Humor

After finishing the excellent (but long and relentless) Otherland series, I was in the mood for something lighter, so I picked out some stories in a more humorous vein. I came up with three that satisfied the need, and reviewed them below. It started me thinking about how they used humor in different ways.

Terry Pratchett knows how to write humor; he writes satire, irony, farces, and parodies. Since this one was about the wizards, it was primarily slapstick; the wizards are the Keystone Cops of the Discworld.

John Scalzi’s humor was somewhere between a farce and a satire, poking fun at bad SciFi.

T. Kingfisher’s humor was harder to quantify. Much of it stemmed from taking a well-known folktale and twisting it in unexpected ways. A lot of the laughs came from her quotes and epigrams:

“Dryads like things that come in threes.”
“Poison ivy comes in threes.”
“Magic’s similar. You don’t notice you’ve run into it, and then it itches you for weeks.”

or the folksy sayings:

So poor they can’t afford cobwebs, her mother had said once, about a relative.

or just the whimsical observations:

She liked birds, but Canada geese didn’t really fall into that category, did they? They were more like airborne sheep.

If lockdown has you down, these are great ways to spend the time. Check out https://lamp.works/books-we-like; there’s a category for humor. What’s the funniest SciFi or Fantasy you’ve read? The first five people who send a nomination to nl@lamp.works will get a coupon for a kindle edition of one of our books. Tell me in your submission which book you would like.