What does it take to write humorous fantasy? I’m not quite sure I know, as I never set out to do it. I simply found that I could not take fantasy seriously, and thus did not. Not at first.

I think of two phenomenal misconceptions about writing humor. The first is that it is easy. It isn’t. It is perhaps the most challenging writing discipline. I have heard it said that a person who can do humor can do anything, and this isn’t limited to writing. Movie actors who are comedians can also do serious roles, while serious actors can’t necessarily do humor. Why? Because anyone can be serious, but not anyone can make another person laugh. It takes a special talent.

The other misconception is that humorists are happy. In my observation the opposite is true: they tend to be depressive. How can that be? It may seem counterintuitive, but a bit of examination clarifies the case. Satisfied folk don’t have reason to jump out of their ruts; they like what they’re doing and it makes sense to continue doing it. Why rock the boat? But unsatisfied folk do have reason to change. An irony is that when they do change, they tend to remain dissatisfied, so they have to try again, and again.

I have an analogy here. One time when I was a child I had a bowl of oatmeal. It wasn’t sweet enough, so I put sugar on it. It still wasn’t sweet enough, so I put on more sugar. But no matter how much sugar I used, it still wasn’t sweet enough. Then my sister said “Try salt.” That seemed nonsensical, but I tried a little salt. And suddenly my oatmeal was sickeningly sweet. I had been looking for the wrong thing.

Okay. I can make people laugh, so I guess I’m a humorist. Can I do other kinds of writing? You bet. I have written in several serious genres, including historical fiction and borderline horror, and I believe I do them competently. My science fiction/fantasy novel On A Pale Horse features Death as the main character: not played for laughs, and it was a bestseller. How serious can you get? So humor is merely the tip of my talent, as it were.

Am I happy? No. There’s a reason I wrote about Death: I thought about it constantly. I was borderline depressive for decades, until discovering thyroid medication; now I’m not happy, but neither am I depressed. I’m on the low side of normal. But in the interim I learned how to write humor, so I can still do it, even if the edge may have been blunted.

Let me give some examples, so I can come at some fundamental truth. I do tend to make people laugh, and I take a certain pride in scoring with the toughest cases, such as the nurse who set me up with the anesthetic when I was in for a colonoscopy. A colonoscopy is not something anyone does for pleasure; it’s a six foot deep penetration of the anus and colon to spot any beginning cancer. You don’t hear many laughs among people who are getting their posteriors reamed. So I said to the nurse “I bet I can make you laugh.” Naturally she doubted that. I said “I asked the doctor whether I could do with without anesthetic, as it’s not supposed to be a painful procedure. He said I could, but it would make him nervous. Well, I thought about having a nervous doctor doing this, and changed my mind.” Yes, she laughed. Then she knocked me out with the anesthetic, and next thing I knew I was in the recovery room. Score one point.

Another time my wife had a serious ailment, and they were trying an expensive treatment to see whether it worked. It was a four hour IV infusion, another no-fun procedure. Was it the right procedure? I talked with the hospital nurse about it. Those nurses don’t get many laughs; they deal all day with patients who may be in desperate pain or even dying. “Wouldn’t it be awful,” I said, “if halfway through they discovered that it was the wrong treatment.” I paused. “Especially if it was working.” She laughed. Score another point. Fortunately it was the right treatment, and in a few weeks my wife was out of her wheelchair and learning to walk again, and she remains mobile today.

Years ago I invested in Xlibris, a company that enables ordinary folk to self-publish their books at a reasonable cost, instead of being forever denied by traditional print publishers. This is good for family biographies, technical information, and, yes, fiction that doesn’t make the grade with choosy editors. I invested from idealism: to make it possible. But this put me in the company of venture capitalists, people who are in it strictly for the money, hoping to make big profits on new ventures. I felt like the notorious petunia in an onion patch. But they had to take me seriously, because my wife and I constituted the second largest investor in the company, and I served for several years on their board of directors. Once Xlibris was stabilized, I retired from the board, but listened in on board meetings. And, after losing money for years, the company finally got its act together and was making money, paying off debts and doing very well. So how did I make these serious folk laugh? I said “I am chagrined to see how well the company is doing-since I left the board.” They laughed, and assured me that there was no connection.

What do these laughs have in common? It’s the surprise juxtaposition of sense and nonsense. The way of seeing something that makes inverted sense. It’s also the edge: a different take on an unpleasant medical procedure, or on the prospect of losing substantial money in a risky investment. My rule of thumb is that to get a laugh you need to come perilously close to trouble, without going over the edge.

Humor isn’t necessarily all pleasant; that’s another misconception. It can be the overlapping of pleasure and pain, something funny but with an unfunny aspect. It is why the sight of a fat man slipping on a banana peel gets a laugh: it really isn’t funny, but it’s not happening to you, so, partly in relief, you can laugh.

Ah, but did you laugh at my examples? My guess is that you may have smiled politely, but did not come close to laughing out loud when reading any of them. And this leads to another misconception: that some things are inherently funny. I doubt anything is. Humor needs to be targeted to be effective. A joke delivered to the wrong audience will fall flat. There is no universally funny joke. Even one that gets a laugh the first time, won’t work a second time, because the surprise is gone. So a joke about colonoscopy can make a colonoscopy nurse laugh, once, and one about IV treatment can make an IV nurse laugh. And one about business investment and management can make investors laugh. Context is everything.

Sometimes humor is merely implied, not for a laugh. When I collaborated with a martial artist, Roberto Fuentes, former champion of Cuba, on a series of judo novels, I didn’t like the old familiar descriptions of skulls getting split open like falling pumpkins, and asked him for some more original imagery. He obliged with suggestions, and thus came about my favorite description: “His fist swung toward my face like a wrecking ball toward a condemned building.” That’s more of a wince than a laugh, but still a humorous analogy, especially to a martial artist. I have mental picture of a giant face crumbling and collapsing slowly, slowly into rubble.

But can you take a joke out of context and make it work? Explain the background, so people understand what’s funny about it? Not really. Humor is highly perishable. If you must explain it, you lose it. It’s like vivisecting a live animal to find out what makes it live. Instead you kill it.

So you want to write humor. Are you a good, versatile writer who doesn’t have to be funny? Can you readily come up with surprise connections that make superficial sense? Are you depressive? If you answer yes and yes and yes, you may have a future in this elusive and sometimes painful sub-genre.

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Piers Anthony was born August 6th, 1934 in Oxford, England. At the age of four he moved to Spain to stay with his parents, who had been doing relief work during the Spanish Civil War. At the age of six Piers and his family moved to America.

Piers got his BA in Writing at Goddard College, Vermont, in 1956. The same year he was married to Carol Ann Marble; they have two daughters, Penny and Cheryl.

His breakthrough came in 1977 with A Spell for Chameleon, the first book in the monstrously popular Xanth series. He became one of the most successful writers of SF/F, with 21 New York Times paperback bestsellers in the span of a decade.

Piers has written over 130 novels. He currently lives in Florida with his wife. He can be found on his website http://www.hipiers.com.