How to Write Funny: Principles, Tools, and the Comedy Engine

The Nature and Challenge of Prose Humor Writing

• Impact of Written Humor

  • Well-crafted humor writing creates a cognitive reaction where a string of words ignites a spark in the reader's brain, sending outlandish images and funny ideas racing like a lit fuse and culminating in explosive laughter.
  • Readers rarely understand the exact mechanics behind why they laugh, often attributing it vaguely to headlines, tone, strong opening lines, crazy characters, escalating absurdity, or a skewed world perspective.
  • The experience of laughing out loud at pure prose is a rare treat because master pure-prose humor writers are extremely scarce throughout history.
  • Eliciting sustained, hardy laughter from total strangers using nothing more than words on a page is a one-in-a-million talent.

• Relative Difficulty of Humor Compared to Other Genres

  • Writing gut-busting humor is one of the most difficult and challenging literary crafts.
  • Horror Genre:
  • Comparatively easy to write.
  • A solid horror story can be written over a weekend, a feat frequently accomplished by writers such as Stephen King.
  • Relies on pre-vetted, inherently spooky clichés readily available on a metaphorical tool shelf, such as vampires, ghosts, blood, and screaming.
  • Dramatic / Melodramatic Genre:
  • Evoking tears is simple and functions like pushing a predictable button.
  • Relies on established emotional triggers:
    • The death of a pet dog or a beloved horse.
    • A couple breaking up.
    • A child being yanked from a mother's arms.
    • Separating characters who belong together or killing off characters prematurely when others depend on them.
  • Humor Genre:
  • Retelling existing jokes constitutes theft.
  • Personal life stories usually fail with broader audiences due to the "you had to be there" phenomenon.
  • Standard go-to funny tropes are worn out and overused, including slipping on a banana peel, mother-in-law jokes, and "three somethings walk into a bar" setups.
  • Requires creating original comedy out of thin air and transferring it perfectly onto a blank page without visual or auditory assistance.

• The Scientific Dissection of Comedy

  • To paraphrase E. B. White: Comedy is like a frog—once you start dissecting it, it is no longer funny.
  • Despite this, mastering humor writing requires taking comedy apart, analyzing its components, and learning how to reassemble it.

Scientific Theories and Definitions of Comedy

• Peter McGraw's Benign Violation Theory

  • Peter McGraw is a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder.
  • He proposed a unified field theory of humor represented by a simple Venn diagram.
  • The core thesis states that humor occurs whenever a situation is simultaneously perceived as a "benign violation."

• Steve Kaplan's Definition of Comedy

  • Steve Kaplan is a comedy teacher and Hollywood script doctor.
  • He reduced the definition of all comedy down to a single actionable sentence for screenwriters and performers:
  • Comedy consists of an ill-equipped, relatable character who faces impossible odds yet does not give up.

• Psychological Explanations for Laughter

  • Psychologists attribute laughter to several nuanced, involuntary, intellectual, or social mechanisms:
  • A gesture of submission within a complex interpersonal dynamic.
  • The manifestation of a positive psychological state.
  • The brain processing an error or anomaly in incoming stimuli.

The Medium Deficit in Written Humor

• The Role of the Performer ("The Salesperson")

  • Most comedy relies heavily on a front-facing performer or engaging personality to "sell" the humor.
  • Audiences naturally like watching funny people, whether it is a relative telling a story, a stand-up comedian performing a routine, or an actor in a movie.
  • Performers utilize critical physical tools to generate laughs:
  • Facial expressions.
  • Intonation and voice inflection.
  • Physical presence and charisma.
  • Direct control over temporal delivery and spatial timing.

• The Constraints of the Written Page

  • Written prose lacks a visible performer, familiar voice, audio elements, visual images, and physical space.
  • The author cannot directly manipulate temporal timing in the reader's mind.
  • The medium consists entirely of motionless symbols formatted into an intimidating block of gray copy on a lifeless page or screen.

The Objective Tools of Comedy Craft

• Debunking the Subjectivity Myth

  • Conventional wisdom claims humor is entirely subjective and unpredictable, placing professional comedy writers on the same level playing field as an average person guessing what might be funny.
  • Professional comedy writers operate using deliberate, reliable, and repeatable tools—analogous to tools used by plumbers or drywall contractors.
  • Professional writers understand what material will succeed because they routinely apply these tools, which become second nature through trial, error, practice, and persistence.

• The Performance Metric of Comedy Writing

  • Comedy writing is an objective craft, but it is an art form rather than math or brain surgery.
  • Success is evaluated like baseball rather than medicine: professional writers lose or miss sometimes, but they maintain a high "batting average."
  • A professional writer's material succeeds significantly more often than a non-professional's because they make far fewer structural mistakes.
  • Making a mistake in comedy writing is non-fatal.

• Learnability vs. Innate Talent

  • The common belief that being funny is an innate trait that cannot be taught is false.
  • Writers who begin as terminally unfunny, shy, charismatically lacking, and structurally weak can transform into world-class comedy writers through disciplined application.

• Historical Secrecy in Comedy Instruction

  • Traditionally, comedy craft was treated like magic, operating under an unwritten code where techniques were kept secret in a vault, forcing writers to spend decades figuring them out independently.
  • While magic instructional kits and books were widely accessible in novelty stores, comedy writing instructional material was historically unavailable.
  • Steve Allen's book How to Be Funny offered transcribed secretarial interviews containing comedy philosophy rather than a step-by-step instructional manual.
  • Library collections historically lacked instructional joke-writing guides in their "Arts & Recreation" sections, often carrying only specialized performance texts like How to Be a Ventriloquist.

• The Institutionalization of Comedy Pedagogy

  • The Second City in Chicago demonstrated that comedy can be taught, beginning with performance instruction 50 years ago and expanding to writing courses decades later, supplying writers for top television comedy shows.
  • Comedian Louie Anderson established a stand-up comedy boot camp to teach stand-up techniques.
  • Universities and academic institutions now offer dedicated comedy-writing curricula.

Fundamental Humor Writing Principles

• Funny-Writing Tip #1: Concept Is King

  • The core concept is the single most critical component of humor writing.
  • Superior execution or brilliant prose cannot salvage a weak or unfunny concept.
  • Conversely, a strong concept executed with bare adequacy will frequently achieve major success.
  • Definition of Concept:
  • The simple, funny idea underlying the piece.
  • Must be expressible in a single sentence using as few words as possible, functioning as a single "joke."
  • Application:
  • Serves as the title, headline, or logline for the work.
  • Acts as the primary hook; readers decide whether to consume the piece based entirely on whether the concept makes them laugh.

• The Atom of Comedy

  • The single, one-line joke or funny concept is the fundamental particle/atom of all humor.
  • All humor formats—stand-up, television, film, web video, corporate speaking, short prose, stories, novels, and screenplays—derive from written material, which originates from a single core concept.

The Brain's Comedy Engine: Clown vs. Editor

• Productivity Blockers in Humor Writing

  • Highly productive humor writers write constantly in journals and notebooks as an essential cognitive mechanism to process life and understand the world.
  • Writers who struggle with productivity typically suffer from one of two core psychological imbalances:
  1. Lack of Confidence / Unmotivated (Overactive Editor):
     • The writer assumes their output will be worthless, hates their writing, and develops writer's block.
     • Manifests in avoidance behaviors such as staring endlessly at a blank screen, cleaning desks, or scrubbing shower tile grout with a toothbrush.
  2. Overconfidence (Overactive Clown):
     • The writer loves everything they produce, considers all their thoughts hilarious, fails to cull weak ideas, and remains immune to critical feedback.

• Funny-Writing Tip #2: Quantity Is the Key to Quality

  • High-volume output generates a deep reservoir of raw material from which high-quality ideas can be selected.
  • Myth: Geniuses write perfect final pieces in a single draft without editing or proofing.
  • Reality: Professional comedy writers generate dozens or hundreds of jokes, discarding the vast majority and presenting only the top tier to the public.

• The Dual Mindsets of the Humor Writer

  • The Clown (Right-Brain Function):
  • Characteristics: Creative, subjective, out-of-the-box, and nonjudgmental.
  • Function: Generates raw ideas continuously without filtering or self-criticism.
  • Stage vs. Page Performance:
    • Performing Clowns rely on stage presence, dynamic charisma, and stage ownership (e.g., Jim Carrey in his prime, Jamie Foxx).
    • On the written page, physical charisma is stripped away; unfiltered Clown output manifests as an unorganized, unfocused mess.
  • The Editor (Left-Brain Function):
  • Characteristics: Logical, objective, organized, and analytical.
  • Function: Evaluates raw material, applies objective criteria, workshops ideas, and culls weak lines.
  • Risk: An overbearing Editor suppresses the Clown, rejecting ideas before they are fully articulated and preventing raw production.

Practical Exercises for Balancing the Comedy Mindset

• Exercises to Develop the Inner Clown

  1. Morning Pages:
  • Originates from Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer and popularized by Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way.
  • Execution: Write continuously for 30 minutes every day without stopping, judging, re-reading, or correcting typos.
  • Adaptation for Humor: Gently steer the unconscious stream-of-consciousness writing toward amusing or lighthearted ideas while maintaining strict non-judgment.
  1. Everyday Notebook Logging:
  • Carry a physical notebook at all times.
  • Record every amusing observation, thought, or opinion immediately.
  • Raw observations represent the "crude oil" of comedy writing; failing to log them is equivalent to letting oil spill into the sand.

• The Weekly Clown-to-Editor Workflow

  • Step 1 (Raw Generation): Perform daily Morning Pages and notebook logging continuously under the Clown mindset.
  • Step 2 (Weekly Shortlisting): Once per week, review all notebook entries and Morning Pages using the Editor mindset. Extract ideas that remain funny or interesting onto a curated "Shortlist."
  • Step 3 (Drafting): Switch back to the Clown mindset to write raw first drafts based on Shortlist concepts:
  • Write individual short jokes in multiple varied ways without evaluating success.
  • Draft unorganized story outlines or quick rough passes for longer pieces.
  • Step 4 (Objective Evaluation): Allow time to pass (days, weeks, or months) so the writer forgets the initial creation process. Put on the Editor hat to evaluate and edit the material with complete objectivity.

Chapter 2 Action Steps

1. Purchase a small notebook to carry at all times. Log every thought or observation that is amusing or interesting.
2. Execute the Morning Pages exercise daily for at least two consecutive weeks by writing uninterrupted for 30 minutes without self-criticism.
3. At the end of each week, review all Morning Pages and notebook entries, transferring all viable amusing ideas to a master Shortlist bank.