Humor is not decoration
By Ryan Jaffe ·
I spent years writing comedy, and the thing it teaches you is how quickly a joke can cost you the reader. A line that is trying too hard reads as nervous, and a reader who senses nervousness stops trusting the writer.
But a single line of real wit does more for an essay than a paragraph of earnestness. It signals that you can see yourself from the outside, which is one of the few things a five-hundred-word piece can genuinely prove about a person.
The distinction is whether the humor comes out of the material or gets applied to it. Observational humor about your own behavior almost always lands. Bits, puns and asides to the reader almost never do.
And if the essay is not funny, do not make it funny. Nobody is grading you on charm.