Written for Nancy Kress, Nebula Awards
collection
WRITING
SF HUMOR: A LOOK AT THE NUMBERS
Condensed from Writers Booty magazine.
You can make up to ten dollars a day, writing
and selling SF humor from your own home.
Sound too good to be true? Read on! A partial telephone survey (almost
half--47.76%-- have phones) of SFWA's humor writers shows the top five earning
considerably more (how does $18.39 a day sound to you?) while the
average ($3.99) still holds a comfortable lead over the related but low-paying
genres of Erotica, Travel and Alien Gosssip.
SF is unique among America's genres in that
it is almost one-fourth humor: 23.45 percent, to be precise. This is
considerably less than Romantic Sports which is almost thirty (29.23) percent
humor, but well above both Romance (18.24) and Sports (15.32).
Humor itself, the flagship as it were, is
only 71.76% humor, and that average is artificially inflated by recent
successes. Correcting for Sedaris and Rackoff, Humor comes in at under sixty
percent (59.54).
Much of this is due to the composition of the
entering writers. SF and Fantasy together induct an average of eight new
scribblers a year (8.42), of whom two (on the average) are funny. Let's look at
a typical year--2001. One hundred
and eighteen writers went pro that year, an above-average eleven of whom were
picked up by SFWA, which handles the draft for the related fields of SF,
Fantasy and Horror. Of those
eleven, eight were a little funny, and four were too weird for words.
By way of comparison, the mainstream gained
41 new pros of whom six were a little funny, and two were not funny at all.
The high incidence of humor in SF is due at
least in part to the outfits. Many (1,254) SF writers dress funny, often
intentionally. And in some cases
(348) haircuts often add to their hilarity.
It's not all personnel, however. The
impressive display of humor in modern SF is due in large part to
tradition. From the high comedy of
Frankenstein to the rollicking chase scenes of DUNE (who can forget those goofy
worms?), humor has played an important role in classic SF. Indeed of the 1,786,873
dialogue interchanges in the field since 1954, fully 987,543 have had a comedic
subtext, and this is discounting the narrative drollery (more troublesome to
quantify) that is a staple of the field.
As might be expected, however, tradition
plays only a supporting role in this most innovative of the subliterary genres.
Many of the laughs in SF (43.78% of the total) have to do with the material
itself. SF is quite correctly considered a literature of ideas, and ideas are
funny, at least some of them; and even the ones that aren't funny are funnier
than Emotions or Reflections, which make up the bulk of Mainstream, Romance,
Financial Guidance and Road Tests, which account for 74.87% of America's
printed matter.
It must be noted that within the linked
fields of Fantasy and SF, the playing field is far from level. Robots and
rocket ships are almost always funny (68.98 of the time), but monsters? Not!
Elves are not funny at all (perhaps because they try so hard). Unicorns lost
their effectiveness along with their horn(s), removed by EPA edict in 1996,
after the Haethorpe Girls' School tragedy which claimed so many (three)
promising young futures. And
castles are funny only to those who have only lived in them for five or more
consecutive days.
Of course, a career in SF doesnŐt
automatically bring laughs, except from the immediate family. Publishing a book filled with SF props
is only a beginning: if a robot farts in the forest and no one laughs, was it
funny? Not very! The SF humorist
needs an agent, who will tone, polish and market the laughs. Luckily, SF agents
are a special breed, known to laugh at as well as with their clients. The best of them (32.65 percent)
actively seek sarcastic rejections, and the worst (87.87%, allowing for
overlap) like to receive small dead animals in the mail.
For quick sales, these agents need look no
further than the top tier of the magazines. They don't waste their time on the
little fish like Locus and Interzone, who rarely print humor
(1.456 laughs per page, not counting ads), or on the all-humor mags like The
New Yorker, Playboy and Analog, which are written in-house by
lunatics, but concentrate on the semi-pro 'zines like Asimov's, F&SF
and SciFiction which are edited by enthusiasts who are so eager for fun
that they have been known (1,987 documented public incidents) to laugh at their
own jokes.
It's an agent's job to make sure a manuscript
is double spaced (a space after each line for laughs) and has a funny title.
Who can forget Green Mars, Red Mars and Blue Mars. Editors will rarely say out
loud what makes then laugh, but they are human, and what makes then laugh is
the same thing that makes us all laugh:
Mars.
The top SF and fantasy writers understand
that the best way to clinch a sale is to call an editor at home, after
midnight, for a little humoristic banter.
Between ten pm and two am is best. Remember to keep it light: the last
thing an editor wants is a midnight collect call from a wannabe who runs out if
funny stories after only twenty minutes on the phone!
Last but not least, three names are essential
for sales. But you neednŐt be a
math genius to figure that out. Just ask Philip Kay Dick or Ursula Kayla Guin.