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Humour
The Functions of Humor in Writing
Omar Sabbagh contemplates the use of humor, in fiction, and in life.
My work as a novelist and short story writer inevitably involves plenty of moments in which I stare into space. In such moments, I sometimes consider the ways in which I use humor in my own writing, and these moments have prompted me to write this article. If this were a systematic discussion of the functions of humor, I might start by making distinctions between the different types of humor, such as, irony, wit, satire, and sarcasm. However, this article is no such thing. It is instead a meditation or a reflection on the different ways humor has happened to play out in my published fiction, as well as in my life and thinking more generally.
I say ‘happened to play out’ because there was and is nothing overly planned about anything funny I may have written (or lived). If ever humor has had a central function in my fictions, it has been a facet of the way my mind works, not a conscious strategy. So, in trying to discern and elucidate the function of humor, in life as much as in fiction, my opening gambit will involve what certainly is a central motor for humorous effects, namely, ‘reflexivity’.
Writers differ widely in the temperament they bring to their work, and this of course means different kinds of humor emerge. My own temperament aligns more with metafiction [fiction that explores its own boundaries, Ed] than with straightlaced psychological realism. At least, the kind of writer I am is very aware of the modes and features of his own story-telling at nearly every step of the way. So apart from the story itself, there is an additional story, superimposed: the story of the writer telling (or showing) his or her story. This can itself result in humor. Borges or Nabokov, for example – two iconic entrepreneurs of metafiction – are not always or not even in the main trying to be funny. Yet the feature they share, reflexivity, does nearly always engender, if not humor, then irony. And irony, whether verbal or cosmic, involves a conflict and differentiation among the parts of any writerly whole one may be producing.
Thoughtful Writing
What is reflexivity? It is more than heightened cognizance. It is the coming of consciousness into self-consciousness. This self-consciousness may be literal – such that, for instance, a writer writes a sentence that then begins to curve back upon itself, continuing via some kind of determinate development or negation, undercutting itself in the process. This type of self-reflection can be maddeningly unending – to the point where it completely fritters away the tale at hand in favor of the tale of the teller trying to tell the tale at hand.
Charlie Chaplin Film Fun cover, 1918
One doesn’t have to necessarily include a ‘story within a story’, or even a thematization of the process of storytelling within the storytelling, to be reflexive. And even when one does have layers or levels of authorship and of story-telling, the effects need not necessarily be funny. In this regard I think of the Lawrence Durrell of The Alexandria Quartet, or even more emphatically, The Avignon Quintet. Although the roles of authority and authorship are deeply at issue there, these novels are not in any direct or primary way funny, nor are they meant to be. However, irony is completely redolent here, which makes them, more broadly, highly entertaining. But then irony in this sense, as well as entertainment, are not the same things as humor.
I think that apart from the disembodying work of reflexivity, another temperamental feature at play when humor works is imagination. Imagination is at work in all creative writing, humorous or not. But while imaginative work need not be funny, funny work must be imaginative. I’ve noticed in everyday encounters that while higher IQs might result in quicker wits, being funny is not in my experience a function of analytical intelligence, but more a result of the capacity for fantasy. In particular, when someone makes you laugh, they are in my experience invoking the specter of otherness. They are in effect illuminating the present moment with a quick ranging over some kind of elsewhere.
The bringing of two distinctively different things up against each other can often be the motor of humorous effects. Or, put otherwise, humor nearly always betrays or contests uniformity or univocality. It doesn’t require a whole cacophony of voices or senses or directions, but at the least two, and no less. And the capacity to imagine is central to this, because imagination is both ranging and adventurous as well as deeply constructive. It builds between different things – connects the dots; and when humorous in its effects, there is no absolute resolution or absorption of the elements at play into one finished, sealed thing. If it wasn’t for the antagonistic couplings engendered by humor, perhaps our world would be simpler. It would certainly be more boring.
The Heart of Laughter
The idea of a remainder – of something left over or out – is at the heart of laughter. If everything did what it was supposed to do, fitted in its proper place forever, then we wouldn’t be challenged into laughter. Perhaps in this sense laughter is akin to desire. I mean that laughter indicates the lack of a complete satisfaction of one’s wishes or expectations. Laughter, like sex, is a little death. It may also indicate a breaking-point – a point at which the only way one can process one’s experience is by putting it to the flames. This is not to say, however, that humor need be cynical, only that in its functioning humor must be an artefact of, if not a direct voicing of, skepticism about the future.
Humor as a kind of doubting conscience, then? This might be why at the inception of the Western tradition of disciplined approaches towards truth, Plato uses dramatic irony (ie, unnoticed incongruities) in his dialogues. That said, it has been argued that Plato wasn’t a true midwife of ideas (as Socrates claimed of himself); that, as a writer of philosophical dramas (starring Socrates), he had an agenda and knew strategically, as it were, which ideas were to come. And yet it has also been argued that this wasn’t the case with Socrates himself, whose life and dialogues were indeed as open-ended and adventurous as they appear to be. And the path of questioning and answering and questioning again – that is, of philosophy – was we know imagined by Socrates as a ‘preparation for death’. Perhaps because true reflection on a life, its examination, is not and cannot be construed as the same thing, or on the same plane, as living itself, but the invoking of a different, other, or othering, way of being. And to connect my own dots, does this make humor, insofar as it provokes thought, an angel of death?
In my own work, such as my Y Knots: Short Fictions (Liquorice Fish Books, 2023), there are metafictional effects engendered by playful narratorial voices; allegories that work satirically; and parodies that invoke more iconic writers in a certain tradition. In each vein a certain othering is always at work, even if only implicitly. And my hope is that when humor is at work in my fiction it entertains the reader: makes him or her smile, wryly or wholeheartedly, or, in a more emphatic mode, laugh out loud.
While one can be entertained without humor, one cannot have humor without entertaining. One can clearly be entertained by horror, say, or by tragedy, as much as by humor, but on the whole they are determinately different genres. But it does occur to me: might Aristotle’s point in his Poetics (c. 4th century BCE) about the ‘purging’ effects of watching tragedies in the theatre, also apply, if differently, when a reader is made to laugh or grin? I tend to think so. There is as much destruction of illusions engendered by doubting laughter as there is by the quagmires of tragic conflict. Both in that sense are political, even if inadvertently. Just as I’ve often thought that weekly football is a needed pressure valve for many of its mostly working-class fans – diverting much everyday anger and frustration that might otherwise prove socially perilous – so being made to laugh is also perhaps a way of diverting our attention from the less laughable truths of our world in a resonant and responsive way. In short, humor, in whatever form, puts the oh-so-fallible world to rights: realistically at times, fantastically at others.
A Humorless World
But such corrective moves are always temporary. In my view what is truly laughable about our current world, is sad – something to grieve over – and intractable. We could have fed everybody the whole world over, infrastructurally, logistically, and economically, since well before the last quarter of the twentieth century. It didn’t happen then, much as it doesn’t today. And when someone dies in an untoward manner – either from a tragic terminal illness or from ruthless, mindless, rabid, genocidal intent – we doubt our world, naturally; but we do know that there’s nothing in the least humorous about it. In a way, what I’m trying to say is that however central laughter and humor are to the human condition, and so to any writing that engages with that condition, there is a story beyond all stories out there, far simpler and more uniting – a flash fiction of just one word, as it were: horror. The afflictions of our contemporary world, especially, are so far othered – so distant from our being able to do anything effective about them – that there’s no true way of honing them into fractious wholes of irony or humor. Humorists and humor are important. But humor and humorists must always come later. First, there is the sanctity of human life.
The Arabic proverb, often quoted at me by my own father, about how ‘the worst tragedy to befall one is actually very funny’, may well have applied in my own life. Maybe even I can laugh at my suffering, like many can at theirs. But the proverb’s formula just doesn’t apply to the levels of horror and abjection we see in our world, which are deeper and lower and more riveted than can be expressed by any kind of meaningful articulation.
© Omar Sabbagh 2025
Omar Sabbagh is a poet, writer, and critic. His latest books are: Y KNOTS: Short Fictions (Liquorice Fish Books, 2023) and Night Settles Upon the City (Daraja Press, 2024). Gazan Days (Dar Nelson) will be released in June 2025. He also teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at the Lebanese American University in Beirut.