How to Write Funny: Your Serious, Step-By-Step Blueprint For Creating Incredibly, Irresistibly, Successfully Hilarious Writing Read online

  HOW TO WRITE FUNNY

  Your Serious, Step-By-Step Blueprint For Creating Incredibly, Irresistibly, Successfully Hilarious Writing

  Scott Dikkers

  Copyright © 2014 by Scott Dikkers. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of a brief excerpts in the context of a review. For information write Scott Dikkers / 4044 N Lincoln Ave., #223 / Chicago, Illinois 60618.

  ISBN-13: 978-1499196122

  ISBN-10: 1499196121

  For everyone who’s put up with me

  TABLEOF CONTENTS

  1 : INTRODUCTION

  Use the techniques in this book to reliably create top-notch humor writing

  2 : YOUR BRAIN’S COMEDY ENGINE

  Access both hemispheres of your brain to eliminate writer’s block and tap an endless reserve of comedy ideas

  3 : THE HUMOR WRITER’S BIGGEST PROBLEM

  Overcome this one devastating obstacle to reach the widest possible audience

  4 : HOW TO GET LAUGHS

  Understand the different kinds of laughs, and how to generate the best one

  5 : SUBTEXT: THE MAGIC INGREDIENT

  Infuse your humor with this vital component to create writing that makes people laugh

  6 : THE 11 FUNNY FILTERS

  Create any joke using the 11 fundamental building blocks of humor

  Funny Filter 1: Irony

  Funny Filter 2: Character

  Funny Filter 3: Shock

  Funny Filter 4: Hyperbole

  Funny Filter 5: Wordplay

  Funny Filter 6: Reference

  Funny Filter 7: Madcap

  Funny Filter 8: Parody

  Funny Filter 9: Analogy

  Funny Filter 10: Misplaced Focus

  Funny Filter 11: Metahumor

  7 : USING THE FUNNY FILTERS

  Layer the building blocks to create increasingly hilarious jokes

  Method 1: Filtering

  Method 2: Finessing

  Method 3: Divining

  8 : PROCESS OVERVIEW

  Master this simple system to become a prolific humor writer

  1: INTRODUCTION

  “A friend once asked me what comedy was. That floored me. What is comedy? I don’t know. Does anybody? Can you define it? All I know is that I learned how to get laughs, and that’s all I know about it. You have to learn what people will laugh at, then proceed accordingly.”

  — Stan Laurel

  When you get pulled into a good piece of humor writing, something magical happens. The string of words in front of you ignite a spark that sends outlandish images and funny ideas racing into your brain like a lit fuse, culminating in an explosion of laughter.

  Most of us don’t have a clue what’s making us laugh, exactly. We don’t have the words to articulate it. “I don’t know—I just thought it was funny,” we say.

  Maybe it’s the headline, or the tone, or a great joke in the first few lines. Maybe it’s the crazy characters or escalating absurdity, or the way the writer strings it all together to make you see the world or yourself with a skewed perspective that you’ve never experienced before.

  Whatever it is, when you put down that story, lean back in your chair and wipe away the tears of laughter, one thing is certain. You’ve just enjoyed a rare treat: the polished work of a master humor writer.

  There aren’t many great humor writers in the world. You could probably count the ones who’ve made you laugh out loud on one hand. There haven’t even been that many throughout history. It’s a one-in-a-million writer who can elicit sustained, hardy laughs from total strangers with nothing more than words on a page.

  Why is that? Why are there so few writers who can do this? I’ll tell you why. Because writing humor that’s funny—really, gut-busting funny—is one of the most difficult and challenging of all the literary crafts.

  Other genres of writing, by comparison, are easy.

  A horror story, for example, is extremely easy. You could probably write a pretty good one over a weekend, like Stephen King frequently does. Vampires, ghosts, blood, screaming, and a slew of other pre-vetted, inherently spooky clichés are sitting on the horror tool shelf waiting to be dusted off whenever a writer needs to drum up a scare.

  A story that’s a good cry is easy, too. Write about a pet dog or a beloved horse that dies, or a couple who splits up, or a kid yanked from his mother’s arms. Separate some characters who are meant to be together, or kill them off before their time, when others are depending on them. Writing a story that makes readers cry is like pushing a button.

  But what if you want to make readers laugh?

  Maybe you can re-tell that great joke you heard the other day. No, wait, you can’t do that—that would be stealing.

  Maybe you can tell a story from your life that you found hilarious. But, on second thought, most people probably won’t find that funny. It’s one of those “you had to be there” situations. Most funny stories from life are like that.

  In fact, all the go-to funny ideas you can think of have been done to death: banana-peel slipping, mothers-in-law, three somethings walk into a bar.... How do you think of something new that’s funny? How do you create laughs out of thin air—and somehow transfer them perfectly onto a blank page?

  We can scarcely explain why we laugh at funny writing. How can we possibly be expected to create it?

  Where do we even start?

  We start here.

  To paraphrase E. B. White, comedy is like a frog—once you start dissecting it, it’s not funny. And dissecting comedy and the comedy-writing process is exactly what we’re going to do in this book.

  So, get out your scalpel. In order to figure out how to write funny, we have to take it apart, analyze it, and learn how to put it back together.

  It’s not going to be an easy task. It may not even be funny. But rest assured, the end result will be you getting a lot better at writing things that make people laugh.

  WHAT IS FUNNY?

  To begin to understand how to make people laugh, we first have to ask, what is laughter, how does it work, and what makes people do it?

  Peter McGraw is a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder. He believes he’s discovered the unified field theory of humor. He can explain what’s funny with a simple vein diagram showing how a “benign violation” is always funny.

  Comedy teacher and Hollywood script doctor Steve Kaplan believes he’s reduced the definition of all comedy down to one sentence that screenwriters and performers can use to generate laughs in movies or TV shows: an ill-equipped relatable character who faces impossible odds yet doesn’t give up.

  Psychologists have a lot of theories as to why people laugh: it’s a gesture of submission in a complex interpersonal dynamic; it’s the result of a positive state; it’s the brain processing an error in stimuli: or any number of other nuanced, involuntary, intellectual or social responses.

  The ideas of these modern experts, as well as those of the philosophers and thinkers who’ve braved this topic throughout the eons, all provide some insight into what makes people laugh. But such intellectual humor analysis usually attempts to define only things that are funny in two areas: real life and performance.

  The question for us is, How do you write something funny? In wr
iting, there’s no funny performer or engaging personality to “sell” the humor. This salesperson is a critical tool almost all media of humor take advantage of. People like people. They like watching funny people perform for them. They like when Uncle Bob tells one of his great yarns, or when their favorite celebrity comedian comes out with a new movie or a new bit.

  When audiences read something funny, there’s nobody there. There’s no funny face you love, no familiar voice. There’s just a page or a screen sitting there, lifeless. A bunch of symbols.

  Furthermore, there’s no sound, no image. There’s not even time or space in which timing can be controlled in order for an act of comedy can take place. There’s just a big block of intimidating gray copy.

  So, how do you write humor when it seems you have no tools to do so?

  THE TOOLS OF HUMOR WRITING

  We’ve all heard that humor is a matter of personal taste. What makes one person laugh is different from what makes another person laugh, and there’s no predicting what people will find funny.

  Let’s say for a moment that that’s true. There are no objective standards in comedy. That means no one has a better chance of making people laugh than anyone else. Professional comedy writers are on a level playing field with anybody off the street—everybody’s a comedian, tossing off jokes and hoping some of them stick, not having any idea which jokes will get laughs and which ones won’t.

  Obviously, that’s not how it works. Professional comedy writers have a very good idea what’s going to work. It’s their job, and they need to be able to do it consistently. And they do it by using special tools, just like plumbers or drywall contractors use special tools to do their jobs.

  The tools of the humor writer aren’t in a physical toolbox. They’re locked away in the subconscious mind of the user. They’re tools of knowledge. The professional comedy writer knows how to write humor that the majority of people will find funny, in a reliable and repeatable way.

  That said, a lot of these writers don’t have much of an idea what the tools look like. They’ve probably never had to think about it. And most of them would be hard-pressed to explain how to use them. They don’t have to—they only need to be able to use them themselves. Most of them developed these tools and the skills to use them over a lifetime of trial and error, practice, dogged persistence, or all of the above. They’ve become second nature.

  Every successful comedy writer uses these tools. Some writers favor some tools over others, but all the tools in the toolbox are the same.

  This book is going to describe those tools in detail, and explain how to use them. It’s going to condense everything the typical comedy writer or funny person learns about comedy through trial and error throughout their lifetime until it becomes instinct, and it’s going to distill that knowledge into a guided process that you can learn.

  All the tools of the professional comedy writer, as well as specific instructions for how to use them, are now yours.

  These tools will not work all of the time, but they will work most of the time. And that’s the best you can get in humor writing. Yes, this is an objective craft, but it’s not math or science. It’s entertainment. You will bomb sometimes.

  The difference between a professional comedy writer and a random person off the street is that the professional comedy writer’s material works more often than the non-professional’s. There are fewer mistakes. A writer whose humor succeeds most of the time is considered an outstanding success by any standard. In this way, comedy is more like baseball than brain surgery. You might lose more than you win, but you can still maintain a solid batting average. And the good news is, in comedy writing nobody dies when you make a mistake.

  But hold on. Being funny is something you’re born with, isn’t it? You can’t teach this stuff. You’re either funny or your not. Right?

  I’ve been hearing this conventional wisdom for years. And through those years, I’ve seen not-very-funny writers—myself included—work hard, apply themselves, and then transform into the most celebrated comedy writers in the world.

  When I first got interested in writing humor, I was terminally unfunny, crushingly shy, and always the least charismatic person in the room. Performing was out of the question. Writing, however, seemed within my reach. The problem was, my writing was bad. I had trouble generating my own ideas. I couldn’t spell. Much of my early work simply aped the writing I’d seen in Mad magazine.

  I read whatever I could get my hands on. I craved information about how to write funnier jokes, snappier dialogue, and laugh-out-loud stories. This was before the Internet, and I didn’t know anyone who knew how to write comedy. At my local library, there were no how-to books on writing jokes or funny stories. They had only one book in their Arts & Recreation section: How to Be a Ventriloquist.

  What I wanted was a book explaining the techniques that professional funny people use. I wanted to use those techniques to make my writing funnier. I eventually found prolific author and original “Tonight Show” host Steve Allen’s How to Be Funny, but it’s not exactly a how-to guide. It’s just disjointed interviews with him transcribed by a secretary—more a collection of his humor philosophy than any kind of guidebook.

  The craft of comedy has been treated, for a long time, almost like the craft of magic. “A magician never reveals his tricks,” is how the magician’s creed goes. But magicians have nothing on comedy writers. Plenty of magicians explain their tricks in books and magic kits you can buy. When I was a kid, I could buy how-to magic books and magic kits at any department store. Not so with comedy. Those tricks are never revealed. They’ve been in a vault. Traditionally, the only way to learn them was decades of practice. You just had to figure it out for yourself.

  Until recently.

  50 years ago, The Second City in Chicago started teaching people how to perform comedy, and their impressive list of graduates is proof enough that comedy can in fact be taught. They began teaching writing a few decades later, and have since prepared writers for a lot of the top TV comedy shows.

  Louie Anderson started a stand-up boot camp where he and others teach the art of stand-up comedy.

  Colleges are starting to take comedy seriously as well. Academically focused comedy-writing classes are popping up at prestigious universities everywhere.

  But unless you go to one of those schools, there’s no divining the skills of humor writing. I’m writing this book in an attempt to create the kind of simple, one-stop, tell-all, how-to book that I was looking for when I was starting out.

  Comedy writing is a craft. It can be learned, and it doesn’t have to take decades and it doesn’t have to be frustrating and isolating.

  Finding humor happens in a split second. Your mind makes a connection, it squares with your internal notion of what’s funny, then you write it down or say it. Everyone’s sense of humor is unique, but everyone who’s funny—or has ever said or done anything funny—has followed these same fundamental steps to create that funny moment.

  In this book, those quantum, incremental steps that take place in that split second are laid out in the form of a clear blueprint that anyone can learn, practice, then master.

  You can make use of this book regardless of your skill level or experience. If you’re just starting out, and you want to be a funnier writer, consider this book your comedy basic training. If you’re already a pretty good amateur humor writer but think you could make a career out of it, this book is your comedy college. If you’re a successful comedy professional and want to increase your hit ratio, this book is your peak-performance coach.

  How To Write Funny explains how comedy works, both in your brain and in the brain of your audience. It outlines the simple tools you’ve probably already used (if you’ve ever made anyone laugh on purpose), which can be sharpened to produce the same effect on command, to consistently create uproarious comedy. It walks you through the dark valley of fear that many of us experience when faced with the prospect of creating comedy, and leads you to
a place of quiet confidence. It lays out the master formula for creating funny material seemingly from nothing, whenever you want.

  This book focuses on the written word, but its techniques are applicable to all media of humor, including stand-up, TV, film, web video, and corporate speaking.

  We’ll focus on the atom of comedy: the single, one-line joke or funny concept. Learning this elemental particle is a critical first step to success in comedy.

  Humor-Writing Tip #1: Concept is King

  When you write humor, the core concept you’re writing about has to be funny. It is, in fact, the most important part of your writing. So, you need to get it right. The greatest, funniest writing in the world will not save a bad concept. But a great concept written even barely adequately will be met with great success.

  The “concept” is the simple, funny idea that you’re writing about. You need to be able to express your concept in a single line or sentence, with as few words as possible. That single line is what I call a “joke.” This core comedic concept introduces readers to your writing, so it’s often used as the title, headline, or logline for your work.

  Readers need to know what the concept is before they read your work, and it needs to make them laugh. If the concept makes them laugh, they’ll read it. If it doesn’t, they won’t.

  Your success in comedy depends on the strength of your concepts.

  If you have grander aspirations than mere joke writing, like short articles, stories, novels, screenplays or a network TV deal based on your stand-up act, I urge you to be patient. All media of humor spring from the written word, and all written comedy springs from the single concept. It is in this microcosm of humor that all the principles of the craft can be learned and honed. Master this fundamental skill, and a much larger comedy world will open up for you like a beautiful flower.