Notoriously, comedy is one of the most difficult forms of writing. This isn’t because it’s so hard to write a gag or a line that’s funny. Life’s a pretty hilarious place, after all. No, it’s difficult because translating goofiness into meaning is vastly more difficult.

These days, we tend to think of comedy as fluff—silly people doing stupid things so we can relate to them just enough to laugh at them and thank heavens we’re not that dumb. But comedy can be so much more than that.

Comedy is the key to entertainment, and entertainment is the key to winning readers over and selling them on every other meaningful thing in your story.

And, yes, I said meaningful. The idea that comedy is meaningless entertainment is false. Comedy is never meaningless. No story is—which is why writers have a responsibility to wield comedy more wisely and responsibly than just about any other technique in their arsenal.

Frankly, in the the sea of meaningless, vulgar, diluted (and, for my money, not very funny) comedy that floods the media these days, if you can write meaningful comedy, you will, without doubt, find yourself with a story that rises far above the pack.

Top 4 Tips for How to Write Meaningful Comedy

There’s a method to every madness, even for how to write meaningful comedy. Here are four tips to get you started, whether you’re writing flat-out comedy or just wanting to infuse a little humor in your adventure, romance, or mystery.

1. Comedy Should Have a Message

Writing Your Story’s Theme (affiliate link)

Ironically, theme is more likely to be ignored in comedy than in any other medium. And yet, comedy has, arguably, the greatest power for sharing theme effortlessly and painfully: if you keep readers laughing, they’ll never accuse you of preaching at them with heavy-handed themes.

Frank Capra directed some of the greatest screwball classics of the 1930s, including Arsenic & Old Lace, You Can’t Take It With You, and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. But no one would argue these stories are mere fluff. They are stories with powerful social and personal messages that remain classics as much for their themes as for their humor.

Capra said:

The best way to make friends with an audience is to make them laugh. You don’t get people to laugh unless they surrender—surrender their defenses, their hostilities. And once you make an audience laugh, they’re with you. And they listen to you if you’ve got something to say. I have a theory that if you can make them laugh, they’re your friends.

How many comedies today offer meaningful ideas that stick with you long after you’ve closed the book or left the theater? How many create character arcs that offer anything beyond a cursory (and usually improbable) overnight change?

Consider such classic sit-coms as the beloved Andy Griffith Show from the 1960s, in comparison with most of the shows on television today. The heart behind the story is what makes the comedy just as funny today as it was nearly sixty years ago.

2. Comedy Should Be More Surprising Than Shocking

Surprise is the essence of comedy. Readers are led to expect one thing—only to be pleasantly surprised by something else. Really, as much as anything, we’re trying to get readers to laugh at themselves for their mistaken preconceptions.

However, too many writers have come to rely on shock value—usually in the form of social vulgarities—as a crutch for evoking the necessary surprises of comedy. Comedy today is almost synonymous with foul language, sexual explicitness, and gross-out gags. But for what reason? To make a shocking comment about society that both amuses and stings readers into a greater awareness of themselves and their world? Generally, not so much.

The problem isn’t just that this approach to comedy is arguably degrading to both storytelling and society, but that it’s an ultimately self-destructive tool. The more you shock audiences, the more shock-proof they become, and the harder it becomes to reuse the technique.

Occasionally, I’ll watch the 1990s British comedy As Time Goes By with Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer. Accustomed to the rapid-fire vulgarities of the current slew of American sit-coms, I keep expecting the same from this show around every corner. But not so. Instead, it actually relies on good ol’ storytelling (remember that?) and the ever-deepening context of its characterization to consistently evoke laughs from surprise rather than shock. Granted, this requires far more skill to pull off, but who doesn’t enjoy a challenge?

3. Comedy Must Offer Readers a Relatable Protagonist

I can’t remember the last modern comedy I watched or read that featured a truly likable protagonist. Outrageously selfish, stupid, and even despicable people are, apparently, the only ones who are supposed to be funny anymore. That may be true for a three-page story or a five-minute YouTube skit. But for a full-on novel or movie?

As Kurt Vonnegut famously said:

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

I would argue this is even more important in comedy than it is in drama, if only because suspension of disbelief makes more demands upon readers in a comedy. Screwy people doing screwy things are much easier to swallow if we like them—0r at least relate with their screwy choices.

4. Comedy Must Be Socially Aware

In her “10 Writing Tips,” Joyce Carol Oates reminds us:

You are writing for your contemporaries not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

Because comedy has the ability to walk that fine line between pointing out the flaws in contemporary social consciousness without (necessarily) being offensive, it will always be the most time-sensitive of all thematic media. This does not mean what’s funny to one generation will not be funny to future generations. Not at all. But it does mean comedy will always be interpreted through the lens of the time in which it was written.

William Powell and Carol Lombard’s classic 1936 romp My Man Godfrey offered a commentary on the Depression that was both biting and heartfelt—and which we still appreciate in that context today.

The David Niven and June Allyson remake twenty years later reused all the same gags but failed to work as well, largely because the era in which it was made—the late 1950s—could not offer the same context for the story’s thoughts about the responsibility of wealth.

By the same token, Mel Brooks’s original 1967 musical shock comedy The Producers was just far enough away from, but not too far away from, the atrocities of World War II to be able to make outrageous fun of Hitler and the Nazis. The 2005 remake, on the other hand, was so far distanced from the generation that actually experienced the war (and, thus, had the right to laugh at it, as a part of a necessary healing process) that it lacked all context and was far more offensive than funny.

This isn’t to say modern authors can’t write funny stories set in historical periods (because, of course, we do), but rather that even our historical stories will inevitably be implicit commentaries upon our own time period.

Just because something is funny doesn’t mean it has to be meaningless, anymore than food that’s yummy has to be bad for us. Comedy is one of the most powerful tools in your writing toolbag—no matter what genre you write. Use it consciously and responsibly, and you will also use it to great effect.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! Do you ever write meaningful comedy into your stories? Tell me in the comments!