Laughter
The body's least obedient music, from giggles at funerals to the last laugh.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about laughter: comic timing, joy and survival, with craft techniques, mistakes to avoid and prompts in this free Writory poetry guide.
What this theme is
Laughter breaks out; it is one of the few things the body does entirely without permission. It erupts in churches, exams and funerals, spreads through rooms like weather, and vanishes the moment it is analysed. Writing about laughter means writing about loss of control, and about the private economies of families and friendships, where an inside joke can hold thirty years of history in one snort.
It is also a serious subject wearing a red nose. Laughter can be cruelty, ask anyone who has been its target; it can be defiance, laughing at the tyrant; and it can be survival, what people do instead of breaking. The comic and the tragic are not opposites in poetry. They share a border, and laughter patrols it.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose laughter partly as a correction: poetry has a reputation for gloom it does not deserve, and Chaucer was funnier than most novelists. A comic turn also builds trust; a reader who has laughed with you will follow you somewhere darker. Judges feel it too. A genuinely funny poem stands out in any pile, and on a score sheet like Writory's, where creativity sits beside emotion, wit that lands earns marks that solemnity alone cannot.
Where it comes from
Chaucer filled the Canterbury Tales with laughter bawdy enough to startle modern readers. Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll built the nonsense tradition in the nineteenth century, proving that sound and absurdity could delight without meaning's permission. Langston Hughes titled a book Laughing to Keep from Crying, naming the survival laughter that runs through Black American writing, and poets under twentieth-century censorship learned that a joke could say what an essay would be arrested for. Light verse from Dorothy Parker to Wendy Cope keeps the craft honest: comic poems scan, rhyme and land, or they die.
The elements that carry it
- The catalogue of laughs: snort, cackle, wheeze, giggle, bark. Every family owns a taxonomy.
- Laughter in the wrong place, funerals, hospitals, courtrooms, where it reveals what decorum hides.
- The dinner table and the kitchen, laughter's natural habitats.
- Physical aftermath: aching ribs, streaming eyes, the struggle to get breath back.
- The silence after laughter, when a room remembers why it needed to laugh.
Techniques that work
- Use timing like a comedian: the line break is your pause, and a punchline lands hardest when the break makes the reader wait for it.
- Transcribe real laughs with onomatopoeia and plosive sounds; she laughed is as empty as she smiled.
- Put laughter next to grief and let them share a stanza; the theme's power lives in that closeness.
- Try a strict light-verse form, a limerick or rhyming quatrains, then let the final line turn serious. Formal neatness makes the dark turn audible.
- Write who is not laughing. In any laughing room, the one still face is the poem.
Mistakes to avoid
- Explaining the joke. If the poem tells the reader something was hilarious, it wasn't.
- Laughter is the best medicine and its greeting-card relatives: sentiments so smooth they leave no grip for feeling.
- Randomness mistaken for wit. Nonsense verse looks anarchic, but Lear and Carroll kept strict metre under the madness; study them.
- Treating comic poems as unworthy of revision. Funny is engineering; one misplaced syllable can kill a punchline.
An exercise
List five laughs you can hear in memory: a grandparent's, a friend's, one that no longer exists. Transcribe each as sound on the page, invented spellings welcome, then write a poem about the one you miss most.
A challenge
Write a poem set at a funeral or a hospital bedside in which someone laughs, and make the reader understand the laughter as love rather than disrespect.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about an inside joke you share with one other person, without ever explaining the joke, so the reader feels the intimacy instead of the punchline.
Before you submit
- No laugh is merely laughed; each has a sound, a body and a trigger.
- The poem's humour, if any, is never explained.
- Line breaks are placed for timing and tested aloud.
- Something serious sits close to the laughter.
- Greeting-card sentiments about medicine and sunshine are gone.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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