Universal levers of humor in fantasy fiction

Magic panties, troublesome cufflinks, and lots and lots of shoveling poop

Photo by Camila Cordeiro on Unsplash

Continuing my adventures in a playful 2024, I asked my husband to suggest an audiobook that will make me laugh. He donned his helmet and tossed me some potential titles. My funny bone is not an easy target. 

The first audiobook on list was The Dragon Squisher by Scott McCormick. As an Audible Original included in our membership, it cost nothing to try. I thought I’d see how long it held my interest before I hit stop.

Dragon Squishers opened with a dubious bit about an old king wearing magical panties. Pink silk, as I recall. We were off to a wobbly start. 

My finger hovered over the pause button. How far into the book would I get before I pushed it?

Irreverence, Parody, Zooming, and Nothing to Lose 

Humor is a personal thing. My husband can be laid out flat, laughing at a video so hard he’s holding his stomach and tears are streaming down his face, while I coldly look on, waiting for the moment to pass. 

However, the general levers that make something funny are not personal. What are those universal humor levers? How can they be employed in fantasy?

Based on my experience with Dragon Squishers, I’ve divided funny into four main levers: irreverence, parody, zooming, and nothing to lose.

Irreverence

Number one on the list of what makes a story funny is irreverence: breaking the rules, thumbing your nose at the authority figures, making fun of something established or revered.

Let’s start with the pink panties. That’s what. McCormick did.

Dragon Squishers set its irreverent tone right off the bat with a noble old king (authority figure) wearing pink panties. Pink panties become irreverent when worn by old kings who make public declarations about their comfort.

A king wearing panties would not have been enough to stay my finger from that pause button, but then those panties did a magic spell.

Magic panties? I was willing to read a little more.

We said good-bye to the king and met our protagonist, Niles, who was just wrapping up his career as town troublemaker and getting conscripted into military school. What followed was a classic drill sergeant sitcom, where Niles attempted to get kicked out of the army for bad behavior. Instead he ended up digging lots of latrines.

My finger was really hovering over the pause button, now. A military establishment is an ideal setting for irreverent humor because it facilitates interaction between people of different social strata in the context of a strict hierarchy. Drill sergeant humor generally leaves me cold. However, McCormick padded latrine digging with a healthy dose of character growth and relationship development.

As the battle of wills escalated between Niles and his drill sergeant, my finger was positively poised over that pause button.

Just before I hit stop, things suddenly got interesting.

Parody

Parody takes the concept of irreverence to the meta level. Instead of pink-pantied kings or one-upping an authority figure, parody involves making fun of an established cultural phenomenon.

McCormick went right for the big fantasy phenomenon by parodying Lord of the Rings. 

It was a clever decision, not just because LotR is such a well-known fantasy icon, but because the choice was so darn economical. Dragon Squishers wasted no time building a detailed fantasy world by summarizing its backstory as a parody of Middle Earth. 

Lord Smoron. The halfling, Elbo. Legendary cufflinks in place of the One Ring. With even passing familiarity with Tolkien’s stories, any reader could easily get the gist. 

Establishing this big world with its big history allowed McCormick to jump right into the next trick in his funny bag.

Zooming in and out

Dragon Squishers is an adventure of small people on a big quest. Thanks to a cleverly economical use of parody, McCormick quickly set up a vast and convincing history to use as backdrop for his story.

Dragon Squishers  squished time as well as dragons. Time was manipulated in huge sweeps. Days or weeks might be compressed into a few sentences.

All this becomes riveting when the narrative lens alternates between big, sweeping views of a vast magical world, and the small world of Niles and his companions. When we alternate between summarizing entire centuries in a few sentences, and spending ridiculous amounts of verbiage with Niles on the pluralization of titmouse.

Every time I got bored with the antics of a self-centered, fourteen-year-old protagonist, McCormick was right there to zoom the lens away from his protagonist and toward the stakes of the fantasy world at large. It was as if he intuited my finger over that pause button, and wanted to say—wait, but this is about more than Niles.

That said, a clever manipulation of those personal stakes for Niles was ultimately what kept me reading.

A protagonist with very little to lose

The more dramatic a story, the more the protagonist has to lose.

A father who is racing the clock to bring life-saving medicine back for his dying, seven-year-old daughter makes for quite a different story than does a fourteen-year-old layabout who’s big life trauma is sharing his special desert. 

Protagonists of funny stories have very little to lose. In Dragon Squishers, Niles has almost nothing at stake. At first, he’s most in danger of disappointing his mommy. He takes risks to accomplish such daunting tasks as pulling pranks and scoring some sweets for girls who barely notice he’s alive

With nothing to lose, Nigel is the ideal funny protagonist.

Yet, if a character truly has nothing to lose, it’s a little hard to root for him. Right here was where I was most at risk for pushing that pause button. But McCormick knew that risk because, little by little, he started to up those stakes.

Nigel got in trouble with his mom. Then he got drafted into the military. Latrine duty escalated to torture sessions in solitary confinement in a dark dungeon. Before I knew it, Nigel had been banished from his entire kingdom and kicked into the wild with no money, no community, and no friend except the dude who scarfed down a week’s worth of magic meals in one digestively-disastrous gulp.

As the stakes grew more serious, both for Niles and for his world, I found myself more and more engaged with the story. So engaged, in fact, that, to my surprise, that I hit the end of Part One.

Lemonade is better than sugar water

Irreverence (with its cousin, parody) zooming in and out of big picture to small picture, and lightweight stakes are the key ingredients of any humorous story. They could probably sustain a short story.

However, if a story is going to stretch into a novel, a writer needs to insert some edge to that sugary fun. A little lemon can transform a glass of sugar water from an experiment destined for the drain into a refreshing drink.

Adding a dose of drama into a comedy by upping the stakes is a guaranteed squeeze of lemon in the fantasy genre.

Some people like their comedies super light and funny. Some people (like me) really crave those stakes to temper the humor. Otherwise it’s just too darn sweet.

The gentle, but persistent escalation of stakes in The Dragon Squisher has gotten me all the way through Part 1. I’ve just begun Part 2. The experiment continues. I can’t wait to see if Dragon Squishers will keep my pause finger hovering.