Why Humor Makes Serious Stories More Powerful

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What makes the stakes in a story truly matter?

In this episode of The Storyteller’s Mission, Zena Dell Lowe explains how to raise the stakes in your story without relying on gimmicks, artificial tension, or repetitive plot devices. This episode explores why high stakes are always tied to character, relationship, and consequence—and how meaningful escalation creates pressure that drives transformation.

From moral weight to relational cost to progressively harder choices, this conversation reframes how writers should think about stakes at every level of storytelling. Whether you’re working on a novel, screenplay, or short story, this episode provides a practical and timeless approach to making your story resonate more deeply with an audience.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] We love characters that have a sense of humor. I think of Tommy Lee Jones in 

[00:00:05] The Fugitive, where Harrison Ford's like, I didn't kill my wife. And Tommy Lee Jones is like, I don't care. But the fact that he has a sense of humor. Makes us love him. Comedy is not the opposite of serious. It's the opposite of despair. Where there is laughter, there is hope, and this is why, by the way, if you can infuse comedy into very serious.

[00:00:30] Stories. You'll take that story to a whole new level.

[00:00:34] It's hard to write a character with a sense of humor in a way that doesn't make it cheesy, in a way that doesn't feel forced or I don't know. In a way it just in a way that genuinely feels organic. So sometimes we can try to have our character have a sense of humor, and one way that people do that is they will actually have other characters laugh.

[00:00:56] At the jokes the character makes, don't do that because it might not be funny. And now we'll just hate all the characters. Right? Like if it's funny, you don't need to have other characters laughing hysterically at something that your character says. The audience will laugh, right? You play the truth of it, you play the honesty of it.

[00:01:17] Okay. So the key to all humor though, is having it be grounded in truth, even though it's absurd, even though it's exaggerated. Point is all good humor is grounded in character. Truth. It has to come from the character. It has to be grounded in reality.

[00:01:37] You don't try to just make them, you know, witty or whatever. 

[00:01:40] So if you think about a movie, like Meet the Parents, meet the Parents is a movie where a character is in a very real. Universal type situation. He is going home to meet the parents of the woman that he wants to marry. That is a classic scenario we can all relate to 

[00:02:03] there's a lot of different ways that you could have genres, that you could write a story like that. But when it's comedy, what you have to do then is find ways to make it absurd, exaggerated.

[00:02:15] Everything is exaggerated. So in meet the parents. Not only is the father-in-law, an intimidating father, uh, played by Robert DeNiro, but he is also former CIA, who has the capacity to spy 

[00:02:33] You also make Falker himself. you make him lose his luggage and he gets this luggage mixed up with somebody else and he is got all this weird cross dressing stuff 

[00:02:43] Somehow he accidentally knocks over grandma's ashes. I mean, you just keep taking everything to the truth, the worst case scenario, but then you play the truth of it.

[00:02:51] Who remembers Braveheart? Remember watching Braveheart and there were those scenes where, I mean, it was intense. They're about to go in the battle and you're on the edge of your seat. Look at all these people. They're about to. Fight. And then the Irish character would say something like, well, the Lord's told me I'm getting out of this, but he's pretty sure you're screwed.

[00:03:13] And we laugh hysterically, you know? I mean, we did. We don't have the characters laugh. It relieves tension and then we are even more emotionally invested. That's the irony. After that moment of comedy, we care even more if these characters live or die. So it's doing double duty. It's relieving tension for a moment, but then it's actually causing the bond to go greater, and now we care more.

[00:03:35] Talk about raising the stakes. It raises the stakes.

[00:03:39] So if you can find a way, if you have very serious projects and you find a way to bring humor into it. Now, where does humor come from? It has to come from the character. It can't be super imposed onto the character because it's the author's humor. It's got to be generated by the character themselves.

[00:04:04] It's gotta be. So that means that every character would have him. Or her own, his or her own sort of personality. So there's their own sense of humor. But when you can do that and you can allow that humor to play a role into the scenes that you're developing, the point is humor is a wonderful tool that we should all be trying to utilize no matter what your genre is.

[00:04:29] Now if your genre is, you know, some sort of spiritual thriller, you're not gonna use it a lot because that will undermine the tone and the genre of your piece. But you can still use it at various times in your story. I mean, I would say, you know, three, four times in a novel, and those will be powerful times.

[00:04:51] But again, it's when it comes from a character. So if it's coming from a character, it means that maybe we're gonna see some physical comedy, right? 

[00:05:00] so Charlie Chaplin, I mean so much physical comedy of even that causes both tension and laughter. So the scene where he is blindfolded and he is ice skating, but he keeps coming really close. I mean, we saw this even in the movie where the pool opens and they're doing the dance on the dance floor and the characters, you know, people are falling in the pool and everybody's like, oh, and we're laughing because we know the floor is open.

[00:05:27] This is just a wonderful life, life. Thank you. It's a wonderful life. We know it's funny because we're seeing it happen, but they don't know it's happening. But that added humor, I mean, that's a very serious story, but there's lots of little humorous moments woven in that make us love the characters more.

[00:05:44] So again, it could be a physical comedy thing.

[00:05:46] It could be. That you are, it's we're inside the character's head and they say something directly to the audience because in a novel, everything is filtered through whatever the character is observing or it's going to be through dialogue. Something that's actually.

[00:06:02] Said so, and it's always based on something true. Sometimes you might not even mean for it to be that funny, but it is.

[00:06:10] If it's a screenplay, you don't have the option of having it be in the character's head. That's the only one that's off the table. 

[00:06:16] There's still another way that you can't do in a novel, and that is, it can be something funny that the character isn't aware of. because everything that happens in a screenplay is through the camera lens.

[00:06:26] the idea being that could be funny to us even if our characters aren't aware of it, but it still has to do with their predicament 

[00:06:33] We just appreciate those little comedic moments. That are kind of just for the audience's benefit.

[00:06:39] Point is all good humor is grounded in character. Truth. It has to come from the character. It has to be grounded in reality. 

[00:06:48]