In defence of the funny one

I want to make a case for the funny one, because the funny one never gets the credit and is usually doing the heaviest lifting in the book.

You know the character I mean. In every story about teenagers there is someone who cannot let a serious moment sit for more than four seconds without landing a joke on top of it. Readers adore them and reviewers underrate them, and there is a lazy assumption, even among people who ought to know better, that the comic character is the light relief, the sugar around the real medicine. I think that is exactly wrong. I think the jokes are the medicine, and the person telling them is often the one who has understood the situation most completely.

Here is why. A joke, a real one, requires you to see a thing clearly and then see one step past it. You cannot be funny about something you do not understand. The girl in the back row turning her own bad news into a punchline is not avoiding the news. She has looked straight at it, measured it, found it unbearable, and made the only move available to a person who is not allowed to fall apart in public. Humour, at that age especially, is not the absence of feeling. It is feeling wearing the only armour that fits.

I write teenagers for a living and I have come to believe that the funniest character in any of my books is carrying the most, precisely because the funny ones are the ones who decided, somewhere early, that they would rather be laughed with than cried over. That is a survival strategy, and like all survival strategies it costs something. The reader who laughs for eighty pages and then feels the floor go out from under them in chapter twenty is not being tricked. They are being shown, at last, what the jokes were holding up the whole time.

This is why I get quietly annoyed when people call a book funny as though that were a smaller thing than sad. Making a reader laugh and making a reader cry are the same muscle used in two directions, and the writers who can do one can almost always do the other, because both depend on knowing exactly where a person is tender. The joke and the gut punch are aimed at the same spot. That is not a coincidence. That is the whole craft.

And teenagers know this better than anyone, which is why they are drawn to the funny character in the first place. They are not looking to escape their feelings. They have more feelings than they know what to do with and nowhere reliable to put them. What they recognise, in someone who is quick and armoured and clearly hurting underneath it, is themselves, handled with respect. They see a character doing in a book the thing they are trying to do in the corridor: stay upright, stay funny, and let almost no one see how much it is taking.

So the next time you meet the funny one, the sidekick with the fast mouth, do not wait for the sad scene to decide whether they are worth your attention. They have been telling you the truth since page one. They have just been kind enough to make you laugh while they did it.