My husband and I have just a few more weeks left in our Get Funny class, and let me tell you, this house is never short of laughs. We hardee-har-har all day long.Okay, I'm exaggerating. Guess what? Exaggeration is actually a form of humor.
The humorous elements of exaggeration and understatement can help bring laughs (or smirks) to your story.
Both of these need a touch of reality to be effective.
Samples of exaggeration are the "She was so old that..." or "It was so hot..." comments.
My exaggeration example for my class assignment was this:
"The rock concert in Chicago was so loud that farmers in Wisconsin were holding up their lighters during the ballads."
The realistic observation would be "The rock concert was so loud that the people across town could hear it." I then exaggerated it so that it wasn't the next town that could hear it, but the next state. In an exaggeration, if it's big, you make it ginormous. If it's cold, you make it five gazillion degrees below zero.
In The Simpsons, Homer's traits (his lack of intelligence, his laziness, etc) are exaggerated to make his character funnier. You can pick a trait of a character and make it bigger than life to amuse the reader or to get your character into interesting situations.
The opposite of exaggeration is understatement. You use it in the same way as exaggeration, but you go the other way. Instead of making something bigger, you add something trivial.
My understatement example:
"Johnny got into a car accident today. The poor guy totaled his car, broke his wrist, suffered a concussion, and spilled his Diet Coke from McDonald's!"
The spilling the drink action would be the understatement.
Here's a writing example:
Kelly has many aspirations. She wants to snag an agent, get a publishing contract, and buy lots of Sharpies to sign books.
What have you exaggerated lately?
