When I write a new major work, something that is going to take months and eventually I’ll promise my soul to the devil, I like to get my wife a bottle of wine and let the magic happen. I get the best feedback when she’s about three glasses in.
“Well,” I’ll say. “My character wants to go to the next level of purgatory.”
“Yes, I get that, but why the patriarchy?”
It’s at this moment that I’ll look at her and wonder how the hell the magic wine made such a connection. And even though drunk editing can be frustrating at times, it does end up making connections in my satirical stories that I would have never made. It pushes me further.
Also, damn the patriarchy because I’m not sure how they are to blame, but dammit, I know they had their hands in here somewhere.
This is the life of a writer. No matter if I’m writing a short piece to satirize people that won’t leave at the end of a party or if I’m knee deep in the best way a parent can deal with our children’s anger, I need my wife (and the wine) to be my alpha readers. And since I write in the realm of the absurd, I need to find a way to get my wife there as well.
My wife often has a problem leaving reality behind. She anchors herself to it with to-do lists and meeting calendars. She thinks in the terms of goals and the steps to achieve those goals. Here spontaneity is reserved for picking a color for her nails. But I need the absurd wife to loosen up my own mind.
“And then,” I wrote on my most recent work in progress “Aaron complimented the angel’s butthole.”
It’s such an absurd line that wine almost came out of my wife’s nose. As a humorist, these are always the reactions we are looking for. If you want to see if a joke works, read it while your audience isn’t paying attention. If the laugh comes like a hammer hitting the reflex joint of the knee, you’ve got a keeper. If it’s a polite laugh, the joke has got to go. But then my wife’s realist brain took over.
“No one would ever say that. They would never complement such a thing,” she said.
“Of course, they wouldn’t,” I replied. “But this is where we heightened. The character in the story is doing their best but has no idea what to say. And in that moment, they say what they think is the right thing, which is, of course, the wrong thing.”
“But that is so wrong!” she countered. Obviously, I need to get my wife more wine.
The point of satire is to take those universal truths that we find in life and take them to an absurd level. That is how we make our point. And although it is humorous, if you look deeper there is often purpose to that absurdity.
In this case, what is the worst thing you can say while trying to be polite? Everyone has had a moment where they stuck their foot in their mouth. Where you have combined phrases such as “Take it easy” and “Thank You” where it comes out “Thanks it easy.” Now the absurdist needs to take it further for a bigger laugh that will highlight the truth. In this case, I could think of no worse thing for my character to compliment than the one thing we should never compliment.
But believe me, this works. And so does the wine.
“You need to have tampon archers,” my wife says. We are back on the patriarchy, and shockingly to me, it has made it into the new book. Originally, I had no plans to satirize such a thing. But one night, my wife made a point out of nowhere, and it was a good one. Her thoughts often come in a circular pattern where the previous thought does not connect to the next one. She says “pinball” and then goes off on a tangent. This is where the magic happens during the edits.
The scene takes place on a golf course. The all-male executive team is fighting women. Now, what freaks out Alpha bros? Tampons. And how can I take that further to make a satirical point?
“What about menstrual hazards instead of water hazards?” I say and this time wine does come out of her nose. From there, the wine does the rest and the story is written. This is how I punch up my humor. I get my wife drunk.
My wife is plenty funny on her own. She points out the hypocrisy of life often and is the master of a three sentence social media story. But she’s better when she finds an excuse to let reality go and get into the realm of absurdity. And that’s where I need her because that’s where my head lives.
“Ugh, you make my head hurt,” she said. “How you get to where you go is beyond me.”
For me, humor is the easy part. Especially the first part of it. The concept comes naturally. But to get to where I need to go, there’s no better way than wine.
I think Hemingway did it like this.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Unsplash
