subtle humour
You may have noticed that the humour I use in my blog posts is very subtle.
If you hadn't realised that I do sometimes use humour, perhaps go back and read a few posts again. It's probably been well hidden. Or perhaps it's just not funny to you, because you have a different sense of humour to me. Nearly everyone does, I've found.
(I haven't used any in this post yet, just in case you were wondering.)
Incidentally, in the language I am writing in, there is a 'u' in humour. If your language doesn't have a 'u' in humour, it might explain why you haven't seen any humour here before. You were probably looking for humor.
One thing that makes my humour subtle and sometimes harder to spot is that I don't tend to use exclamation marks very much. I read some other writers sometimes and see an exclamation mark used like its very addition is enough to raise the sentence or phrase into being funny all by itself.
This is funny! Laugh! You cock!
There you are see, that doesn't work at all.
Some people seem to think that using two or more exclamation marks will make the line funnier than if they only used one. They are of course wrong, and should be locked up for the public's safety. Two wrongs (or more!!!) don't make a right.
I don't use exclamation marks much in writing the same way I don't use them at all in speech. My wife says that I have stopped being excited enough—or indeed exciting enough—for her to imagine that there would be an exclamation mark after what I've said.
Yes, even then.
She thinks I suffered some brain and personality changes when I had a stroke, thirteen years ago now, which has taken away my exclamation marks. Personally I think I've been calmer and more in control of myself since I gave up drinking soon afterwards, which was mainly done in order not to have another stroke. I am a more evenly balanced person now, and I have found that using real life exclamation marks and raising your own heart rate by 50 bpm rarely helps anything in any practical way.
My wife disagrees and thinks it is necessary to use them to infer a sense of urgency. The example she gives is when she says "Spider!" (she does actually say "ARGGHHH! SPIDER!", in all caps, but she says including the "ARGGHHH!" and all caps makes her look pathetic, so I promised not to do that).
My argument here is that I could perfectly well understand and do what was necessary if she just said normally, "Excuse me dear, there's a spider there that needs dealing with. Would you be so kind?", and it wouldn't make me jump and have a heart attack when it happens either.
Anyway, my style of humour could probably be described as black, sardonic and dead-pan. Some might say bleak. I don't do jokes as such. It probably takes a lot more skill to imbue your text with laughs if you are using a sardonic and dead-pan writing voice in your head—and you don't do jokes—because the reader is almost certainly not using that sort of voice in theirs. What strikes me as a funny line probably needs that voice for it to work, and there's very little chance you as the reader have that voice too. Or any of the other voices I have.
One day, I hope to master the skill of using my writing in a way which transmits my voice and my warped sense of comedy to you. In a way, I am currently relying on the intelligence of my readers to see and enjoy any humour I have attempted, which is obviously not ideal. For now, I just have to put up with the fact that what makes it to the page is probably totally lacking the chuckles my writing and reading voice gives to me when I read it.
Why not carry on reading the posts on brumph to see if you can spot something funny occasionally?
I'm sure it'll be an absorbing and a pleasantly futile pastime to keep you enjoyably entertained and occupied until civilisation collapses and we all die.
NB: I published this post originally on a blog called scribblanity. That is probably another reason why you haven't noticed anything funny here before
Written by a real person who completely ignores red wavy underlining and uses perfectly legitimate brand new words that just haven't made it to a dictionary yet. skryb
Post Link: https://skryblans.com/subtle-humour
↓ There is a star to click down here, if you have been fully trained by modern social media to click stars mindlessly whenever you see them.
I have been similarly fully trained to receive them gratefully.