Ever want to do something but were afraid people might laugh?  I had the same problem, sort of, in High School.  I was asked to write a humor column for the school paper.  But I thought people might laugh–or actually that they might not laugh.  What if they all said, "It was beautiful."  "It changed my life."  "I never realized that mere words could be so exquisite."

    Humor results from putting a spotlight on the irony and inconsistency of everyday life.  But it’s getting tough to pull it off.  We live in a world where people who call themselves conservatives oppose abortion but support war, the death penalty and hand guns.  Liberals aren’t much better.  They believe in human freedom and try to achieve it by creating enormous "social service" agencies to control our every thought, act and deed from before the cradle to after the grave.  And these are just the main stream.  There is also a lunatic fringe out there.  How do you point out irony and inconsistency to a crowd like that?

    I always wanted to write humor.  Other boys idolized Mickey Mantel, J.F.K. or Forest Ackerman, but my hero was the guy who drove the jungle boat at Disneyland. It was childish admiration, but I still keep a toy jungle boat on my bookcase at work.  A few years ago my son and I memorized the entire jungle boat script, just in case–and this could happen–we are on the jungle boat.  The boat pilot gets hit by an imaginary poison dart.  He falls into the Zambezi where he is eaten by little plastic piranha.  The other passengers panic.  At any second the boat will be dashed against those fiberglass rocks dotting the shoreline, or attacked by ravenous animatronic beasts.  But then, a tall dark stranger stands at the rear of the boat.  Someone shouts, "Don’t standup in the boat."  But, undaunted, the stranger strides forward.  Taking the helm in his powerful, yet somehow gentle, hands he steers a safe course and he saves the day . . . by telling the rest of those stupid jokes.  It could happen.

    So, for me, writing humor is just a way of bringing people back to safety . . . by telling them stupid jokes. 

    But before I could write humor, I had to learn the rules.  The first rule is: humor columns have to be between six hundred and eight hundred words long.  That is a tough one.  For me the natural length is about twelve hundred words.  But modern computers are great, for instance if a story gets too long you can just cut out a part of . . .

    The second rule is to be funny.  The corollary is, " you must not try to be funny." That also is hard.  Humor is not well defined.  In fact, if you think too much about even a very good joke, it will quit being funny, except for that one about Bill Clinton.

    The third rule of humor is to work from a base of shared information.  It is best to tell jokes about something your audience already cares about.  But don’t take this to extremes.  Do not, for instance, tell a new mother jokes about her baby.  Back in the eighties there was a great joke about a covenant running with the land being like pantyhose (Because they both "bind the assignees").  But only law students got that joke (and back in the eighties that was o.k. because just over ninety percent of the population of earth was in law school).  Today nobody understands that joke, so you should never include it in a humor column–unless you’re under the required six hundred words.

    The fourth rule of humor is to surprise your reader with a funny part at the end, called a "punch line."  Here is a classic joke with the punch line moved to the front.  "To get to the other side is why the chicken crossed the road."  Most of you won’t find this funny (However, see: lunatic fringe, above).  But I told the same joke with the punch line at the end, to my four-year-old son, with better results.

    "Why did the chicken cross the road?" I asked, my eyes twinkling with giddy anticipation.

    "What chicken," he asked, a perfectly reasonable question since we had been talking about Captain Kangaroo, and humor, and not about chickens at all.

    "Well any chicken," I said trying to move the joke along to it’s hilarious punch line which, I by this time, I suspected might be lost on my son.

    "The one we saw from the tram?" my son asked, also trying to move it along.

    "What tram?" I was genuinely wondering where he had picked up the word "tram." "Well any tram." he said.

    The fifth rule of humor is, don’t tell jokes to four-year-olds.

    Metaphysical jokes are usually a bad idea also.  For instance:  

    "How did the chicken get to the other side?"

    "She went toward the white light."