[stylist] Writing exercise: satire and humor

[Bernadetta Pracon]

Bridget,
Aww, how exciting that you're expecting a new baby in September. Best 
of luck to you and your hubby. Smiles. I speak from experience when I 
say that having a baby is the most tiring but also the most enjoyable 
twenty-four hour job one could ever have. lol.
I, too have found it hard to try to workshop humourous pieces in my 
writing classes. I tend to write satires or dark, dramatic  humour 
where that genre is concerned, and  a bunch of my peers often didn't 
know what to make of it. Once, I workshopped a one-act play in my 
playwriting class; It was supposed to be a funny spin on a truly 
serious matter. It was meant to be acted out in the nature of slapstick 
commedy. One of the comments from a classmate though, was actually, 
"you need to be careful not to make your  scenes  so comical. Because 
obviously, here's something that's supposed to be dramatic, and instead 
it comes off as sort of funny. And that's wrong.".
I wasn't sure what to make of that comment because, I in fact, wanted 
it to be funny, and that person tried to make me feel guilty for it. 
Which leads me to believe that either my sense of humour is totally in 
poor taiste where my  fiction writing is concerned, or it's just so far 
off that it's simply misunderstood. I wonder what, if anything, to do 
to make that sort of writing more relatable to the reader. At the same 
time, I'm sure that there's a nich for dark humour material, so maybe I 
shouldn't try to make it more integrated.  As a matter of fact, I'll 
post that play as my humor writing excersize. When I look back on it 
today, I don't really like it nearly as much as I did when I first 
wrote it years ago, but I'm curious to see what kind of feedback I 
could get on it here.

Bernadetta

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