Because I'm starting my critical paper on the use humor in poetry by women, I thought I'd ramble on what I've been thinking about.
First, in reading about men and women stand-up comedians and found this--
Comedian Kim Wayans observes:
with men they're [the audience] like eager and they're ready . . . to accept him and then he has to prove that he's not funny before they . . . back off . . . but with a woman you have to come out and you have to win them over.
I started to wonder about women poets, do readers assume they are going to be lyrical, confessional, or emotional before they read them and if so, does humor in women's poem seem unexpected? Personally, I'm around a lot of funny women poets, so I usually expect at least something in poem that offers a little giggle or maybe a twist of wit. But how does our culture perceive women who use humor in their work? Can they be taken as seriously as the men who use humor? Are they?
I'm most interested in risk a poet takes when using humor. I think one of the risks is that their poetry will seem "light." Billy Collins was known for his humor in poetry, then a backlash came about. Perhaps, there was some good reason for this as he began to be able to publish poems based on his name and not the poem. I think this allowed for some poems that weren't his best to be put out in the world, and the good poems that he was writing (and I do like his poetry, so yes, I believe he was still writing very good poems) they were mixed in there too, but not as noticeable.
Strong well-crafted humorous poems are hard to write because so much of humor is about timing and even if you are writing free verse, you still have the constraints of the form to consider. Imagine telling a joke using stanza and line breaks. I think this is one reason that prose poetry works so well to write humorously because you move away from having to creates perfect lines of poetry. You get a little wiggle room to tell the joke.
So, I'll wander onto my paper now. Only thirty more pages to go.
