Animal Crackers… er, crackups

If you wanna spice up your writing with a bit of humor, look no further than our furry friends and, um, the  scaly ones… and don’t forget feathered.  Plus those with shells, fins, and … other things.

Uh.

Anyway, the point is that you should consider putting animals in your writing. No, I don’t mean rubbing a cockatiel over your keyboard or writing a pet wildebeest into your story.  I mean mentioning animals out of context to evoke a humorous response.

For example, in my upcoming book (The Next Adventures of Guy … more wackiness) the husband of the book’s warrior queen is in her third trimester of pregnancy.  Because she already has three sets of hyperactive twins, she’s understandingly a little sensitive about her situation. 

So there’s a point in the story where the husband innocently sits next to her, puts his arm around her, and the action goes like this, “She turned to him and said sweetly, ‘Honey, I told you.  If you ever touch me again, I will rip your arms out of their sockets and stake you outside for the raccoons to munch on.’”

Raccoons munching.  This works better than simply threatening to give him a noogie, right?  But there’s no real raccoon in the story, nor does the reader expect to meet one later.

And which of the following statements is funnier?  “His head quickly disappeared.”   Or, “His head disappeared with the alacrity of a meerkat bolting in its hole.”

The second one, right?  And it’s because meerkats are cool and evoke a funny image.

One of the characters in The Next Adventures of Guy is a sorcerer, and I decided it would be fun to have a toad simply appear as a byproduct whenever he performed any kind of spells.  For no other reason than I just thought it would be amusing.

But as the story unfolded, it occurred to me that the toads could become an essential part of the story, … and, well, I don’t want to give anything away.  But when I first put them in the story, it originally wasn’t for anything other than comedic effect.

The best humor writers dip into this well all of the time.  For instance, Dave Barry once wrote of a crab that used to live outside of his house in Florida and how he (the crab) thought that he (Dave) was ‘interested’ in the crab’s mate, so they had a gunslinger-like showdown on the sidewalk.   I couldn’t help but grin just picturing this.

The other fun things about animals are that their motives are different than ours.  They are interested in food, sex and relaxation.  Um… okay, maybe they aren’t so different.

But they have other traits that come to mind, like the loyalty of a dog, the wisdom of an owl, the cleverness of a monkey, the memory of an elephant, the independence of a cat.  For every trait, you can just about come up with an animal that personifies, or more precisely, animalifies the qualities of that trait.

But I challenge you to make it funny, because when you step outside of these overused, worn out descriptions, you can come up with descriptions that breathe new life into them.

For example, we’re all sick of the overused expression, “…like a bull in a china shop.”    So give it a little twist, “Like an aardvark in a termite colony.”  The fresh approach brings a fun image to the reader’s mind and they don’t gloss over any of your words.  And can’t you just picture little termites scrambling for cover, dodging a whip-like tongue?   

But a bull in a china shop would create a lot more noise, so maybe this doesn’t create the picture you’re trying to evoke.  So tweak it a bit and say something like this instead, “like a drunken bat in a chandelier.” 

Now that’s good stuff, and you didn’t put a tired old phrase into your prose.

It’s also fun to compare humans to animals.  For example, which one of these sentences is better? “Her mother is a nasty piece of work.”  Or “I think her mother’s a wolverine in disguise.”   Comparing someone to an animal is always amusing.  And you can give her an entirely different look if you describe her as, say, a ‘distracted platypus,’ ‘disgruntled weasel’ or a ‘constipated tubeworm.’

I think that’s why I lovingly refer to my two daughters as my ‘critters.’  Being teenagers, they are hormonally programmed to rebel, disobey, disrespect and all of the other antisocial stuff that they’ll grow out of only when they have their own critters and learn that Mom and Dad weren’t such idiots after all.

But how different is their behavior from that of our pet kitten? When we’re looking, she obeys every single rule.  But as soon as we’re snoring, she’s up on the counters, getting into cabinets, harassing the bird and doing all the things that she knows she shouldn’t do.

It just goes to show that it’s easy to demonstrate the similarities between humans and animals.  Plus it’s fun, it’s funny, and not always untrue.

So, if you want a laugh, think seriously -  or funnily -  about putting critters in your shorts, er, I mean story!

Norm Cowie is the author of The Adventures of Guy … written by a guy (probably). His next Guy novel - The Next Adventures of Guy … more wackiness - comes out later this year. Check out his site at www.normcowie.com, or shoot him an email at n.cowie@comcast.net.