As I just noted on Bluesky, one of the goals in this year's Hallowe'en story will be to pack it with as many dumb jokes as is mathematically possible.

This is unusual for me.

I don't think anybody but a couple of Old Regulars has noticed this, but in general, I tend not to do humor in my stories. Sarcasm, yes; tons of it at all times. But I don't do humor well at all, and what passes for humor, when I write it, is usually just wisecracks. Wisecracks are like puns; you don't laugh, you roll your eyes. I can write puns all day, but they're not humor.

I am hindered by the fact that my sense of humor is not like most people's. There are a whole lot of movies and TV shows and books I am assured are hilarious, and when I actually read or watch them, I find inevitably that they are not.

Heinlein definitely had his ups and downs, but there is a scene in Stranger in a Strange Land where Mike (who was raised by Martians and is not really a human, in case you've managed to never read the book, and our ways are often alien to him) is trying to figure out humor, which Martians don't have. He does some researching and learning, then explains to Jill that he's determined that all humor contains "a wrongness" of some kind. Jill says no, that can't be, but then she runs through her mental inventory of jokes and situations she's found funny in the past, and realizes he's right. "Apparently the pratfall is the basis of all humor," she says, dejectedly. She feels it reflects poorly on humanity. (I may paraphrase slightly; I'm not going to go dig out my copy at this time.)

I do not do the humor of the pratfall. I don't see humor in situations which center around someone's humiliation, public embarrassment, doing the wrong thing by mistake or ignorance in a situation, etc. Not only are these things not funny to me, but they will often make me so squirmy I stop watching the film or reading the book.

I do enjoy the humor of farce. I enjoy watching an absolutely ridiculous house-of-cards situation gradually being set up, carefully, so that it can all come apart. Some Like It Hot is an extremely funny movie. And yet, I don't recall that it's ever made me laugh out loud, in any of my many viewings of it.

Physical comedy is hardly ever funny. Comedy of purely obnoxious behavior is hardly ever funny. There are many people in the world who think everything that Rowan Atkinson has ever done is hilarious. I find him painful to watch, and as a result, have not watched any number of things because he's featured in them. The most tolerable he's ever been for me is in The Tall Guy where his obnoxiousness is the entire point of his role, and where his unwatchability is balanced by the fact that the other two lead characters are extremely likeable and counterbalance him. Also, he's not actually onscreen all that much.

(The Tall Guy also wins an award for having one of the only "funny sex scenes" ever made which is actually mildly amusing.)

The funniest scene in A Fish Called Wanda is the one where Wanda finally tells Otto about all the things he gets wrong. The rest of the movie is great, but not necessarily ha-ha funny to me; and there's one scene in it I have to fast-forward past because it depends on a character's humiliation.

I'm trying to go through my mental library and think of some scene somewhere which makes me laugh -- I mean actually laugh out loud, guffaw, etc -- every time I watch it. The kind of scene that makes me giggle just recalling it. I'm sure there are some, but they aren't coming to me right now.

Anyway, I don't write humor. And I try to sharply limit the amount of wisecracks I throw in. Since the wisecracks are in there mostly for me anyway, I tend to hide them a bit; I know they're there, but I don't care if anyone else notices, and I don't expect them to. I still don't know how many people figured out "Verwandlung Konditorei" in this year's Valentine's story, or the last name of the business' competitor Emilio Ladro. Maybe some people did; I know on DA I have a small core of readers in Germany (they're part of the "night crowd," the ones who come in and leave hits and faves on items after I go to bed, for me to find the next morning).

But sometimes the pressure builds up, and I need to let it out. So this Hallowe'en story is going to be filled with wisecracks and really dumb jokes and stupid puns, if I can manage it, and damn the torpedoes.

The only thing is, I may not be able to manage it. Because it is also a private-detective noir, and I insist on those having a plot. The plot doesn't have to be foremost, because a noir is more about the characters than the case, but it does have to have one, and if I chase that too hard I may forget to put the bad jokes in. It's happened before.

We'll see.