Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Dave Barry’s Tip for Writing Humor

Episode Date: December 29, 2020

Dave Barry is the rare humor writer who has also been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. For anyone looking to inject some humor in their writing, Dave has some simple advice to follow.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chris Hill. With The Motley Fool Money Extra, I'm Chris Hill. The end of the calendar year means certain traditions, one of which is Dave Barry's annual year in review column. If you're not familiar with Dave Barry, he's written more New York Times bestsellers than most authors have written books. He's won the Walter Cronkite Award for excellence in journalism and the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. And what makes these accomplishments even more remarkable is that Dave Barry is a humor writer. He's one of the first guests we ever had on The Motley Fool Money radio show. When I interviewed him back in 2010, I asked for his thoughts on the biggest mistake people make when they attempt to write for humor. This is going to sound awfully

self-evident, but it's not maybe as self-evident as it sounds. A lot of times when people write right humor it's not funny you're right that did sound self-evident and and but what i mean by that is i i get a lot of i mean i've always i've always said this if you don't the only way you can tell something funny is to give it to somebody else not your mom and if that person thinks it's funny then you can argue it's funny what you cannot do but which people try to do is say this is funny i know it is you know if you don't laugh it's because you don't you know you're not you're not a good enough reader or whatever and you can get away that a little bit i mean some people think some things are funny and some, but you can't sort of generally state that something's funny

if people aren't laughing at it. So I tell people if they want to become humor writers that they need to, they need to ask people who are reasonably objective, you know, if they think it's funny and, you know, get an honest answer and not, and not ignore the answer, which I think a lot of people do. Other things that people do that, that makes humor not work so well, they tend to take one joke and beat it completely to death. The rule should be make a joke and get out. You know, go on to the next joke or stop. But don't keep, you know, overstating, restating the same basic humor premise,

which even good humorists do sometimes. If you need a laugh, and who doesn't, find some of Dave Barry's writing. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching!