I just finished adding humor to a novel about nuclear war.
Shield of Ashes deals with World War III, about as depressing as subject matter gets. Without humor, the relentless weight of the story would crush the reader before they reached the halfway point. A well-placed moment of absurdity or dark wit gives the reader room to breathe, resets the emotional baseline, and makes the next devastating scene hit harder because the reader had a moment of relief before it arrived. For a deeper dive, see Comedy Writing Secrets.
Humor is structural in my writing. My novel Grim is filled with dry bureaucratic humor because the story involves systems and institutions that take themselves far too seriously. Killer Cuts and Dead Letters is a comedy about two serial killers, a premise that only works if the humor is confident enough to carry the darkness. I also add humor to client books during ghostwriting projects because it makes the author more relatable and the content more readable.
I think writers who strip humor out of serious books are protecting their own dignity at the reader’s expense. Readers abandon a business book that never makes them smile by chapter three, and the author never finds out why.
What Does Humor Do in Writing?
Humor creates contrast. A funny moment in a serious narrative is a structural tool that makes the serious moments hit harder. Shakespeare understood this. His tragedies are full of comic scenes because sustained darkness numbs the audience. The porter scene in Macbeth exists so that the murder scene that follows feels more horrifying by comparison. For more, see conflict in writing and plot devices.
When a reader laughs at something you wrote, they’ve made an emotional investment in your work.Share on X
Humor reveals character faster than almost any other technique. How a character jokes, what they find funny, and whether they use humor as a weapon or a shield tell the reader more about who they are than a page of description. In Killer Cuts and Dead Letters, the comedy comes from the characters themselves: two serial killers with distinct personalities, perspectives and senses of humor. The premise is dark. The characters make it funny, and that combination is what makes the book work.
Humor also builds trust between writer and reader.
I think writers who strip humor out of serious books are protecting their own dignity at the reader’s expense.
When a reader laughs at something you wrote, they’ve made an emotional investment in your work. They’ve decided they like spending time with your voice. That trust carries them through the parts of the book that aren’t funny, the parts that are difficult or challenging or demand patience. A reader who trusts your voice will follow you into dark territory they wouldn’t enter with a writer who hasn’t built that connection.
Watch: How A Nuclear War Will Start - Minute by Minute, Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
Which types of humor work in writing?
From Author Talks
Robin Donovan writes comedic murder mysteries around a deliberately anti-perfect middle-aged sleuth, and runs an advertising agency by day. She described the balance on Author Talks.
Dry and deadpan humor works in almost any context because it doesn’t announce itself. The writing plays it straight while the content is absurd. Grim’s bureaucratic humor works this way. The systems in the story are ridiculous, but the characters treat them with complete seriousness. The gap between the absurdity and the straight delivery is where the humor comes from. Douglas Adams built an entire career on this approach.
Dark humor handles heavy subjects by acknowledging their weight while refusing to be crushed by it. Shield of Ashes uses this. Soldiers tell each other crude jokes the way real soldiers do, because gallows humor is how people in impossible situations stay sane. Nobody in that book thinks the nuclear apocalypse is funny. They joke because humor is how humans cope with things they can’t control, and I think a war novel without that is lying about the people in it.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote the book on this, and he paid for the right to. (More on Kurt Vonnegut Day) German forces captured him during the Battle of the Bulge and sent him to Dresden as a prisoner of war. When Allied bombers leveled the city starting February 13, 1945, he survived by sheltering in a meat locker in the basement of a slaughterhouse.
He turned that night into Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, and he filled it with jokes. Billy Pilgrim travels through time, and the book answers death after death with the same flat refrain: “So it goes.” His obituaries called his work “the blackest of black humor,” and the novel became his most famous.
To me, that’s the strongest case anyone could make for dark humor in a war novel. Vonnegut had been inside the firestorm, and he still decided his readers needed to laugh on the way through it. Nobody who reads that book comes away thinking he took Dresden lightly.
Satire uses humor to critique. Orwell’s Animal Farm is the textbook example: a funny story about farm animals that’s a devastating critique of Soviet totalitarianism. Satire works when the target deserves it and the humor is sharp enough to make the critique memorable. It fails when it’s mean-spirited without being insightful.
Self-deprecating humor makes an author or character relatable. David Sedaris has built his career on making himself the butt of his own jokes. In ghostwriting, this is among the most effective tools for making a client’s voice feel human. A CEO who can laugh at their own mistakes on the page becomes someone the reader wants to spend time with. A CEO who presents themselves as infallible becomes someone the reader stops trusting.
Irony creates humor through the gap between what’s expected and what happens, or between what’s said and what’s meant. Jane Austen’s entire body of work runs on irony. The opening line of Pride and Prejudice is among the most famous ironic sentences in English literature. Irony rewards attentive readers and gives your writing a layer that reveals itself on rereading.
| Type | How it works | Examples cited |
|---|---|---|
| Dry and deadpan | Plays it straight while the content is absurd | Grim; Douglas Adams |
| Dark | Acknowledges a subject’s weight while refusing to be crushed by it | Shield of Ashes; Slaughterhouse-Five |
| Satire | Uses humor to critique a target that deserves it | Animal Farm |
| Self-deprecating | Makes the author or character the butt of the joke | David Sedaris; CEOs laughing at their own mistakes |
| Irony | Plays on the gap between expected and actual, or said and meant | Jane Austen; Pride and Prejudice |
Where do writers go wrong with humor?
Forced humor is worse than no humor. If a joke doesn’t come naturally from the material, the characters or the situation, it reads as the writer trying to be funny, and readers can feel the effort. I cringe at the wink-at-the-camera jokes some writers drop into tense scenes, because every one of them tells the reader the author cares more about looking clever than about the story.
Too much humor undermines serious content. If every paragraph has a joke, none of them land because there’s no contrast. Humor needs straight sections to work against.
A novel that’s funny on every page is exhausting in the same way a novel that’s tragic on every page is exhausting. The ratio depends on the material, but the principle is universal: humor needs space around it.
Humor that punches down alienates readers, and I think it should. Making fun of people with less power, less status or less ability to defend themselves reads as cruelty with a laugh track. The best humor punches up or sideways, at systems, institutions, pretension and hypocrisy, and those targets deserve every joke aimed at them.
Sarcasm is dangerous in writing because tone of voice doesn’t exist on the page. In conversation, inflection carries sarcasm. In writing, it can be indistinguishable from sincerity unless the context makes it unmistakable. Use it sparingly and only when the surrounding text makes the intent obvious.
My take
Put jokes in your darkest book. A story about World War III with no laughs crushes the reader before the halfway point, and a moment of dark wit lets them breathe. Let the humor come from the characters and the situation, and leave quiet stretches around it so it lands. Punch up at institutions and hypocrisy, never down at people who can’t fight back. And cut every wink at the camera, because it tells the reader you care more about looking clever.
Humor in Ghostwriting
Adding humor to client books is among the most valuable things I do as a ghostwriter. Most clients don’t think of themselves as funny, but nearly all of them have stories, observations, and perspectives that contain natural humor. My job is to find those moments in our interviews and bring them out on the page.
A memoir without any humor reads like a eulogy. A business book without any humor reads like a manual.
Adding moments where the author laughs at a situation, acknowledges an absurdity, or tells a story with a funny payoff transforms the reading experience. The reader stops thinking of the author as a distant authority and starts thinking of them as a person they’d enjoy having dinner with. That shift in perception is worth more to the book’s success than any amount of expertise or credentials.
Even a serious nonfiction book needs a little of it, mild is fine, to break up the wall of words. Facts and examples help, but a couple of humorous touches make a book less intimidating, and often it’s only a matter of rewording. I like a dedicated humor pass, paragraph by paragraph, and it might take a day. Back in 2024 I’d hand ChatGPT a couple of paragraphs, ask it to put some humor in, and use it for options.
Match the humor to the client’s actual personality.
Some clients are naturally dry. Some are self-deprecating. Some tell stories that build to a punchline. The humor in the book has to feel like it comes from them. If I write a joke that sounds like me instead of the client, it breaks the voice, and voice is everything in ghostwriting.
Humor, I think, is the most underrated skill in the whole craft, and writers who dismiss it as fluff leave their readers stranded in the darkest parts of their books with nothing to hold on to. That’s a failure of nerve, and the reader is the one who pays for it.
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