Make ‘Em Laugh

Here on the East Coast, we’re having a real blast of summer before all the leaves fall and we start to focus on apples, pumpkins, and getting the house in shape for winter. I am also marking the change of season by the volume of calls I’m getting from nervous students and parents who wished that they had gotten their essays done before the start of school. Oh well. That would have been nice. But there’s still plenty of time.

Thinking back over the students I worked with in these last few months,  I have come to see that one very nice ingredient I haven’t talked about much is humor. I had several students this year who actually wrote quite humorous pieces. Now if you think of a college admissions counselor reading hundreds of overly earnest essays, you can imagine that person’s relief–and interest–when something comes along that is actually funny. And, of course, funny stuff can be just as brilliantly revealing about a person as anything else. There is, to be sure, such a thing as great comic literature: Eudora Welty’s The Ponder Heart, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Cervantes. Well, your college admissions essay is probably not going to scale those heights, but it can still be amusing and profound at the same time, as in the vein of Welty and Wilde.

The thing about humor, however, is that not everyone is capable of it. I believe that virtually everyone is capable of writing a decent college admissions essay–my book, Conquering the College Admissions Essay in 10 Steps, is premised on this conviction and that may explain why it  has been so successful–but not everyone can do humor. And if you can’t do humor, don’t do humor. You know if you’re funny. Your family and friends think so. People laugh at your jokes. If you have never thought of yourself that way and can’t remember a time that you ever said anything that anyone else ever laughed at, then you’re probably not very funny. But that’s okay. Not everyone has to be. If you are funny, however,  maybe you want to try that direction, at least in part.

Didja ever hear the one about the rabbi, the priest, and the minister? Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk.