All language subtitles for MasterClass Neil Gaiman Teaches The Art of Storytelling - 13Humor

Humor in anything you do is good. Um,

for me anyway, I know there are many

writers who write without humor. For me,

humor, whether it's broad or whether

it's subtle, is always vital.

Um, sometimes it can be very dry.

Sometimes it can be overt.

Whatever you're writing, you want some

humor because humor is recognition.

Humor is that moment where you see

something that you've always thought,

but now somebody has articulated it. And

they've articulated in a way that you've

never seen before. And sometimes it's

just the joy of the unexpected.

This is a book that is all humor. It's

called Fortunately the Milk. It's a

children's book and uh it is about a

father who sets off to buy milk for his

children's breakfast

and uh

finds himself kidnapped by aliens. and

fleeing the aliens

finds himself captured

by pirates.

"Who be ye land lover?" said the woman,

who had a big hat on her head and a

parrot on her shoulder. "He's a spy, a

walrus in a coat, a new kind of mermaid

with legs," said the men. "What are you

doing here?" asked the woman. Well, I

said, I just set out to the corner shop

for some milk for my children's

breakfast and for my tea, and the next

thing I knew, he's lying, your majesty.

She pulled out her cutlass. You dare lie

to the queen of the pirates?

Fortunately, I had kept tight hold of

the milk, and now I pointed to it. "If I

did not go to the corner shop to fetch

the milk," I asked them, "Then where did

this milk come from?" At this the

pirates were completely speechless. Now,

I said, if you could let me off

somewhere near to my destination, I

would be much obliged to you. Then where

would that happen to be? Said the queen

of the pirates. On the corner of

Marshall Road and Fletcher Lane, I said,

my children are waiting there for their

breakfast. You're on a pirate ship now,

we find Bucko, said the pirate queen.

And you don't get dropped off anywhere.

There are only two choices. You can join

my pirate crew or refuse to join, and we

will slit your cowardly throat, and

you'll go to the bottom of the sea,

where you will feed the fishes. What

about walking the plank? I asked. Never

heard of it, said the pirates. Walking

the plank? I said. It's what proper

pirates do. Look, I'll show you. Do you

have a plank anywhere? It took some

looking, but we found a plank, and I

showed the pirates where to put it. We

discussed nailing it down, but the

pirate queen decided it was safer just

to have the two fattest pirates sit on

the end of it. "Why exactly do you want

to walk the plank?" asked the pirate

queen. I edged out onto the plank. The

blue Caribbean water splashed gently

beneath me. Well, I said, "I've seen

lots of stories with pirates in them,

and it seems to me that if I'm going to

be rescued at this, the pirates started

to laugh so hard their stomachs wobbled,

and the parrot took off into the air in

amazement. Rescue?" They said, "There's

no rescue out here. We're in the middle

of the sea." Nevertheless, I told them,

if you are going to be rescued, it will

always be while walking the plank, which

we don't do, said the pirate queen.

Here, have a Spanish deloon and come and

join us in our paratical adventures.

It's the 18th century, she added. And

there's always room for a bright,

enthusiastic pirate. I caught the

deloon. I almost wish that I could, I

told her. But I have children, and they

need their breakfast. Then you must die.

Walk the plank. I aged out to the end of

the plank. Sharks were circling. So were

piranhas.

Unfortunately, the milk is a bit odd

because it has a father narrating. The

actual book is narrated by his son. So,

and this was where I interrupted my dad

for the first time. Hang on. I said,

piranhas are a freshwater fish. What

were they doing in the sea?

You're right, said my father. The

piranhas were later, right? So, I was

out at the end of the plank, facing

certain death when a rope ladder hit my

shoulder, and a deep booming voice

shouted, "Quickly, climb up the rope

ladder." I needed no more encouragement

than this, and I grabbed the rope ladder

with both hands. Fortunately, the milk

was pushed deep into the pocket of my

coat. The pirates hurled insults at me

and even discharged pistols, but neither

insults nor pistol shot found their

targets, and I soon made it to the top

of the rope ladder. I'd never been in

the basket of a hot air balloon before.

It was very peaceful up there. The

person in the balloon basket said, "I

hope you don't mind me helping, but it

looked like you were having problems

down there." I said,

"You're a Stegosaurus."

One of the fun things about a scene like

that is you are taking a scene that

everybody is kind of familiar with

and then you're just twisting it 45°

offkilter.

So,

we have a pirate ship

and you get to go, "What are the

cliches? How can I make fun of the

cliches? How can I enjoy the cliches?" I

love the idea that the first thing that

anybody does if they're about to be

killed on a pirate ship is demand the

plank because of course you get rescued

walking the plank. We've all seen that.

So, one thing that's really fun is just

take a cliche.

Take a scene that you have seen a

thousand times and it can be from

whatever kind of fiction you like.

It can be

um you know, if you like people with

guns, it can be two people facing off

with guns. If you like fiction with

swords, it can be swords. If you like

fiction with dragons, it can be somebody

against a dragon. Um, if you like doctor

nurse romances, it can be a doctor and a

nurse and another nurse and they're

glaring at each other because one thinks

that the other one has slept with the

other one. The other one knows that they

haven't and they're a messy and you do

the thing

the cliched way. Do the way that you

have seen it a hundred times. And now if

you're going to mine it for humor, you

just turn it and you tilt it. And some

of that is just going to be word choice.

Some of that is going to be attitude.

And a lot of it is going to be surprise.

Because the lovely thing about laughter

um is it's the release of tension. You

are building up to something funny and

then you're letting it go. you're

building up to something tense and then

you're deflating it with laughter. So

see how you can do that with something

very familiar and something very cliched

and then have one of the characters just

be a little bit more matterof fact than

they ought to be. Have one of the

characters know a little bit more about

this kind of fiction than they ought to.

have one of the characters be much more

concerned

about whether they left the kettle on at

home um or that the kids need to be

picked up from school than they are

about the dragon or the gun and just see

what happens. Um that way it's an easy

way to start building humor but really

lovely way just to go in and find what's

funny in a scene.

certain words are going to have humor.

In in the sequence that I read from

Neverear,

uh describing risip as being heavier

than four fops, each of those fops

carrying a large suitcase filled

entirely with lard. Um the use and

deployment of the word lard is just it's

just the right word to deploy in the

right way and it gives you this

wonderfully funny image in your head of

four tall thin people each hauling a

suitcase around which by its very nature

is funny. Um so you can go you you know

use funny words

deploy them play around. One of the

things that that standup comedians and

people who write humor find fascinating

is where in the sentence your word comes

can actually mean the difference between

funny or not funny. Ending with the with

the funny

is always important.

Um you know four lard filled suitcases

as opposed to four suitcases filled

entirely with lard. The lad being the

funny word comes at the end.

When Terry Pratchett and I were working

on Good Omens, um, we needed shorthand

ways to communicate

with each other. And what I loved about

talking with Terry

was that he would come up with terms for

things that there were not terms for

in ways to write comedy.

Um, one of those was a fig. Uh a fig was

a term that he had started using in

Discworld

where a fig

initially uh you think it's something

terrible that you know like a body part

possibly a testicle or something where

your figginins are going to be you know

cut off or thrown to the winds and later

you discover a fig in is a small

raisinfilled

um like an Eckles cake. It's it's a

little sort of um pastry.

And

he used to use that as just a a a fig

being a little joke that becomes a

running joke.

Um but a running joke that then will pay

off in some way toward the end. And they

were distinguished from something that

we built in um in Good Omens which Terry

called sherbet lemons. And he called

them sherbet lemons because there is a

moment in the text where Adam,

the 11-year-old antichrist,

has been um fallen asleep eating sherbet

lemons.

and he is determined to get rid of

nuclear power because he's read

magazines saying this is a very bad

thing. And the next thing that happens

is a nuclear power station discovers

their reactor has gone missing, but

mysteriously is still putting out uh

they're still putting out a full load of

power. They just don't know where

they're getting it from. And when they

go and inspect the enormous room where

the power where the reactor used to be,

uh, the only thing they find is a

sherbet lemon.

And

so Terry would start using sherbet

lemons to mean just little things that

you'd throw in to the text

to make someone smile. They'd just be a

little little nice little moment of of

humor. It's a small thing that you throw

in as opposed to a fig in.

And the fig in would be something that

you would think was just a sherbet

lemon. But then it would pay off and it

would have a shape and a payoff toward

the end and it would appear. You'd sneak

it in under the radar. People would

think, "Ah, this is just a sherbet

lemon." But actually, it'll be a thing.

Terry loved having these terms for

things. Um, another one of Terry's terms

was cigarettes. And uh, he would talk

about the end of a book

as being built of cigarettes. And by

cigarettes, what he meant was the

moments in a 1960s cop show, 1960s

American cop shows in particular, where

everyone will be sitting around having a

cigarette because they used to smoke on

television in those days. And uh

they'd say, "So what really happened to

the widow Bloom and Tal anyway?" And

someone would say, "Ah, well, this would

happen." And then you you'd cut in on

all of the characters. They'd all be

having their little cigarettes and and

you get a way of saying goodbye to them.

So Terry would always love the idea that

at the end of the novel, after a novel

was done, you needed to have your

cigarettes. you needed to just stop in

on each character, explain anything from

the plot that had not been explained so

far, wrap everything up, and say your

goodbyes. And the problem with that

actually I discovered years later was

the nice thing about the cigarettes on a

1970s American cop show is they are

literally the time between the end of

the episode and the final commercial

break. So you have your commercials and

then you have your titles and in between

they liked to have this little bit that

they would squeeze in where nothing

really would happen and it lasted maybe

a you know maximum of 3 minutes long was

this tiny little thing. Um and of course

once you put them into a book and then

try and turn that book into television

your last half hour consists of people

saying goodbye to each other after the

plot is finished. So, when I was doing

uh Good Omens as a television series, I

actually wound up having to reconfigure

the entire plot for the last episode and

come up while keeping the original plot

that Terry and I came up with, I came up

with a new plot. And um

one that keeps ticking until the final

second because I really didn't want a

plot that finished halfway through and

then people just said goodbye to each

other.

Well, something that that is definitely

just a sherbet lemon in that it is there

it is a running gag. It shows up several

times. Um but it's just there to be fun.

It doesn't have any kind of payoff. um

would be this is an Nancy boys and uh

was the lime

and uh the idea being that um

Fat Charlie, who is the hero of um the

novel, has arrived on a little

island

called St. Andrews.

Here we go. He's taking a taxi ride.

He learned there was no reason ever to

leave St. Andrews. The taxi driver

himself had seen no reason ever to leave

St. Andrews, and he had given it much

thought. The island had a cave and a

mountain and a rainforest. Hotels, it

had 20. Restaurants, several dozen. It

contained a city, three towns, and a

scattering of villages. Food, everything

grew here. Oranges, bananas, nutmegs. It

even the taxi driver said had limes.

Fat Charlie said no at this mostly in

order to feel like he was taking part in

the conversation, but the driver

appeared to take it as a challenge to

his honesty. He slammed on the taxis

brakes, sending the car sooing over to

the side of the road, got out of the

car, reached over a fence, pulled

something from a tree, and walked back

to the car. Look at this, he said.

Nobody ever tell you that I was a liar.

What it is? a line said Fat Charlie.

Exactly.

Which means that by the time we get to

uh

page 12 uh chapter 12,

several chapters later,

Fat Charlie gets to rent a bicycle.

And uh there were information conduits

on St. Andrews that fat Charlie, who on

some level believed that coconut palms

and cellular telephones ought to be

mutually exclusive, had not expected. It

did not seem to make any difference who

he talked to. Old men playing drafts in

the shade. Women with breasts like

watermelons and buttocks like armchairs

and laughter like mocking birds. A

sensible young lady in the tourist

office. A bearded raster with a green,

red, and yellow knit cap and what

appeared to be a woolen miniskirt. They

all had the same response. You're the

one with the lime, I suppose. So, show

us your lime. It's back at the hotel.

Look, I'm trying to find Callianne

Higgler. She's about 60 American. Big

mug of coffee in her hand. Never heard

of her. And uh

once Fat Charlie gets back to his room,

Benjamin the concierge examined the bike

and told Fat Charlie not to worry.

They'd have it all fixed and good as new

by tomorrow. Fat Charlie went back to

his hotel room, the color of underwater,

where his lime sat like a small green

Buddha on the countertop.

"You're no help," he told the lime.

"This was unfair. It was only a lime.

There was nothing special about it at

all. It was doing the best it could.