This week, I started a writing class at l’École nationale de l’humour. The 10-week course teaches participants some basics in writing humour, including how to identify different comedic genres and formats, how to apply these for effect, and how to generate jokes.
I signed up for the class thinking it would be useful to get some theory to apply to my skit project. I’m also interested in stand-up, and the course is structured so that by the end of the ten weeks, I will have a short stand-up bit prepared and workshopped in previous classes that I will present to the class.
Here’s what I learned in the first class:
Thinking outside the box makes anything funnier
We did an in-class exercise where we had to analyze household objects and come up with alternate uses for them. My group had a velcro hair roller, and we had a good laugh trying to pitch a cock ring with built-in pube-combing capacities. This exercise reminded me of sketch-writing and the notion of taking an idea and elevating it by continually asking yourself “what if?” to generate increasingly absurd ideas.Cultural references matter
The names of tv shows, comedians, and other public figures mentioned by my Quebecois classmates generally went right over my head. I already suspected that francophone Quebecois humour was somewhat different than various genres of anglophone humour — in my experience, Quebecois stand-up comedians thrive on making funny voices, rapid-fire speech, and gestural physical humour — but I hadn’t thought about the importance of points of reference. This doesn’t necessarily mean name-dropping, though — I got a pretty good laugh from my classmates by taking a crack at Communauto drivers.I’m going to have to adapt to my audience
This is maybe the most obvious, but my audience won’t always be trans or even trans-friendly. Case in point: the guy sitting next to me in class said he was a big fan of Dave Chappelle. This doesn't make me feel ultra safe or anything, but it also means the class is an opportunity for me to workshop material that targets a different audience — maybe one that’s less explicitly queer, at least until I get to know them better. And given that my work tends to be explicitly queer, that’s a creative challenge in of itself.
These lessons reflect two of the main basic principles of humour: the angle and the reference. The notions of angle and referent also keep coming up in my work on the skits, where I workshop not only how to make something funny, but also think about the best way to make it funny for my intended audience of primarily trans people — all the while remembering that even though we’re all trans, we won’t all have the same points of reference. It’s tricky, but it’s a creative process I’ve been enjoying.
Charlie Morin | Bio
I’m a writer and visual artist based in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke. My work focuses primarily on humour, with a particular interest in transmasculine comedy. I’m originally from Treaty 1 (Winnipeg), where I got my bachelor’s of arts in rhetoric and worked as a newspaper editor and as a transcriber. I moved to Montreal in 2022, leaving behind the cold, the cankerworms, and my boobs.
This newsletter is all about having fun with humor and sharing some laughs. I post a short, themed reflection once or twice a month, plus the occasional update on my projects.