Dammit, brain, I do not need an idea for another series, however good. I need an idea for a hilarious short story that I can finally sell to Unidentified Funny Objects.
Get on that, will you?
Dammit, brain, I do not need an idea for another series, however good. I need an idea for a hilarious short story that I can finally sell to Unidentified Funny Objects.
Get on that, will you?
Alcoholic narcissist gets his/her life ruined because of a presumed “lost weekend”, which was, in fact, an abduction.
That’s good. Except… I don’t really write alcoholic narcissists, and I’d struggle to make one funny.
(It doesn’t have to be a UFO story. Funny spec-fic in general is the theme.)
Hmm… the odd found alien object that corresponds to some piece of human detritus? Pop-top ring (are y’all young enough to remember those?), light up sneakers, chop sticks, etc. Sorta a riff of Roadside Picnic.
two completely different but equally unlikeable idiots are killed in a car crash and have to haunt the stretch of road where they died until they kill two more people.
TWIST: this doesn’t free them, just adds more people to the pile.
As for funny, uh… about the funniest books I’ve read are Illegal Aliens by Nick Pollotta and Phil Foglio (Girl Genius web comic), Bill the Galactic Hero, and some of John Irving’s books (Garp, Cider House Rules, Hotel New Hampshire). I think most of the humor comes from off-the-cuff style commentary, rather than engineered in, although Irving’s work has a premise of irony running through it.
One of my all-time favorites (besides Pratchett and Adams) is AC Weisbecker’s Cosmic Banditos. The humor is very American, with outsized characters in improbable situations. That are often resolved with grenades, tequila, and/or quantum physics.
Part of my problem, I think, is that I have a different kind of sense of humour from most people, and especially from most Americans.
Tend towards Douglas Adams / Rowan Atkinson? Or maybe P. G. Wodehouse?
Pratchett and Wodehouse, mostly. Though I have a soft spot for the very American Damon Runyon.