ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT A LITERARY TEXT

There was an old man with a beard, 
who said, "It is just as I feared!— 
Two owls and a hen, four larks and a wren, 
Have all built their nests in my beard!

by Edward Lear

When you read a funny story, poem or article, you’ll find yourself smiling or even laughing, and feeling much happier afterwards. How do writers achieve this magic? And how can we understand this art and maybe even practice it in our speech and writing? That’s what we’ll learn in this lesson.

Different people find different things funny, but there are a few tricks that humor writers use to get us laughing. Let’s see what they are.

1. Setting up expectations and delivering completely different results: Surprise is an important element of humor. Read the poem we began with. We’re not expecting the birds to be living in a beard, and that’s what makes the poem so funny.

2. Unlikely comparisons and exaggerations: Authors often use comparisons between two very different objects or exaggeration to create a joke. For example:

The principal’s speech about the 100 Years’ War was about as long as the real thing.

The speech was probably long, but he writer exaggerates and compares it to the length of the war itself.

3. Funny sounds: Believe it or not, whoosh and splosh and cuckoo are among sounds that make people smile, and such sounds are often used by writers to add humor to their work.

4. Using well-known funny situations: sometimes writers rely on old jokes to make us laugh. Read this and see if you can guess what happens next:

Dumpitty was so busy reading the newspaper as he walked along the road, that he did not notice that the cleaners had not yet made their rounds. It seemed like monkeys had been having a picnic on the road, because it was littered with banana peels….

Is Dumpitty going to have a hard fall? Very likely. Are we going to laugh? It’s bad manners, but the answer is yes!

There are lots of other ways humor is created, and you can learn as you go along, by thinking about why something is funny when you read it. For now, let’s read a humorous story and see what we’ve learnt.

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