Excerpt

Humor is the secret weapon of the nonfiction writer.

If you trying to write humor, almost everything you do is serious.

One strong editorial cartoon is worth a hundred solemn editorial.

The writer must find some comic device—— satire, parody, irony, lampoon, nonsense—— that he can use to disguise his serious point.

Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it's still outlandish.

The targets will change from week to week, but there will never be a dearth of new lunacies and dangers of the humorist to fight.

Humor aren't as urgent, but they help us to look at far older problems of the heart, the home, the family, the job and all the other frustrations of just getting from morning to night.

Humor is not a separate organism that can survive on its own frail metabolism. It's a special angle of vision granted to certain writers who already write good English.

Don't search for the outlandish and scorn what seems too ordinary; you will touch more chords by finding what's funny in what you know to be true.Finally, don't strain for laughs; humor is built on surprise, and you can surprise the reader only so often.

There's no law that says humor has to make a point.

今天这章讲幽默。看的时候就一直在想《笑之大学》。当年看完去豆瓣上翻影评，看到这样一句话：“喜剧创作必须抱持严肃的态度与目的，否则连当哗众取宠的笑料资格都没有。”幽默背后的，才是作者真正想表达的啊_(:зゝ∠)_不过要注意不要解读过度，有时候可能真的只是个玩笑。

Vocabulary

1.Which he presumably wrote just to amuse himself.

presumably:If you say that something is presumably the case, you mean that you think it is very likely to be the case, although you are not certain.大概，很可能，据推测

2.To deflect anger into a channel where we can laugh at frailty instead of railing against it.

deflect:

1）If you deflect something such as criticism or attention, you act in a way that prevents it from being directed towards you or affecting you.转移，引开注意力

2)To deflect someone from a course of action means to make them decide not to continue with it by putting pressure on them or by offering them something desirable.使脱离，使放弃

3）If you deflect something that is moving, you make it go in a slightly different direction, for example by hitting or blocking it.使偏斜，使偏转

frailty:

1）If you refer to the frailties or frailty of people, you are referring to their weaknesses.弱点，脆弱

2）Frailty is the condition of having poor health.（体质）虚弱

3.To those of us who were alive and sartorially active at the time.

sartorially:裁缝地

sartorial:Sartorial means relating to clothes and to the way they are made or worn.服装的，缝纫的

sartorius:缝匠肌