of a day – being an editing process, and the birth of bias), but as the familiar and close and therefore noteworthy and comment worthy, where one saw oneself or someone one knew and understood but probably with not quite the same focus as found in the sketch. Or one saw a street or alley or place or person one knew about but only as some mystery yet to be solved, which the Boz sketch resolves. The Boz sketches often go indoors.
Mark Twain did much to popularize the humorous sketch as a newspaper feature. It was Twain’s intent to write humor, so we find embellishment and variations on the truth of things, exaggerations. Exaggeration, hyperbole in rhetorical diction, is a comedian’s tool, as is its counterpart, understatement, litotes, first cousin to euphemism. Here is a sample excerpt from a Twain sketch featuring an unexpected subject, titled “Speech on Accident Insurance“:
“Certainly there is no nobler field for human effort than the insurance line of business—especially accident insurance. Ever since I have been a director in an accident-insurance company I have felt that I am a better man. Life has seemed more precious. Accidents have assumed a kindlier aspect. Distressing special providences have lost half their horror. I look upon a cripple now with affectionate interest—as an advertisement. I do not seem to care for poetry any more. I do not care for politics—even agriculture does not excite me. But to me now there is a charm about a railway collision that is unspeakable.”
Insurance for accidents occurring to individuals riding a train was first introduced in England, and insurance as an industry grew expansively in the latter half of the 19th Century, but it wasn’t then nor is it now considered by many to be a subject of humor. Twain was able to find humor in just about any subject. Twain’s use of the word cripple in his context would not be acceptable today, and indeed humorists are inevitably at risk of their word choices landing as offences.
It’s interesting, thinking now of insurance, how some things, like the old saying goes, never change, in spite of what Twain says below, from his visit to a barbershop:
“All things change except barbers, the ways of barbers, and the surroundings of barbers. These never change. What one experiences in a barber’s shop the first time he enters one is what he always experiences in barbers’ shops afterward till the end of his days. I got shaved this morning as usual. A man approached the door from Jones Street as I approached it from Main—a thing that always happens. I hurried up, but it was of no use; he entered the door one little step ahead of me, and I followed in on his heels and saw him take the only vacant chair, the one presided over by the best barber. It always happens so.”
If you want to write a humorous sketch, it might work best to start with something familiar, that any reader should recognize. Otherwise, you might too soon and too easily drift off into a piece redolent of surrealism, which is seldom very funny. If the easiest piece to write is sarcasm, it might be because the only skill required is mean-spiritedness, which probably comes from a deficiency of generosity. There’s also a tradition of vindictiveness associated with some humor, sublimated in the speeches at roasts that ridicule the honored guest. But writing humor is not easy. Not everyone is a wit. Nor wants to be a twit.
References:
“The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway (1926). Quotes from 2022 Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition.
Mark Twain Project Online. In discussing what is meant by a written sketch, the editor Edgar Branch, from the Introduction to “Early Tales and Sketches” Volume 1, has this to say:
“The great preponderance of short items, however, are sketches—and these range from ambitious magazine articles several thousand words long to short, hundred-word trifles tossed off by the newspaperman during a working day. The sketches include comic letters to the editor, hoaxes, exaggerated accounts of the author’s personal activities, burlesques of many kinds, comic or satirical feuds with fellow journalists, ingeniously contrived self-advertisements, commentary in a light and personal vein, descriptive reporting, reminiscences of past pleasures and adventures, and so on—but neither this nor any other list can easily be exhaustive.”
“Sketches New and Old,” by Mark Twain, link to Gutenberg e-Book.
“Sketches by Boz,” by Charles Dickens, link to Gutenberg e-Book.
The Coming of the Toads 