In My Own Words: Buster Wilde

Look. I'm going to level with you. I didn't set out to become a comedy writer. Comedy set out for me, like a dog you didn't ask for but can't seem to return.

I started out writing Very Serious Literary Fiction. Capital letters. The kind where people stare out of windows and think about their fathers. I wrote three novels like that, and each one was more earnest and less interesting than the last. Then one day I put a joke in chapter four of a Very Serious Manuscript — just to entertain myself, just to see if anyone was paying attention — and my editor called me to say it was the first time she'd laughed out loud at anything I'd written and could I please do more of that and less of the window-staring.

So I did. And it turned out that funny was the shape my brain had been trying to think in all along. Not ha-ha funny, necessarily — more the kind of funny where you laugh and then realize you're uncomfortable and then laugh again because the discomfort is the point. Satire. Parody. The art of saying a true thing in a ridiculous costume so that people listen to it instead of arguing with it.

I write every morning between 6 and 10 AM because those are the hours when the editor in my head is still asleep and the weird ideas make it past security. I keep a file called 'Bad Ideas' that has produced three published novels. I test every joke by reading it aloud to my dog, who is not a good literary critic but is an excellent barometer for timing — if I can get through the sentence without him losing interest, the pacing works.

My footnotes contain jokes, opinions, digressions, and occasionally the actual point of the chapter. My chapters never end where you expect them to, because predictability is the enemy of comedy. I break the fourth wall exactly once per book, always at the moment of highest tension, because nothing is funnier than sincerity interrupted by self-awareness.

Terry Pratchett taught me that satire is an act of love disguised as an act of war. Douglas Adams taught me that the universe is funnier than we give it credit for. Kurt Vonnegut taught me that you can look directly at the worst things in the world and find them absurd, and that the absurdity doesn't diminish the horror — it makes it bearable.

I write comedy because the world is on fire, and if I can't put the fire out, I can at least make sure people are laughing while they reach for the extinguisher. The joke is the spoonful of sugar. The truth is the medicine. And the medicine is always going down, whether you like the taste or not.

If you're laughing, I'm winning. And if you're laughing and thinking, I've already won.