Writing a Funny Book About Florida Without Making Florida the Punchline
Florida is easy to make fun of. That is exactly what makes writing about it harder than people think.
The state arrives with its own props. There are alligators, hurricanes, golf carts, sunburned tourists, aggressive birds and news stories that appear to have been assembled by drawing nouns from a hat. A writer could point at all of that, add an exclamation point and call it comedy.
I wanted something warmer. I wanted the people who live here to recognize themselves, laugh and then quietly wonder who had been telling me about their neighborhood group chat.
Affection sets the temperature
Humor becomes mean when the writer stands outside the scene and announces that everybody in it is an idiot. Florida deserves better, partly because nobody here is truly outside the scene. Give it time. The state will involve you.
You may begin as a responsible observer. Then a storm forms over your house while the sun is still shining, a lizard disappears behind the refrigerator, and you find yourself explaining both events to a visitor with the calm authority of a park ranger. You are in the story now.
That shared vulnerability is where the affection comes from. I am not laughing at people for adjusting to Florida. I am laughing because I adjusted too, and at some point I stopped noticing how much of my day requires wildlife diplomacy.
The joke needs a person inside it
A funny premise is useful. A recognizable human moment is better. Humidity by itself is weather. Humidity becomes a story when a man says he has finally acclimated while standing in front of an open refrigerator.
The details matter because they give the joke a pulse. Somebody brought the wrong shoes. Somebody trusted the forecast. Somebody said the beach would be relaxing and is now guarding lunch from a bird that has clearly done this before.
Readers do not laugh only because an event is strange. They laugh because they know the exact kind of confidence that caused it. They have seen it in a spouse, a friend, a parent or the mirror, although the mirror remains under investigation.
Florida does not need a publicity department
The temptation with a place this colorful is to keep turning the volume up. I found the opposite usually works. Let the actual behavior carry the scene. Florida has already done the writing equivalent of bringing fireworks to breakfast.
That means resisting the easy headline version of the state. Florida Man can be funny, but Florida is also families, old friends, immigrants, retirees, working people, artists, veterans, teachers and neighbors who know which houses need help before a storm. The absurdity is real. So is the generosity.
A book that includes only the chaos misses the reason people stay. A book that includes only the sunshine has probably been printed by a real-estate office. The truth is the interesting part because the truth contains both.
What I wanted to keep
While writing As Florida As It Gets, I kept returning to a simple test. Would somebody from Florida recognize this? Would somebody outside Florida understand why we love it? Would the joke still work if the reader cared about the people in it?
The book is full of heat, storms, Publix, parking lots, wildlife and decisions that looked stronger indoors. Underneath all of it is gratitude. Florida gave me a home, a family life, friendships and enough material to make writer’s block seem ungrateful.
The state is not the punchline. It is the relative telling the story too loudly from the other end of the table. You may wish the volume were lower. You would miss it immediately if the room went quiet.
Read more from Writer’s Notes, browse the Florida Stories collection, or learn about As Florida As It Gets.