Allan Miller is a comedy writer from Scotland. He has been a stand up comedian and a script writer at the BBC. His humorous prose has appeared in such publications as Gutter, Popshot Quarterly, Ellipsis Zine, Lucent Dreaming, and Trash Cat Lit. Every full moon he turns into a building. He may be a warehouse.

In ‘The Developments’, Allan’s story featured in THE BARE BONES BOOK OF HUMOUR, a generational curse comes back to haunt a man out of his depth. Ankit Raj Ojha spoke with him about the building blocks of the story.

Tell us about your perspective on humour and its place in writing and in life.

Although there are differences in the sort of things people find amusing, humour has a universal appeal. It can be satirical, dark, silly, or surreal, but it has to be relatable or conform to some sort of logic, otherwise the joke (or story) won’t work. It can be a great weapon for pricking pomposity, and speaking truth to power, but I think the bottom line is that humour brings people together and makes them feel better. 

What are the things, works, and authors that have influenced your writing? 

Funnily enough, or perhaps not funnily enough, the writers that have influenced me the most are not writers of humour but of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. I love Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, M.R. James, Clark-Ashton Smith, Algernon Blackwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett aka Lord Dunsany. Although I tend to use everyday normality as a starting point for my stories, I find humour through incorporating fantastical elements, or in taking sudden diversions into ridiculously far-fetched situations.

Chris McQueer and Limmy are contemporary Scottish writers who’ve produced very funny short story collections that made me think there might be a readership for my attempts at humorous short fiction. I think there’s a real appetite for humorous prose (perhaps because of everything going on in the world right now) and I’m relishing the fact that THE BARE BONES BOOK OF HUMOUR is coming along to cater for it. 

Is there any image, phrase, idea, place, person, or memory that became the seed for your story? 

My wife and I always wanted to move from the city to the countryside. After more than a year of looking, we finally got the keys to our dream house. We’d only been living there for a few weeks when a notice was put through our letterbox informing us that a developer wanted to build 200 houses in the field right outside our door. Humour can be a great coping mechanism, and ‘The Developments’ was my creative response and a way to make something positive out of an unpleasant situation.