Blog Tour: Guest Post from Adrienne Kress

Being part of the blog tour for The Friday Society (you can find my review here) means I get the chance to host a guest post written by Adrienne Kress. I love guest author posts. Many thanks to Adrienne for the post, and now here's her post on why she loves comedy so much. :)

Why do I like comedy so much, and why do I make it an important element of my writing? For these five reasons:

1. I love to laugh.

2. I love to make other people laugh.

3. The fact that something is funny doesn’t mean it can’t also speak to human truths and have serious moments. In fact, I tend to find comedies can pack even more of an emotional wallop than pure drama. Life, in general, is absurd. And to deny that absurdity is to take something honest and real away from the moment. Yes, there are purely serious moments, and, in fact, I have such moments in all my books. But those are rare. Usually we feel a mix of feelings, life isn’t all black and white. I remember when I was delivering the eulogy at my grandmother’s funeral. I’m an actor as well as an author and I tend to work best when I get audience feedback, be it laughter, applause, etc. Of course at a funeral people aren’t really doing any of those things. They are sitting listening to you. Not really responding that much. So as I was reading my eulogy, and was getting all teary and missing my grandmother so much, I also couldn’t help thinking, “Wow, tough crowd.”

See? Absurd, right?

4. Speaking of absurdity. Douglas Adams has got to be one of my greatest literary influences. It was his absurd humour that taught me I was allowed to play in the telling of a story. My father read to me before bed every night, and we worked our way through the classics (Dickens, Tolkien, etc). But then one day he picked up THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, and my perspective on books and on writing changed in that moment. I don’t think my mind would have been nearly as blown had I not been introduced to the classics first. And I think it is very important to have a solid grounding before you start to hop around like a crazy person. But Adams definitely inspired my love of absurdity, and that tends to be at the core of most of my humour. I think, going back to point 3, what I like best about it is that life is kind of absurd. And building up on that idea to an extreme is still a very honest reflection of how humans live. It is also hilarious.

5. A shared joke that everyone loves brings people together in a wonderful way. It’s an instant moment of connection. Of “Even if we are quite different, we have this in common.” The best evenings out with friends are the ones where everyone is laughing, where everyone is having fun. I really love bonding over comedy. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

Thanks so much for the guest post, Adrienne. :)