Why Use Humour in Written Work?

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh (otherwise they’ll kill you)
—Oscar Wilde, 1890

Overall, humour can significantly improve our connections with others and our own well-being, making it a crucial component of today’s society. When things in life are tough, laughing about them is one of the best coping methods!

Humour is proven to have a positive influence on mental health and can be a useful tool for lowering stress. Using humour to deal with anxiety & stress can be beneficial for both reader and author.

A shared sense of humour helps facilitate better relationships with readers

—Neil Mach

I employ humour in my prose to ease the awkwardness of a situation or make a difficult subject matter more bearable. But using humour in writing can be beneficial in a variety of other ways. Here are a few examples:

• Employing humour helps readers feel at ease (especially useful if you’re tackling difficult topics)
• A shared sense of humour helps facilitate better relationships with readers
• Reminisced humour will confirm connectedness between reader and author and validates convergent thinking
• Humour will make difficult messages more tolerable
• Humour increases the engagement and power of unappetizing messages
• For both the writer & reader, humour requires creative gymnastics (thinking outside the box). Such mental workouts can be intrinsically enjoyable
• Humour can help counteract the negative aspects of a worsening situation
• Humour encourages empathy for others, openness to new ideas, and honest discussion
• With sarcasm, an author can communicate and describe tensions without offending the reader
• With sarcasm, an author laughs at their own predicament: this helps facilitate better relationships with readers
• If readers are coping with a dysfunctional environment (and/or difficult people) sharing irony deals with real-life challenges by recognising & sharing the silliness of a situation

In his book The Patternmaker and the Tide, English author Neil Mach addresses issues including racism, invasion of privacy, mental illness, disruption of everyday routines, and the continuing crisis of the English Channel migrant-crossing using skilful, sympathetic and nuanced humour.

Get the novel here: https://books2read.com/u/md6GgO