Writing Serious Things in a Humorous Way

By Rob Gee

Rob Gee, photo by Nick Rawle

As a nurse, I discovered that, when used properly, humour is enormously valuable: it can diffuse tension, create common ground and help put seemingly insurmountable problems into context. It allows us to enjoy our idiosyncrasies and relate to each other as equals. As someone I nursed once told me, "laughter stops us feeling alone and strokes a broken soul."

When we use humour to address serious or difficult subjects, people can be more receptive to our messaging: one of my shows is a whodunit set on a dementia ward. In the wake of the Francis report (which examined care failings in mid-Staffordshire NHS), it was used by several NHS trusts to train staff in ethics and reporting concerns. The laughter around this serious subject enabled people to learn whilst giving them the safety to share their own experiences.

Since then, I’ve written several comedy and health-based commissions, including a singalong about chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and a comedy quiz show about early symptoms of breast, lung and bowel cancer: ambitious subjects for comedy, but able to reach beyond conventional health education strategies. The comedy quiz show toured working men’s clubs, for example.

Some writing advice

• When writing about a sad or dark situation, a small amount of levity can have a wonderful impact. At the same time, try and avoid being funny simply for funny’s sake: if we contrive unconvincing situations or have our characters behaving unlike themselves purely for the sake of humour, it won’t ring true and is therefore less likely to be funny.
• Write what amuses you, not what you hope will amuse your audience: we all laugh at different things and many successful comedians are very marmite. 
• It’s not the choice of subject that decides whether a joke’s offensive, but the intent. With this in mind, punch up, not down. Most comedic events combine surprise with misfortune and every joke has a target. Choose yours wisely. 
• Self-deprecation can be lovely: it lets people know that you’re not afraid to laugh at yourself.
• The brain loves being given images to enjoy; the more imaginative, the better. Similes can be particularly joyous when they combine elements that wouldn’t normally co-exist: "He entered the room with all the grace of a cow walking downstairs."
• With a single line, you can create a story within the story: "He looked down at the scene with the forlorn expression of a man who’d just swallowed a winning lottery ticket."
• A good way of adding levity to an otherwise serious work of fiction is to give your narrator a sense of humour: as they talk directly to us, we see the world as they do. 
• Once you’ve created a strong character, you can do anything with them: someone like Alan Partridge, Larry David or Philomena Cunk could be in a waiting room, a lecture or a yoga session and we’ll still enjoy the experience.
• The humour will often come to you in later drafts, once your infrastructure has been established. Don’t worry if it’s not hilarious straight away.
• Seek feedback from people who share your humour; watch and read lots of comedy. It will help you avoid or subvert clichés.
• No piece of writing has to be entirely funny any more than it had to be entirely serious. You can have varying amounts of light and dark, because, after all, life is like that.

Here is a poem about an ostensibly serious subject:

Dr Brice

Dr Brice put her name in the wrong part of the form
and inadvertently sectioned herself.
This amused us greatly,
because she was bad for people’s mental health.

She went on a trip to Venice,
paid for by the drug company
who were keen to invest in her impartiality.

She changed everyone’s meds when she came back.

Carnage ensued and people relapsed.
One man’s mental health fell so badly to bits
that he smashed up the ward and put two nurses off sick.

So don’t be like Dr Brice.
Just stick to the guidelines from NICE.

About the author
Rob Gee was a mental health nurse, then a comedian, and now a stand-up poet who dabbles in theatre. He’s performed at over a hundred fringe festivals worldwide and received over twenty awards for his solo shows. He leads comedy and poetry workshops in mental health settings and is sometimes sent into schools as a warning to children. You can read about his collection The Day My Head Exploded: Poems about Healthcare on Creative Writing at Leicester here. His website is here. 

Kelli Allen, "Otherwise, Soft White Ash"

 

Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally. Allen is the co-Founding Editor of Book of Matches literary journal. She is an award-wining poet, editor, and dancer. Her fiction has appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2022 and she is the recipient of the 2018 Magpie Award for Poetry. Her chapbook, Some Animals, won the 2016 Etchings Press Prize. Her chapbook, How We Disappear, won the 2016 Damfino Press award. Her collections include Otherwise, Soft White Ash (2012), Imagine Not Drowning (C&R Press 2017), Banjo’s Inside Coyote (C&R Press 2019), and  Leaving the Skin on the Bear (C&R Press, 2022). Her book, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, was rereleased Fall 2026 by C&R Press. She currently teaches writing and literature in North Carolina. Her website is here. 

About Otherwise, Soft White Ash, by Kelli Allen
In this rerelease of Kelli Allen’s first collection of poetry and short fiction, with a new foreword by Brian Turner, readers are asked to consider how grief and longing continuously occupy the same hut. Allen’s work explores how loss, myth, sexual desire, and the wild journey inward come to shape capital S-Story.

You can read more about Otherwise, Soft White Ash on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Otherwise, Soft White Ash

Clearing Materials of Exile 

Hunter and hermit both dissolve bitter with sugar cubes stolen 

from cut glass jars, though neither always remembers the theft.

Each extends then wraps dirt dried fingers around the weak sweet crystals,

mouths diminished in the metal mirror hanging loose in the old barn.

Humiliation is an Easter horse moving directly behind us like some brutal,

selfish child whispering I want my supper while chewing weeds and apples.

We cross one border to move closer to another, as the dark crow 

in our coat pocket closes his eyes, and we are allowed to sleep.

The priest ignores the ark in his woods because he is busy absorbing his shadow,

and the animals know their work is to hide every egg like dark stones meant for the river.

Noon, Like Whiplash 

          

Every episode of self-imposed solitude, 

the moments when she would lock herself 

into a room sometimes for hours, often 

for days, would always be followed 

by extravagant gestures meant to breed 

forgetfulness.  My closets were alive 

with texture and ocular romance.  

I was treated to shopping trips, 

which included purchasing original 

designs from the best shops 

in whatever city we happened to be living 

at the time.  There were expensive chocolates, 

gorgeous piles of books, cosmetics, shoes, 

any articles of expression or indulgence 

she could hope might make it easier 

for me to blanket the segments 

of disaster her erratic attentions 

invariably caused.  I allowed this 

behavior for so many years 

that I no longer feel a prickle 

of shame when I find myself pressed 

against remembering.  

What else could we do, 

this single child and her raging 

mother offering gift after gift 

from a silver horn?  The whole 

is never far, and one fraud 

is as easily dressed in silk as another.

The extravagance ended entirely 

for one year when I was seventeen 

and found myself wearing so much 

of my mother’s blood that the new pale 

yellow sweater I adored became lost 

in awkward blossoms of sticky red. 

I remember cashmere softness before 

I begin to usher in flashes of the surreal 

scene of her fourth suicide attempt.  Memory 

is unfaithful to intention, catapulting 

what we should recognize far 

from what our cognizance vividly defends.  

There is no room for apology 

at any moment in the scene, neither 

when it unfurled as quick thin tentacles 

or now, when recollection feels viscous 

and tastes of paint left to dry on a lid.  

While tracking the minutes 

from the call to the sound 

of the gangly ambulance halting 

near my mother’s window, I focused 

on the saturation spreading peripherally 

down my own arms, soaking 

the delicate fibers of my daffodil sweater.  

There was a pattern forming over 

my forearms and onto the top layer 

of lemongrass-shaded sheets 

my mother bought to match a vase 

with similar colored latticework 

snaking around and through its glass.

In those twenty-six minutes when I pushed 

my hands into her wet arms and waited 

for whatever help would arrive 

through sirens and stillness, I felt 

as though there were streaks of rain 

pelting far too slowly against my face 

and back.  There was more wetness 

in that waiting than what could be 

described as measurable pain. The shape 

of her was an indication that something more 

had gone wrong, but I was lost in the absence 

of humming, and the reticence was a film 

like thin stained glass—fragile 

and something to be irrationally trusted. 

The reality of blood strips all defenses 

into patience, calculations descending 

into calm like knowing the old gods 

are present and full.  Silence 

can be its own kind of vertigo, 

and there is nothing so quiet 

as keeping your mother alive 

and not being certain that you should. 

When her veins were finally bound 

and there seemed to be a cessation 

of rushing, both of fluid and breath, 

I finally looked at her face.  The paramedics 

had obscured her mouth and nose 

with a dome of plastic and whatever color

was left clinging to her skin

seemed temporal and cheap.  

The sheets on her bed were beautiful, 

and watching her blood deploy itself 

over the quiet sheen of the cotton 

was a betrayal of sorts.  I imagined 

she would wake at any moment; her mouth 

opening in an impossible "O," and hordes 

of butterflies would emerge and become her hair.  

Hazel Stuart, "Robert Kirk's London Commonplace Book, 1689-90"

 

Hazel Stuart has lived in Leicestershire since 2004. She was born and brought up in Aberfoyle, Scotland, and attended university in London. She has previously published an academic paper on Poststructuralism, an award-winning children's fiction series and, most recently, a creative contribution in the University of Leicester's Other Lives in Samuel Pepys's Diary e-book. She has an ongoing interest in early modern history and the intersection of politics, religion and the occult. 

About Robert Kirk's London Commonplace Book, 1689-90, transcribed and annotated by Hazel Stuart
Robert Kirk's London Commonplace Book, 1689-90 is a transcription of the private journal belonging to a brilliant Scottish minister, scholar and translator abroad in London in the early days of the Glorious Revolution. Visiting the capital to oversee the printing of the first ever Gaelic Bible, a project financed by the Royal Society's Robert Boyle, he chronicles the late-seventeenth-century city in meticulous detail. Through Kirk's remarkably tolerant and curious narration, we explore a city of religious diversity, toy with early modern science's understanding of second sight, and get to tag along to some of seventeenth-century London's best visitor attractions. This book is every bit as critical to historians as the diaries of Pepys or Evelyn. Beyond her faithful transcription of the commonplace book, Hazel Stuart has provided an introduction and notes, including the most comprehensive biography to date of its author, Robert Kirk, a man whose interest in second sight and fairies was ultimately to lead him to infamy. 

You can read more about Robert Kirk's London Commonplace Book, 1689-90, here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From Robert Kirk's London Commonplace Book, 1689-90

March 21, 1689, I also saw Gresham College, where the Hall pertaining to the Royal Society is, bestowed for the use of inquirers into nature’s phenomenon and mysteries by –

It is in Bishop’s Street on left-hand as you go forth to Bishop’s Gate. There is a square court there and a pole for mathematical experiments. But the Hall containing the curious rarities is not large but full of all varieties, above 2000.

Among which the main that I remarked and remembered were three manucodiatas with plain bills, long wings and tail, travelling feet: I took a feather out of a wing of one of them, and out of the tail of the ostridge’s skin. The bird of Paradise is carnivorous. I saw the pelican black, its bill was broad and as big as my arm, with a collar beneath. A Hudson’s Bay partridge white and long, with a few black feathers in the tail. A serpent of East India 7 yards in length, a small head and body as big as my leg at the ankles. A cassowary, duskish black fowl as big as an ostrich for the bones, though not so long necked, the bones of his leg are as gross as those of a man’s arm. The neck about a yard and a half in length, the legs three quarters. The blackish brown pigritia in shape like a man, a big body, slender legs, it goes but a yard and a half a day, though tis bigger than a cat. It climbs a tree, eats itself fat with fruit, and becomes lean before it creeps to the root of the tree.

Creative Empathy: An Evening with Rob Gee and Jonathan Taylor

Photo by Trust "Tru" Katsande on Unsplash

Join the Centre for New Writing, the Empathic Healthcare Society, and the Stoneygate Centre for Empathic Healthcare for a special evening celebrating the power of creative writing to foster empathy, understanding and connection. Award-winning poet, performer and storyteller Rob Gee and author Jonathan Taylor will appear in conversation to explore the relationship between writing and empathy. The event is free and open to all. It takes place on Thursday 29 October, 6-pm, and you can register for tickets here. 

The event celebrates the Anthony Locke Empathic Healthcare Prizes for Creative Writing, recognising outstanding writing that engages with themes of compassion, understanding, care and human experience. Following a talk by Rob and Jonathan, there will be a reading of some of the brilliant entries to the competition.

Whether you are a creative writer, healthcare professional, student, or reader, you’re welcome to this celebration of the role of creativity in helping us understand one another.

About the Speakers
Rob Gee is a comic, poet, and ex- mental health nurse with over a decade of clinical experience. He has won over twenty awards for his solo shows and triumphed in major poetry slams, including the Edinburgh Slam and BBC Two's Why Poetry Matters Slam. He has performed over 3,000 shows globally, including at more than 100 international fringe festivals. He serves as patron for the Leicestershire Action for Mental Health Project (LAMP) and spent 12 years as the lead artist for Comedy Asylum, which runs comedy workshops and shows for individuals with severe mental illness. Shows include Forget Me Not: The Alzheimer's Whodunnit and AWOL: Two old men escape from a care home and go to a metal festival. He has published numerous books of poetry and edited anthologies celebrating the power of poetry for wellbeing.

Jonathan Taylor is an author, editor and critic. He is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, and author of prize-winning novels, short story collections, and memoirs, including the beautifully empathic works of life-writing Take Me Home: Parkinson’s, My Father, Myself (Granta Books, 2007) and A Physical Education: On Bullying, Discipline & Other Lessons (Goldsmiths, 2024).

About the Prizes
In summer 2026 we ran a creative writing competition open to all medical and healthcare students at the University of Leicester, with prizes kindly sponsored by Anthony Locke, and the Centre for New Writing. The prize was judged by a committee including students from the Empathic Healthcare Society, Dr Jonathan Taylor, Dr Andy Ward, Dr Felicity James and Dr Rachel Winter.

The range of entries – moving, tender and empathic – showed how talented and expressive our students are. The evening will include a presentation of prize certificates, but all the entries deserve to be celebrated: the talk will be followed by a reading of a sample of the great short prose pieces and poems entered.

The event forms part of our larger conversation around the literary arts and healthcare, funded by the AHRC as part of the Empathy, Difficulty, Difference: Creative Curiosity in Practice project.

We look forward to welcoming you.

Rachel Burns, "My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses"

Rachel Burns lives in County Durham. She was awarded a DYCP Arts Council Grant in 2023. She won the Classical Association Poetry Prize in 2026. She was placed second in The Julian Lennon Prize for Poetry 2021 and second in the Disabled Poets Prize 2024. Her poetry has been widely anthologised, including COAL (Smith/Doorstop) and North Country (Saraband). Rachel has facilitated poetry workshops for The Ginkgo Prize, Tees Women Poets, The Writing School and Creative Future. Her pamphlet, A Girl in a Blue Dress, is published by Vane Women Press. My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses is published by Broken Sleep Books.

About My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses, by Rachel Burns
My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses is a raw, propulsive book of poems and lyric prose that moves through teenage motherhood, addiction, poverty, care work, violence, and the long afterlife of classed shame with furious clarity and bruised humour. Across six sections, Burns writes from buses, pubs, kitchens, prisons, foodbanks, council estates, and the uneasy calm of nature reserves, allowing memory to return in flashcuts, refrains, and narrative riffs that feel as immediate as speech.

The collection's emotional range is wide, from the bleak comedy of survival and the tenderness of parenthood to the stark ache of friendship, loss, and what gets left behind, while recurring motifs of horses, film, music, and woodland destruction thread private life into a wider social landscape. It is a book that refuses respectability and refuses silence, insisting on testimony without polishing the edges.

You can read more about My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses

Love in the 80s

Rubik’s Cubes
& Fred Perry white polo shirts

The roller-disco Life – La-La-La-La
I’d watch you from my bedroom window

Doing bunny hops on your BMX 
Counting 1,2,3 like Hopscotch 

Wheeling my shopper bike
Through the metal gate

Riding around the green
In the hope you’d notice 

I’d graffiti my school book
I love Joe

Heart & cupid arrows
Dreamily dissecting a frog

You were sent to Ireland 
To fight in The Troubles

The mines & steelworks all gone
It was the army or the Monger’s Yard

You came back hyem
Not quite the same

I still think of you
As that boy 

Who changed
The colour of your hair

More times than I’d had hot dinners

School Bus Anthem 

I sit at the back with Shelley and Titch,
sharing a long cigarette, smoking it down to the fag end. 
Bernadette goes from seat to seat, can yer sponsor us 50p, pet?     
We all know the money isn’t for the starving babbies in Africa.

The big lads on the bus, bounce first years up and down, 
up and down, on their knees. This is the way the donkey’s ride,
the donkey’s ride, the donkey’s ride.

The old double-decker crawls up the bank, wheezing like a knackered miner.
We pile to one side, just as it hits the hairpin bend, knowing the driver, 
won’t make the gear change in time. 

The engine smokes, splutters and coughs, wheels spin backwards. 
Time rewinds. The bus grinds to a stop. We pile out the exit, 
a herd of untamed ants. The driver shakes a fist.
Ger off yer little bastards! Ger off! 
 

Anime, ADHD and Me

By Mathew Lopez-Bland

Having just failed his graduation exam for the third time, Naruto watches on as the rest of his classmates celebrate graduating from the ninja academy.

When I started pitching ideas for my PhD, I knew that I wanted to write about anime, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. Japanese animation had been an ever-present in my life, ever since I’d first watched the Pokémon anime, back in the late 90s. Over the years, the medium had come to mean so much to me, but I’d never really thought about why.

Then, in 2021, I got the answer I was looking for, when I was diagnosed with ADHD. I realised that anime mattered to me because throughout my childhood, before my diagnosis, it’d been the characters I’d seen in anime, like Naruto Uzumaki, from Naruto, who’d taught me about myself. 

In Western media, delinquent characters always seemed to be the butt of the joke, the naughty boys that everyone laughed at, but nobody cared for. When an episode of The Simpsons ended, Bart’s life went back to normal. His actions had no lasting consequences, as each week everything started over again. But in anime, things were different. In long running shonen like Naruto, hyperactive and disruptive young boys, like me, were taken seriously. For all of Naruto’s bravado, the show’s early overarching storylines hinge on his isolation, and his desperation to overcome his flaws and be accepted by his peers – feelings I understood all too well.

Within a few months of my diagnosis, I was researching at the University of Leicester, working on a thesis titled, ADHD, Anime, and Writing Creative Non-Fiction. This consisted of a 40,000-word creative non-fiction collection, and a 30,000-word reflective commentary. The creative work used a hybrid form of memoir and essay to explore how my ADHD symptoms had affected my life, and how the stories and characters I’d found in anime had helped me to understand who I was, and where I fit in the world around me. My commentary looked at how experimenting with the structure and form of my essays led to me using more rigid, conventional writing structures, as a kind of "medicine" for my ADHD. 

Now that I am almost a year on from completing my studies, I look back at my PhD as a period of both creative and personal maturation. As I write this, I realise how glad I am that I persevered and insisted on writing about something that meant so much to me. At times, it was a painful and tiring process, but it was also joyous and revelatory, as I found that I learnt almost as much about myself, as I did about the craft of writing. I don’t know where my writing will take me next, but I do know that the my research journey was more rewarding than I had ever anticipated.

About the author
Mathew Lopez-Bland lives on a farm with his fiancé and their pet cat. When he’s not writing, he’s usually watching anime or playing football. He has a PhD in Creative Writing, and his short stories and poetry have appeared in various literary magazines.

Book Review Competition and Creative Writing Workshop for Bedford College Group

To celebrate the National Year of Reading 2026, the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester is holding a Book Review Competition and Creative Writing Workshop in conjunction with the Bedford College Group. The Book Review Competition is open to students at the Bedford College Group, and all entries will be considered for publication for publication on our popular book review blog Everybody's Reviewing. The workshop on "Non-Linear Narratives and Storytelling for Games" will run in Tresham College in Kettering on 16 October 2026, and is taught by Laura Besley and Jonathan Taylor. Details are below!