Your online audience is like a lab mouse that grew up engrossed in addiction studies. Writing for skittish readers can be challenging as they won’t enjoy anything dull, boring, and monotonous.
You need to blow their minds and elicit positive emotions in them with your work. You need to give them a dopamine hit one after another to keep them hooked. But needless to say, this can be difficult.
So how do you convince your readers to chomp through your paragraphs? The best way to keep your readers hooked is by incorporating humor and punches in your piece or telling them a joke.
There are several uses of humor in serious writing. Here’s a rundown of a few.
Makes Your Writing Relatable For the Audience
Relatable writing is one of the significant components of pieces well-liked by the audience. Humor is a great way to connect with the audience.
According to Earleywine’s book Humor 101, 94% of people believe their sense of humor to be average or above, meaning they can understand and identify characters that display a sense of humor.
Creates Likeness for the Characters
Various studies have proven good humor to be a sign of intelligence, creativity, and cooperation that’s better-liked by the audience. They assume the character that has a comic touch to be more creative and intelligent. Hence, readers like characters more that demonstrate a sense of humor.
Uncomfortable or Confrontational Subjects Can Become Easy To Address
Certain topics might offend people or be too bold to be confronted. That’s when humor comes to the rescue, and it’s the only vehicle to address such matters.
Take a drive down the past where sit-coms breached difficult subject matters before anyone else. Being a lesbian, a woman kissing another woman, masturbation, and being gay are sensitive topics that need to be handled carefully.
Humor gives you the loophole to escape any controversies on the pretext that it was said light-heartedly for just a little laugh and not to offend someone.
Keeps Your Audience Engaged
Imagine reading a book or watching a film that’s always serious. There’s no humor, no punch lines, nothing. Just plain monotonous tone stretched across the piece. Will you enjoy it? Will you continue reading it till the end?
We don’t think so. When you, a writer who loves and enjoys reading, can’t read it entirely, how can you expect your reader to do so? Such a piece will instantly lose potential readers.
Humor keeps your audience engaged. It keeps them hooked and interested till the end.
Makes Your Work Memorable
What do you remember from the latest book you read? Is it something serious or a short, witty, and funny line? You got your answer!
It’s always the line that’s intended to be funny or contains an element of humor. “You talking to me,” “hit me, I’m giving out wings” are some of the famous lines that almost everyone remembers.
On the other hand, think about the line “let’s get out of here.” It sounds quite ordinary and there’s nothing funny about it. Yet you can’t recall a single instance where you’ve read this line. That’s because it isn’t memorable.
If you want your stuff to be unforgettable and stay with the readers for long, add some humor to it. A single short phrase can make your writing iconic and stay in the minds of readers for a long time.
Makes Your Characters Real
Even in the most serious situations, you’ll find people joking and laughing. That’s an emotion that can’t be left behind.
When my mother died, my younger brother and I sat in a corner to have some time alone. He tried to cheer me up and broke the tension by recalling the funny things our mom used to do. A sad and emotional moment was instantly uplifted, and we were soon remembering the hysteric incidents and quirks involving her.
If you want your characters to shine and be relatable to the audience, make them true-to-life by adding humor. You don’t need to make every fictional character funny, but write at least one light-hearted character in your story.
Helps Readers Release Tension
When you feel like things have become too intense and overwhelming for the reader, throw in a little humor that’ll help release the tension. This is a very common practice used by famous writers to tone down the intensity of the scene a bit.
Provides Flow and Cohesiveness
You’ll often find humor at the end of a long, intense scene. That’s because it brings flow to your piece and keeps the reader interested who’s now wondering what will happen next after such an amusing end.
About Reid Champagne
Reid Champagne has been a famous American humorist, observer, and a humorous travel writer for over 35 years. His travel writing shows the mundane as extraordinary with the glitter of life and hope. He is one of the top humor columnists in America and adds a touch of irony and satire to his work.
He is known for his work, An American Walkabout. Even now in his 70s, Reid’s writing and humorous observations and takes on relationships, the mundane, and food, including his exceptional travel writing pieces are a breath of fresh air.
Kistopher Langdon is a digital marketing specialist at Content Development Pros and has helped small businesses grow into household names. When he’s not busy curating content that sells, Kistopher Langdon can be found at the gym or watching Netflix. Feel free to send him all your questions about writing a letter of recommendation on the official website.