What makes me laugh when I write

I laugh to myself when I write. Quite a lot. It isn't something I like admitting in public, because the image of a grown man laughing at a notebook in his flat in Madrid is a little unsettling. But it's true, and I think it says a lot about how I work. If a lyric doesn't amuse me while I'm writing it, it's very unlikely to amuse anyone afterwards.

I want to try to pin down exactly what makes me laugh. Not humour in general, which plenty has been written about, but the specific things that set me off when I've got a lyric in my hands.

Words that shouldn't be together

First, and most of all, it's putting together words that have nothing to do with each other. A serious word and a household word. A big word and a small one. When they collide, a spark flies that nearly always tickles me.

«La dieta del cucurucho», the ice-cream-cone diet, is a good example from the title alone. A diet is a serious thing, all doctors and New Year's resolutions. A cone is ice cream, summer, beach bar, a kid with a smeared face. Putting them together makes no sense, and that's exactly why it works. When a combination like that occurs to me, I laugh before I even know what the song will be about.

The same goes for place names. «Mi novio de Albacete», my boyfriend from Albacete, makes me laugh because it's so specific. It isn't "my boyfriend from the provinces", which would be a label, nor "my faraway boyfriend", which would be poetry. It's Albacete. With its name and its postcode. Precision, when it turns up where nobody expects it, is funny.

Drama out of all proportion

Second is drama out of scale. Copla, the old Spanish torch song, is very present in what I do, and it has that knack of treating a disappointment as if it were the end of the world. I love applying that intensity to small things.

A boyfriend who does nothing, told with the gravity of a tragedy. A neighbour who finds out everything, described like a character in a crime novel. When I pull off that mismatch, the sky-high tone for a tiny matter, I laugh a lot. And the good thing is that under the laughter there's usually something true, because small things sometimes really do feel like the end of the world, even if we're embarrassed to admit it.

There's one that makes me laugh from its title alone, and that's «La primera drag», the first drag queen. It sounds like an encyclopaedia entry, like "the first man on the Moon". That solemnity of a historic record, applied to something so neighbourhood, so late-night, delights me. And at the same time there's some truth in it, because everything we do for the first time feels historic to us, even if only four friends in a bar see it.

The third thing is more personal. I find it very funny to laugh at myself. At my quirks, at the times I've made a fool of myself over someone, at how pathetic anyone can get when they fall in love or get dumped.

It isn't cruel humour. I don't punish myself. It's more the laugh you get when you catch yourself doing something you'd criticise in someone else. I write about exes, about self-esteem, about those things where we've all come off badly at some point. And if I put myself above it, as if I'd never fallen, the lyric rings false. If I put myself inside it, I laugh, and the laugh is honest.

When I laugh too much

Here's my problem. Sometimes I laugh so much writing a lyric that I lose my judgement. It seems the funniest thing in the world and it isn't. It's funny to me, at that hour, that tired, with all the context I've got in my head. To an outsider it's just an odd sentence.

I've learnt to be suspicious of lyrics that make me roar with laughter. The good laugh, the one that works later, is usually quieter. A smile, a snort. When I laugh really hard, it's often because I'm tired or because the joke depends on something only I know.

The test is to reread it the next day. If I'm still smiling, it goes out. If I can't work out what I was laughing at, I shelve it or bin it. It's happened more than once and it always makes me a bit sad, like waking from a funny dream and not remembering the joke.

What doesn't make me laugh

There are also things that don't make me laugh, and I avoid them. Laughing at people who have it harder than I do isn't funny to me. The joke that needs a victim isn't funny to me. When I write about a nosy neighbour or a boyfriend who brings nothing to the table, the fun isn't in humiliating them. It's in recognising them. We've all had a neighbour like that. And some of us, whether we admit it or not, will have been that boyfriend.

The humour I'm interested in is the kind that makes you feel accompanied, not the kind that makes you feel superior. If someone hears a song of mine and laughs because they recognise themselves, I've got it right. If they laugh at someone, I've done something wrong.

I'd like to think that the solitary laugh, the one in front of the notebook, somehow reaches the person listening later. Not exactly the same. But something like it. A small complicity between someone who wrote something laughing and someone who hears it and thinks yes, that's exactly how it is.

The full lyrics, with their good jokes and the odd so-so one, are at mikesaintlouis.com.