Heightening in Your Humor writing

Why your satire needs to escalate

I get a lot of submissions where I give the note, “This needs more heightening.” But what does that mean? Whether you’re in improv, standup, sketch, or writing satire the answer is the same. You need to build upon your premise in a funny and compelling way that stays true to the central idea of your piece.

I mean, imagine reading a story where nothing happens.

“Once upon a time a little girl went into the forest to see her grandmother. And it was silly that she had to do that because she was just a little girl. Her mother was actually not very good at parenting at all. The little girl got tired while walking through the woods and almost died from exposure. The girl eventually made it to her grandmother’s house. A wolf who’d seen her walking called social services. The end.”

If this was as long as the actual tale you’d be bored out of your mind. Nothing is happening. If you were a humor writer there is an interesting idea in this paragraph; bad parenting in fairy tales. But the writer doesn’t do anything with it. If they wanted to heighten the writer could show us examples of increasingly dangerous parenting from these fairy tale parents.

This could take the form of the mother sending her daughter on more reckless journeys. Or a social worker might be interviewing the parent and discussing the, once again, increasingly awful findings. If a fairy tale parent were writing a how-to guide their advice would most likely be bad and start from, “Teach kids independence by sending them on journeys alone,” to “Teach them to not depend on technology by locking them in a tower.”

I’m spitballing. The point is something has to happen that takes the joke to the next level. There needs to be a reason for the reader to keep reading. That is why you heighten.

Here is an example of heightening from my piece, “I Became My Best Self, and Also a God, Just by Adopting a Morning Routine.”

Premise: Getting up early will make you successful and amazing.

Beat 1: I established who I am and the premise of the piece. Then I talked about getting up early and how great it was for optimizing my day. In this first part, I kept it tame, relying on the normal things that people say they like doing in the morning. I exaggerated a couple of routines to keep it interesting and give an idea of where the piece was going. But I didn’t go too far since I needed space to heighten.

Note: If everything starts at the tippy top of insanity mountain, there is rarely any place to go. Ground your piece in some kind of reality the reader understands first.

Beat two: This is where I push it a little farther, signaled by getting up even earlier. The affects of the routine go up a few notches. The character now has extraordinary human senses and a slightly snooty belief in their own abilities.

Beat three: I get up EVEN earlier and transcend human limitations and gain superior godlike abilities that I still attribute to getting up early.

By this last beat, I’ve got as far as I can go. Or at the very least the most extreme of the examples. You don’t have to get to that level of crazy (like when everyone dies in an improv scene because they don’t know how to end it) but you do need to have a gradual increase in joke-building based on your world’s internal logic. Think, “What happens next?” If your idea doesn’t top the last paragraph or add anything new, you need to try again.

Heightening doesn’t look the same in every piece of humor. But without it, most pieces fall flat and bore the reader. Always ask yourself if you are taking the joke far enough, and see where it can go if you follow the path your premise created.