You write humor in web fiction the same way you write tension, by controlling what the reader expects and then breaking that expectation on purpose, because a joke is a small structured surprise and comedy is a craft of setup, timing, and specificity rather than a talent you either have or don't. The format rewards it unusually well, since web fiction is read fast on a phone and comedic LitRPG is one of the genre's largest and most loved corners, so a reliable sense of humor is a real retention tool. The two hard parts are staying funny without deflating the stakes, which you solve by keeping jokes out of the exact moment the reader needs to feel danger, and running a joke across hundreds of chapters, which is where the callback and the escalating running gag do compound work that no single novel has the length to match.
Why does humor matter so much in web fiction?
Humor matters in web fiction more than in almost any other prose form because the story is consumed fast, on a phone, one chapter at a time, and a reader who laughs is a reader who comes back tomorrow, which in a serial is the whole game. A printed novel is bought once and finished on the strength of that single decision, so it can afford long humorless stretches that a serial cannot, because a serial has to re-earn the reader's attention at the end of every chapter. A laugh is one of the most reliable ways to do that. It is also, and I think this is underrated, one of the fastest ways to make a reader feel that they like a character, because we trust and warm to people who are funny in a way that no amount of described competence can quite replicate. Running a web fiction platform, the pattern I see is that the stories which hold an audience through a slow arc are very often the ones with a dependable comic pulse, the ones where even a setup chapter is fun to read because the narration and the cast are enjoyable company.
The genre history backs this up, because some of the largest and most beloved corners of web fiction are explicitly comedic. Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl is one of the most successful web serials of its era and it is, chapter to chapter, a comedy, a lethal dungeon crawl narrated with the deadpan cruelty of a reality-TV production. Shirtaloon's He Who Fights with Monsters runs a huge amount of its charm on its protagonist's relentless snark, and Casualfarmer's Beware of Chicken built a devoted readership on warmth and gentle comedy rather than on escalating combat. Comedy is not a garnish on these stories, it is a load-bearing wall, and learning to build it is one of the higher-return skills in writing web fiction. My feeling is that a lot of new serialists treat humor as something that either happens or doesn't, a lucky byproduct of their personality, when it is in fact a craft with rules as learnable as the rules for pacing a fight, and treating it that way is the first step to getting reliably funny on the page.
What actually makes a scene funny?
A scene is funny when it sets up an expectation and then breaks it, delivered with timing and rendered in specific, concrete detail, which means comedy is a structure before it is ever a joke. The mechanism underneath almost every laugh is the violated expectation: the reader is led one way and the sentence turns another, and that small controlled surprise is what registers as funny. This is why the oldest comic pattern, the rule of three, works so reliably, two items to establish a pattern and a third to break it, and why the undercut, sometimes called bathos, deflating a grand moment with a small mundane one, is such a dependable tool. Douglas Adams built The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in 1979 almost entirely out of this move, the cosmic sentence that collapses into the trivial, and the technique translates directly to a progression fantasy narrator solemnly describing a world-ending power and then noting that its wielder has stepped in something. The line-level mechanics of banter, distinct character voices, and how spoken dialogue should read fast on a screen I have written about separately in how to write dialogue in web fiction; what I want to isolate here is the comedic engine underneath all of it, the timing and turn that make any line land, whether a character speaks it or the narration delivers it.
The single biggest upgrade most writers can make is to get more specific, because vagueness is the enemy of comedy and precision is its fuel. "He owned a lot of weird junk" is not funny; a precise, absurd, unexpected object is, and the great comic prose writers are all obsessive specifiers. P. G. Wodehouse, the master of the English comic sentence, is funny almost entirely at the level of exact word choice and the perfectly wrong simile, and Terry Pratchett's Discworld runs on the same fuel, a comedy of precise, humane detail rather than of gags dropped into a scene. The other structural lever is deciding where the comedy lives, and the most durable choice is comedy of character over comedy of situation: a joke that exists because of who someone is and what they want survives far better than a one-off pun, because it keeps generating. This is exactly why a self-interested, vain sidekick pursuing her own agenda is a renewable comic resource, the way the ensemble in the strongest serials so often is, which is closely tied to how you build a cast in the first place, a subject I went into in how to write side characters in web fiction. Build the funny into the wants of your people and you will never run out of jokes; try to sprinkle wit onto a flat scene from outside and you will feel the strain in every line.
How do you stay funny without killing the stakes?
You stay funny without deflating the stakes by keeping the jokes in the space around the danger rather than inside the moment of danger itself, so the comedy goes silent at exactly the second the reader needs to feel the threat as real. The fear that stops a lot of writers from committing to humor is that a joke will puncture tension, and it will, but only if it lands in the wrong place. Comedy and dread are not opposites; they run on the same engine, the violated expectation, which is precisely why the same story can carry both at full strength without either one weakening the other. Dungeon Crawler Carl is the standing proof of this in web fiction, a serial that is genuinely, consistently hilarious and also genuinely horrifying and lethal, and the comedy does not soften the horror, it sharpens it by contrast, because a world that jokes and then kills feels crueler than a world that only kills. Joseph Heller's Catch-22, published in 1961, works the same seam, using absurd comedy to make the horror of war land harder than a straight treatment would, and Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens from 1990 does it with an apocalypse.
The rule that makes this work is one of placement and it is worth stating plainly: never make the joke at the instant the reader is supposed to be afraid or grieving, because that is comedic whiplash, and it reads as the author failing to feel the weight of their own scene. Crack wise in the buildup, crack wise in the aftermath, but when the knife is actually at the throat, let the prose go straight and trust the danger. A fight can be framed with humor on either side of it, but the moment-to-moment combat needs to read as real threat, which is part of why writing legible, tense action is its own discipline, one I covered in how to write litrpg combat scenes. Pratchett is again the model here, because the funniest passages in Discworld very often sit directly beside the most genuinely moving ones, and the comedy is what earns the emotion the right to land. My advice, then, is to think of humor and stakes as taking turns rather than competing, letting each have the scenes it owns, and to be ruthless about pulling a joke that is stepping on a moment the reader needs to take seriously. A story that knows when not to be funny is a story whose jokes you can trust.
How do you run a joke across a long serial?
The technique that web fiction is uniquely built for is the running gag, a joke that recurs across the story and pays compound interest, getting funnier each time precisely because the reader remembers every prior instance, and a serial's enormous length is the perfect ground for it. A single novel can plant a callback and pay it off two hundred pages later; a web serial can plant one and pay it off two hundred chapters later, after the reader has spent months anticipating it, and that delayed, communal recognition, shared across a whole comment section, produces a laugh no standalone joke can match. The one discipline that separates a great running gag from a tiresome one is escalation: the joke has to grow, twist, or raise its own stakes on each return, because a gag repeated unchanged goes stale fast, while a gag that keeps escalating becomes one of the most beloved features of a long story. The callback rewards the loyal reader specifically, which is exactly the reader a serialist most wants to keep.
Web fiction also has a native comedic instrument that print mostly lacks, the System itself, the status screen and the automated announcer that so much of the genre is built around, and it is one of the richest sources of comedy the format offers. A floating interface that assigns bureaucratic titles to acts of desperate violence, or an AI dungeon narrating a death like a game-show host, is a built-in engine for the epic-meets-mundane undercut, and the best comedic LitRPG mines it constantly, in the same vein as the interjecting Guide entries that structure Adams' Hitchhiker's. Getting that comedic System voice right is close cousin to the craft of writing the interface at all, which I went into in how to write a litrpg status screen. The practical problem with all of this, across a serial that runs for years, is memory: you will genuinely lose track of which gags are still live, when each one last appeared, and whether a bit has been run into the ground, and readers will notice a joke going stale long before you do. This is the unglamorous bookkeeping the connected wiki and editor in IlorisNovel are built to carry, a place to keep your running gags, recurring bits, and the comedic voice of your System recorded and findable, so that a callback you planted in chapter forty is still there to pay off in chapter three hundred, and so a gag gets retired on purpose rather than quietly overstaying its welcome. Comedy at that length is not only inspiration, it is maintenance, and the writers whose jokes still land two hundred chapters in are the ones keeping honest track of what they have already made the reader laugh at.
The mistake I would most warn a new serialist against is waiting to feel funny before writing anything funny, because comedy on the page is built, not summoned. Learn the setup-and-turn, get specific where you were being vague, build the humor into what your characters want, keep the jokes clear of the moments that need to hurt, and plant gags you can escalate over the long haul the format gives you. Do that and humor stops being a lucky accident of your mood on a given day and becomes something you can produce on demand, which in a form that has to re-earn its reader every single chapter is about as valuable a skill as a web fiction writer can own.
Common questions about writing humor in web fiction
How do you write humor in web fiction?
Treat a joke as a structure, not a decoration: set up an expectation, then break it with a turn the reader did not see coming, and deliver that turn with timing and a specific, concrete detail. The funniest web fiction is rarely funny at the line level alone; it is funny because a character wants something absurd and pursues it seriously, or because a grand moment gets undercut at exactly the wrong second. Build the comedy into who your characters are and what they want, and the individual jokes will come much more easily than if you try to sprinkle wit on top of a flat scene.
Can you learn to write comedy, or is being funny a talent?
You can learn it, because comedy is mostly mechanics: the setup-and-turn, the rule of three, the undercut, the callback, and comedic specificity are all teachable techniques that funny writers use whether or not they could name them. Natural wit helps the way natural rhythm helps a musician, but the working comic writers, Terry Pratchett and P. G. Wodehouse among them, were relentless craftsmen who revised jokes the way other writers revise sentences. If you study why a passage made you laugh and reverse-engineer the structure, you will get funnier on the page even if you are not the funniest person at the table.
How do you write a funny LitRPG without ruining the tension?
Keep the jokes in the space around the danger rather than inside the moment of danger itself, so the comedy goes quiet the instant the knife is actually at the throat. Comedy and dread share a mechanism, the violated expectation, which is why the same story can run both at full strength; Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl is genuinely hilarious and genuinely lethal at once. The failure is comedic whiplash, cracking a joke during a death or a real loss, which punctures the feeling the scene needs. Be funny before and after the fight, and let the fight read straight.
What is a running gag and how do you use one in a serial?
A running gag is a joke that recurs across the story and pays compound interest, getting funnier each time precisely because the reader remembers every previous instance. Web fiction is unusually good ground for it, since a serial has hundreds of chapters for a callback to land and escalate. The trick is to escalate rather than merely repeat, because a gag that returns unchanged goes stale fast, while one that raises the stakes or twists in a new direction each time keeps earning the laugh. Track your live gags so you know which are still running and when each last appeared.
Why is comedy so common in progression fantasy and LitRPG?
The genres invite it because their machinery is inherently a little absurd: a floating status screen narrating a life-or-death fight, a System that assigns titles and levels to ordinary acts, and a power fantasy that a straight-faced narrator can gently puncture. That built-in gap between the epic and the bureaucratic is a comedy engine, which is why so many of the most-read serials, from Dungeon Crawler Carl to He Who Fights with Monsters, run on humor. Readers on a phone also reward a story that is fun chapter to chapter, and reliable comedy is one of the most durable reasons a reader comes back tomorrow.
by Jacob Tam · September 22, 2026
I run IlorisNovel, a platform for web fiction writers. If this kind of craft writing is your thing, you can try the editor with no account.