Art & Creativity Quote by Mark Strand

Admitting "It's very hard to write humor" is a kind of comic feint in itself: a poet famous for elegant seriousness letting the air out of any fantasy that jokes are effortless. Strand isn’t praising humor as a lighter genre; he’s warning that it’s an exacting craft with fewer places to hide. Lyric poetry can survive on atmosphere, on a shimmer of ambiguity. Humor has to land. It’s engineering disguised as play.

The line’s bluntness is the point. Strand offers no consolation about talent or inspiration, just the curt reality that comic writing is a high-wire act where timing, tone, and proportion are brutally exposed. Miss by a syllable and the piece doesn’t become "less funny"; it becomes awkward, even embarrassing. That risk is part of why humor is so rarely granted the prestige of "serious" art: when it fails, it fails loudly. Strand flips that hierarchy. If it’s hard, it’s because it demands control.

There’s also the poet’s subtext: humor threatens the poet’s usual authority. A solemn voice can command attention; a funny voice has to earn it moment by moment, negotiating with the reader rather than issuing pronouncements. Coming from Strand, the remark reads like a defense of comedy as discipline, but also a quiet confession about the temptations of the deadpan. For a writer attuned to silence, humor is the noisiest form of precision.