Jim Hines joins Brandon and Howard at Penguicon for a discussion of parody, satire, and why things are funny.

We start by defining parody and satire, and then Jim tells us why he wrote his he-calls-them-satirical Goblin novels, and why aspects of gamer culture so badly need to be satirized. Howard provides his formula for delivering the satire in Schlock Mercenary, and then we begin bandying about the terms “absurdification,” “commodification,” and “Disneyfication^TM.”

And believe it or not, we manage to discuss humor in a way that is actually funny, at least some of the time.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Eyes Like Stars, by Lisa Mantchev, narrated by Cynthia Bishop

Writing Prompt: Start with a highly magical, pseudo-medieval fantasy setting. Now… how do you deal with baldness?

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key Points: Parody is a sendup of an existing literay work, while satire is making fun of society around you. Extrapolate, exaggerate, and add a half-step to the left — that’s satire. Look for what’s missing, the gaps, the assumptions, then play there. Set up expectations, then twist them. Don’t lose the characters!

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Season Five, Episode 37, parody and satire with Jim Hines.
[Howard] 15 minutes long because you’re in a hurry.
[Brandon] And we’re not that smart. I’m Brandon.
[Howard] I’m Howard.
[Jim] And I’m Jim.
[Brandon] We have the wonderful Jim Hines, author of numerous books. The Goblin series, and some books about princesses…
[Jim] Also known as the Princess series.
[Brandon] The Princess series. You have something new coming out, too.
[Jim] Yep. I’ve got a new series it’s going to be modern-day fantasy. First book is called Libriomancer, set partly in Michigan’s upper peninsula. Which means in the second book, I get to write about a yooper werewolf.
[Brandon] Okay. Cool.
[Jim] Having fun with that.

[Brandon] Well, I decided we would pitch this one to Jim because I read the Goblin books and they are fun. They are partially parody of gaming tropes, I would say.
[Jim] Partly.
[Brandon] The idea being that you’ve got a protagonist who’s a goblin, the lowest on the food chain, and you make lots of fun jokes about that. So… let’s talk about this. Do you… what’s the difference… I’m going to pitch this at you and Howard… what’s the difference between parody and satire?
[Jim] That was my cue to say I’m not that smart.
[Brandon] Okay. Howard? He pitched it to you.
[Howard] Okay. No, no. That’s fine.
[Brandon] You’re the funny guy. Be funny.
[Howard] We’ve had this problem before. We start talking about humor, but I just get dry as a bone.
[Brandon] That’s because they can’t see your face. They’d laugh otherwise.

[Howard] Thank you. Thank you for that, Brandon. Okay. Parody, typically is when you are doing a… I call it a sendup of something. You take an existing literary work and you do a parody of it. Bored of the Rings is a classic parody of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It’s quite a bit shorter, most of the key story elements are in there, and it’s not just a parody of Lord of the Rings, it’s also… it plays off of the fact that the whole epic heroic monomyth…
[Brandon] Right. It’s a parody of the entire epic genre.
[Howard] Yeah. The entire epic genre, and it pulls all sorts of other literary elements into it. Satire is when you’re looking at the society around you and you are making fun of it. Not necessarily pop culture, not necessarily the entertainment elements of that satire, but things like… I’m a satirist with Schlock Mercenary. Healthcare…
[Brandon] Basic human nature.
[Howard] Yeah. Healthcare, human nature, boy bands, politics, whatever…
[Jim] Gaming, genre.
[Howard] Gaming. Yeah. Any of these things can be satirized. Naturally, when you are writing satire and you start pulling in pop cultural elements, the line between satire and parody becomes very, very blurry. But readers don’t care. Readers are reading to enjoy. They don’t mind a blurry line here and there.
[Jim] They want funny.
[Howard] Yeah. They want to be entertained.

[Brandon] So, Jim, why did you decide to start writing these books?
[Jim] Mostly… and I’m going to call them satire because I think that just sounds better.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Howard] It does.
[Jim] Partly because I love the genre. I love the gaming… I don’t think I could have written any of these books, even though I’m making fun of things, if I didn’t love the source material. If I didn’t sit around doing the gaming thing on Friday nights with the Cheetos and Mountain Dew. That’s been my life for… well, most of it. Sadly. Yet despite the fact that I love this, despite the fact that I love fantasy and have been a geek since I can remember… we are flawed. I know this will shock people, but yeah, we have problems. We have things that we don’t think about. We have assumptions we make. For example, we go on our merry little adventures, and we slaughter all of the goblins because, well, there’s treasure behind them. We almost never… you don’t want to mess up your game because that will tend to kill your game buzz, but what did they ever do to you?
[Howard] It’s a rare, and usually one-offed sort of campaign, where the GM… you’re on your way, you’re hacking your way through the orc encampment, and there is a basket of baby orcs. Now what do you do?
[Brandon] A basket of baby orcs?
[Howard] Yeah, a little basket…
[Brandon] From the baby orc market or something?
[Howard] No, it’s like they… you know what I’m saying.
[Jim] Well, that’s when your average gamer will say, “Okay, I pick one up. What kind of damage does it do, and what range can I get?
[Brandon] Improvised weapon, 1D4.
[Howard] The tusks haven’t come in yet. 1D3.
[Jim] Let me look at the manual. If I throw the entire basket, is this like a range…
[Brandon] Spread. Oh, boy. We’re going to get e-mail about this. Well…
[Howard] But the point is, in gamer culture, they are baby orcs, and we are taught not to treat them as people, and that’s kind of a flaw in the way we game.
[Jim] It’s a flaw that shows up in genre, too. I mean, gaming is one thing, but when you’re reading fantasy novels, and… oh, that race is evil. Wait. What? No. [garbled — that’s traumatic?]
[Brandon] Right. Yeah. That does raise some really weird questions. The fact that we just kind of accept that orcs are evil. In fact, people have written entire dissertations about Tolkien on that. They are actually smarter than us, so we’re just going to move off of that topic.
[Howard] I was going to say… we’ve taken a hard left.

[Brandon] Let’s come back to satire, because you guys are both writing satire. How do you approach it? How do you… Jim, how do you do satire well? Or Howard, either of you. Because you both do a good job of it.
[Jim] Well, thank you.
[Howard] Let me give you… no, let me give you an example. I pick something that I either… it doesn’t matter if I like it or if I don’t like it, I pick something that has implications. Let’s take the TSA. I look at the TSA and being searched on the way to an airplane, and I began extrapolating aspects of that. Well, the frisking looks a lot like being searched by a police officer. Standing in the machine that irradiates you and all that looks an awful lot like being cooked. Because I’m writing science fiction, I can go in either of those directions. The further I take it, the more people look at what the TSA is currently doing, and say, “Oh, wow, that’s really absurd.” So, yes, I can send a very clear political message in that way. But then if I take the whole thing that I’ve extrapolated to the nth degree, and sort of knock it half a step to the left, people don’t recognize it as the TSA. I’m being searched on my way into a grocery store or something like that. They just look at it and they say, “Wow, that’s really funny. Wow, yeah, Sam’s Club always checks my receipts on the way out. What if they actually patted me down on my way into the store?”
[Jim] They don’t?
[Howard] Oh, that’s right, you’re in Michigan here. That’s why I don’t shop here. So that’s the formula I use for coming up with satire.
[Brandon] Okay. So, exaggeration.
[Jim] I also…
[Howard] Extrapolation and exaggeration, yeah.
[Brandon] Extrapolation, exaggeration, and absurdification. That’s a mouthful.

[Jim] A lot of the time, when I’m looking at it, I’ll be reading material, whether it’s urban fantasy or gaming or whatever, and it’s… what jumps out at me is something’s missing here. Something… there’s a gap. With fairytales. Whether it’s the original fairy tales or Disneyfication, which is a whole other podcast…
[Howard] Is that not a word? I need to make sure that’s a word.
[Brandon] No, that’s a word.
[Howard] Disneyfication?
[Brandon] Disneyfication, yeah.
[Howard] Right up there with absurdification, which you just threw at us.
[Brandon] Absolutely.
[Jim] But we have to pay like five bucks every time we say Disneyfication.
[Brandon] Hey, stop doing that. We can’t afford it.
[Howard] Cut it out.
[Jim] But what’s missing in these fairytales, for me, part of what’s missing is… and they lived happily ever after… and then what? I don’t know anybody who lived happily ever after. There is no such thing as happily ever after, there is life. Stories don’t end. So what came next? Okay. Cinderella, you’ve got some pissed off stepsisters out there. Half blind, momma got her eyes pecked out. They’re going to be pissed. They’re coming back for blood. That’s a starting point. Because it’s this big gap that none of these fairytales ever talk about. Especially when you get to the commodification of fairytales with a certain Empire. We can call that mouseification.
[Brandon] Mouseification. Good. That one’s only 50 cents.
[Howard] Mouseified commodification.
[Jim] Nice. So when they MC these fairytales, it gets taken down another level. It’s like, “Okay, what are the assumptions here, what are you missing? That’s where I want to play. That’s where I want the story to start, and that’s where I just want to totally mess with things.

[Brandon] Okay. Excellent. Let’s stop for our book of the week. Jim is actually going to promo a book for us this week.
[Jim] This week’s book is Eyes like Stars by Lisa Mantchev. It’s a YA title. It is set in the Theatre Illuminata, which is the theater that contains all the actors and all the plays ever written. So you have Ophelia hanging out with random characters from Death of a Salesman. Then Ophelia runs off to drown herself. It’s just… it’s a very self-contained story. I love the idea. I love the worldbuilding and what she’s doing with it.
[Howard] All right. You can pick up a copy of Eyes like Stars on audio at audiblepodcast.com/excuses where you can kick off a trial 14 day free membership. I got those words messed around a little bit. Please do that. Support the podcast and help us pay our legal bills versus Disney.

[Brandon] Okay. So we have listeners who are saying, “Okay, I want to be funny. I want to write something that’s funny.” They’re saying, “How can I be funny like Jim Hines? What advice do you have…”
[Howard] Because all the men want to be Jim Hines, and all the women want to be with those men.
[Brandon] Okay. Why was that funny?
[Jim] Because it’s true.
[Howard] Because I said it last night in the bar.
[Jim] And that is the only thing we will quote from last night at the bar…
[Brandon] Oh, Howard recycles jokes. Really?
[Howard] Oh, yes.
[Brandon] No, why was that funny? Let’s talk about it. Why was that sentence funny?
[Howard] It was funny because we have… it’s an existing aphorism. All the men want to be like me, and all the women want to be with me. Okay? That’s how you expect it to end. All the men want to be like me, and all the women want to be with those men. Suddenly, it provides… I’ve set up some expectations that we’re going to finish that aphorism. Instead of finishing it, I provide what we call a comic drop. Which is where “I” in the version I just gave or “Jim” in the version I gave last night in the bar, have now been dropped in status. Instead of offering praise, I’m offering a slam. The comic drop and the refusal to give you what you are expecting are both key elements in humor. Yes, it is that formulaic, and yes, it can be learned.
[Jim] Well, you’ve also got the contrast of “All of the men want to be him” when applied to a fantasy author. Just right there…
[Brandon] Yes. Yes. There was another layer of joke there. Because when you said Jim Hines, immediately we smiled.
[Jim] I’m down, now.
[Howard] Yeah, we did.
[Brandon] Yes. I think it is because it’s… we’re replacing something expected with something unexpected, and that makes us laugh.
[Jim] You are replacing somebody manly and dignified…
[Howard] With someone brilliant.
[Jim] Nicely saved.
[Brandon] Oh, yeah. Way to kill the funny.
[Howard] I’m sorry. I just… I wanted to point out that our society… this is something that satire does… if our society currently rewards people for being big and dumb and handsome, and we start rewarding people for being short and smart and awesome…
[Jim] And bald.
[Howard] And bald. I have a soft spot for Jim. Right here in the top of my head.
[Jim] We’re scalp brothers.
[Howard] You see where I’m going… these are the sorts of things…
[Brandon] No, that was really good. That brings you right back to the topic. Wow. It’s like you know what you’re doing.
[Howard] Which I really needed to do.

[Jim] In terms of writing humor like Jim Hines, which… why? Write humor like Terry Pratchett. He sells so much better. A lot of mine comes back to characters. I mean, I don’t really like the Bored of the Rings, because if you strip out that satire, that parody level… again, I’m not very smart, I don’t know the difference. But if you strip that level out, there’s not much left.
[Howard] No, I did not… I loved Bored of the Rings when I was… like sixth, seventh grade, I read it. I liked it because it was silly and it made fun of things that I understood, but it was very puerile. I liked it for the same reason that movies like scary movie and epic movie sell well. They’re parody, but they’re puerile. They’re not character-based. They’re just silly. They’re depending on the sendup for the joke. You’re not.
[Jim] Right. Whereas… I mean, even right here, the banter part of that back-and-forth, part of it is because we are terribly entertaining people, but part of it is because people like us.
[Brandon] Yes.
[Jim] Right?
[Brandon] Yes, of course. They’d better…
[Howard] Let’s have a cheer from the audience.
[Cheer]
[Howard] Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, we recording this live at Penguicon. We have an audience in the room, who you probably can’t hear unless they’re really loud, because we just got this awesome new mixer. Did I mention that you need to go out to audible and get a book?
[Jim] The other way that I play with it is just… again, the exaggeration. Flipping the Goblin books… flipping around to the goblin’s perspective and these adventurers are coming in and basically slaughtering their way through on their way to the dragon. Well, this could be tragic, but I go in the humorous direction. I go with the goblin who is smarter than these guys, because it is not always difficult to be smarter than the average gaming fighter. But then exaggerating it… just taking these characters one step further, making the goblin one step grosser, and then just extrapolating from there. Okay. This is a goblin. This is his worldview. Oh, we have a fallen comrade. Well, of course, he’s going to eat the comrade. That’s what they do.

[Brandon] So here’s an important question, I think, for this that we need to touch on right at the end. How do you not lose the character in this? Because, as you pointed out, it comes back to the characters. I’ll add on top of that, my favorite comedy pieces, my favorite humorous books, I prefer Terry Pratchett to Douglas Adams because in Terry Pratchett, I get attached to the characters. In Douglas Adams, I don’t. I liked your books because I got attached to Jigs.
[Jim] Everybody loves Jigs.
[Brandon] I mean, how do you not lose the character when you’re doing stuff this… when you’re going so far into satire like this?
[Jim] Part of it is going back through the book and just asking myself, “Okay, this chapter is of course hysterically funny. Does it advance the story? Is there more than just one layer here? Because if the only thing this scene does is go for a laugh, that’s not enough.
[Howard] I do the same thing in Schlock Mercenary. One of the things that I’m very careful about is that when I’ve told a really good joke, no matter how good that joke is, I have to ask myself a question, “Is this something that that character would have said or done?” If it’s not, no matter how funny it is, if it’s not right for the character, then what’s going to happen is my reader’s going to get knocked out of the book and suddenly I’m Douglas Adams instead of Terry Pratchett. Now, I would love to be Douglas… I would love to be either of those guys.
[Jim] There are worse fates.
[Howard] Well, Douglas Adams is dead, but… but you see where I’m headed with this. I want to make sure that the characters are consistent. As long as the joke is good and in character… matter of fact, if the joke is really good and really in character, it draws the reader further into the book and allows me to tell even better jokes and even better drama and story later on.

[Brandon] All right. Well. We’re out of time. I’m going to make Jim give us a writing prompt. So, Jim, what’s our writing prompt?
[Jim] Pseudo-medieval fantasy. Generic Europe. You’ve got your magic. How do you deal with baldness?
[Brandon] All right. You are out of excuses, now go write. Thanks for listening.
[Howard] Write me some magic Rogaine.