Realism

Realism is not often very funny. To illustrate my point, here's a joke:

What did one duck say to the other duck?

Nothing, because it was a duck.

As with any question, to get a different (and possibly better) answer, one must change the parameters:

What did one duck quack at the other duck?

Unfortunately, the resulting punchline is similarly uninteresting:

"Quack."

Realism can be interesting sometimes, though. Usually you have to go into more detail than is necessary with a quick question-punchline joke. For instance:

A couple of years ago, I was an applicant for a job in the technology nook at the bookstore of my campus. After several phone calls, I managed to secure a job interview and, in desperate need of income, I put the interview at a level of very high priority. I spent the morning of the scheduled day readying myself, rearranging my wardrobe choices at least six times. My roommates watched me as I walked out of my room repeatedly, asking questions a guy less secure in his masculinity would be too embarrassed to ask. "Should I wear the tie or not?" "Blue shirt or white shirt?" "It's definitely too warm for the jacket, but I think it looks nice, doesn't it?" "Do these shoes go with this belt? Because I know that the shoes are supposed to match the belt, but I think sometimes they don't have to." Needless to say, they didn't have much to add to the situation.

I ended up wearing a sky blue dress shirt and brown slacks, which happened to be the exact uniform the gazillions of high school kids swarming the Student Union were wearing as my interview was on the same day as the school district's jazz festival. Because of this, every time I asked where my interview was to be held, the annoyingly customer-service oriented staff continually tried to direct me to the auditorium with all of "my classmates." I finally extricated myself from the swarms of children and made it to the interview, huffing and puffing and adjusting my shirt. I took several breaths and told myself the morning's mantra: "Don't worry. This will be fine. Half of an interview is your appearance and you look good. You look professional. Don't worry."

I was then directed to my interviewer, the manager of the technology nook, who, after shaking my hand vigorously and looking fixedly over my left shoulder, picked up his walking stick and slowly found his way to his office, bumping into two people on the way. Lacking the appearance fifty percent of the interview, my confidence faltered and I didn't get the job.

The problem with making realistic stories entertaining, though, is keeping them believable. This really did happen. It seems that after a certain point in our adolescence (later for some, of course), we become disconnected with reality in that we begin to believe that it is incapable of producing anything interesting. In order for anything to retain a feeling of verisimilitude, it seems it has to have a certain amount of drabness. It must reflect the dreary tones we've come to associate with day to day life. Henry David Thoreau said, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." He was right when he wrote it next to Walden Pond in Massachusetts in the early 1850s, and we've made it an American tradition to uphold the classic phrase's truth.

Believing the realism inherent in our lives to cause them to be boring, we instead focus on the lives of others we find to be less realistic, and therefore, more interesting. We sift through movies and television shows. We live vicariously through the characters in romance novels and soap operas. We update ourselves on the lives of celebrities with whom we have no connection and will not notice or care when we die (because, after all, celebrities are those whose dreams have been realized, and that's just not realistic).

It doesn't have to be like this, though. Write a story about your life down. Use interesting language and embellish the text with detailed descriptions and beautiful pictures. The duck quacked. Okay, but what did it do when it quacked? Throw in a pond covered in duck shit, a gleeful toddler and a bag of cheap gas station white bread and you've got a great story.

Let the duck quack. But make it good.