One of the biggest challenges I encountered in writing The 188th Crybaby Brigade was the switch from comedy written for the stage to comedy for the page.

I’m a stand-up comic by trade. Onstage, I have tools at my disposal: facial expressions, body language, the ability to speed up and slow down as I create a psychological dialogue with the audience. Best of all, if a particular string of jokes bomb, I can switch topics, or, better yet, pick on a funny looking guy in the guy in the front row.

In writing humorous prose, these tools are, obviously, out the window. Compounding the problem is that I lose my ever-important barometer: instant feedback. I love the instantaneous nature of stand-up comedy. I never have to wonder how the act is going. Instead, it’s simple: if they laugh, I’m great. If the audience is silent, I suck.

To acquaint myself with humor writing, I read books by the three Daves: Sedaris,Eggers, and Barry.

As I read, I looked for patterns. Although their styles of humor differ, I noticed a common trait: they never signaled the joke. Instead, they simply state the absurd truth in as straightforward a manner as possible. This bluntness makes for a double punch: 50% of the humor comes from what the author is saying, and the other half comes from the fact that he’s saying it so bluntly.

For example: one of my favorite passages in Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the one in which Eggers describes his night out with friends in a Berkeley, California bar:

Brent and I, and everyone else, are standing on the bar’s second level, looking down upon the heads of the hundred or so below us, while drinking beer that has been brewed on the premises. We know that the beer has been brewed on the premises because, right there, behind the bar, are three huge copper vats, with tubes coming out of them. This is how beer is made.

Whenever I read this passage, I laugh out loud. What makes it so funny is that, instead of waving his arms and signaling the absurdity of the situation (that seeing beer travel through tubes implies that the beer is brewed on the premises), Eggers instead takes the opposite tack: he takes it seriously. His deadpan approach makes the joke doubly funny—much funnier than had he said, “It’s so crazy. They have beer in vats and tubes, as if we’re supposed to believe that this means it was brewed on the premises.”

In The 188th Crybaby Brigade, I attempt to utilize humor by describing absurd situations as candidly as possible. I start with the opening sentence of the book, in which I chronicle my first medical check-up at the military Induction Center in Tel Aviv:

The Russian is poking my balls.
It’s awkward.

Two chapters later, I describe my first day of basic training:

I am Israeli soldier number 5481287. I’m at the Armored School, in the south, halfway between Jordan and Egypt. I’m dressed like a soldier but I look like a clown. My uniform’s three sizes too big, and it’s stiff, so it looks like I’m wearing a suit of green construction paper; I’d thought I would look sexy in uniform, but I don’t. I’ve also got a new look—I’m buzz-cut and shaved—and a new name: instead of Joel, I’m now my Hebrew name, Yoel, and my last name, according to my dog tags, is Shetznitz.
“You misspelled my name,” I said to the guy working the dog tag machine.
“So don’t die,” he said, and shooed me out the door.

Humor can even be used to describe a situation as dark as death. Here, I talk about the platoon’s field trip to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum:

Inside Yad Vashem, it’s the usual Platoon Two, Company B shenanigans. While our tour guide describes Hitler’s rise to power, Gerber pinches Uri in the ass. “Koos-emok!” Uri whispers, then he stuns Gerber with a quick knee to the nuts that sends him tumbling into a display case of Zyklon B.
“Bitch!” whispers Gerber.
“Your mother,” Uri whispers back.
Doni and Tanenbaum step between them, try to break it up, but only get sucked into the melee. Then Ganz jumps in, then Nir, and suddenly six, seven of them are attacking one another with headlocks and noogies, Three Stooges style, next to a wall-size photo of Jewish corpses.
My first thought is to scold my platoon mates. Show some respect! I want to shout. For the sake of the six million dead!
But as I watch my comrades roughhouse, I suddenly have another thought:
This is awesome.

I go on to describe why my platoon mates’ roughhousing in a Holocaust museum is a good thing for the Jewish people—namely, because it means that after thousands of years of persecution, we’ve reached a point in Jewish history where the notion of our people being annihilated is so foreign that Jews can goof around in Yad Vashem.

Typically, a writer doesn’t get the stand-up comedian’s instant feedback. But since you’re reading this and have the ability to post, I’ll go ahead and ask:

Does it work?

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Even before I signed the contract to write The 188th Crybaby Brigade, I turned to other authors for advice.

The first writer I met was Joshua Ferris , author of Then We Came to the End. Joshua had grown up outside Chicago, not far from where I grew up in Evanston. I’d played little league with his best childhood friend, Grant. It was at a birthday party for a mutual friend that Grant introduced us.

Despite the fact that he’d just sold a novel that would go on to become a New York Times bestseller and shortlisted for the National Book Award, Joshua was completely down to earth and, better yet, generous with his time. He read the sample chapter of my book proposal and then, a week later, took me for coffee and gave an extensive critique. He then offered to introduce me to his literary agent, if I needed one. (I did not, as it turned out.) Over the next few years, I’d email him questions about everything from what to expect during the editing process to publicity strategy. He always answered back.

Then, in January 2006, I saw an ad in the Times about an upcoming event at the 92nd Street Y with, among others, Dave Eggers.

Every writer has that one other writer whom he or she emulates almost to the point of obsession. For me, that other writer is Eggers.

I first came across Eggers in the fall of 2003, when I happened to notice his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Shattering Genius, on the front table at a Barnes and Noble in Buffalo.

I picked up the book, examined the amateur-looking cover. I flipped through the first few pages and saw a list of metaphors (and their explanations) contained in the book and an Acknowledgments section that thanked, in turn, the employees of NASA and the U.S. Postal system.

From that moment, I was hooked. I sat in an easy chair and read half the book right there in the store. Then I paid for it, finished it that night, and started to reread it the next morning.

After his reading at the 92nd Street Y, I stood in the signing line for upwards of an hour. When my turn finally came, I handed him a book and a white envelope with a letter in it. “I wrote you a note,” I mumbled, nervous, like a kid meeting his favorite baseball player.

“Cool!” Eggers said.

For two weeks, I checked the mailbox with anticipation.

No note.

Then, somehow, I forgot about it. Until one day, I opened the mailbox and found a letter with a San Francisco postmark, addressed to me in my own handwriting. (I’d enclosed an SASE).

I tore open the envelope. Inside was the letter I’d written to Dave, with his handwritten comments scrawled next to each question.

Eggers offered incredible advice. On my need for an extension from the publisher: “Totally normal. Good to have deadlines, but don’t release it ‘til it’s ready. You can never un-publish.”

On how to know when the book was finished: “Have a group of 5-6 readers outside of your S&S editor. Get these readers committed to reading/helping you make the book as good as it can be. They should be friends/relations who like you, care about what you publish. They can screen for dangerous passages.”

Truth be told, the best part of Eggers’ letter was not any one piece of advice, but simply that he’d written back.

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