Author Scott Dikkers will show you how to write jokes. He's a master joke writer, founder of the world's most popular humor site TheOnion.com, #1 New York Times and #1 Amazon best-selling humor author, and successful cartoonist. Scott created the "Writing with The Onion" training center at the famed Second City in Chicago. His students have been hired for the top comedy writing jobs in TV and won dozens of Emmy Awards. He's consulted for top entertainment companies like NBC, Comedy Central, and Pixar.
This easy-to-follow guide lays out a clear system and simple formula for how to write a joke that will get big, milk-coming-out-of-your-nose laughs, reliably and repeatably. You'll learn...
* The 3 sure-fire ways to generate material
* The 11 different kinds of jokes and how to tell them
* The secret to overcoming writer's block--permanently
* And many more tips, tricks, and techniques
If you've wondered how you can start writing jokes, how to tell jokes to your friends, how to add humor to your writing, how to add jokes in a speech, or how to add humor to your presentation, this book spells out the simple joke writing formula professionals use.
How to Write Funny is for you whether you want to find a comedy writing job or just want to learn how to tell a joke.
Genre: PERFORMING ARTS / ComedyHow to Write Funny has sold approximately 25 books a month since its debut in 2014. It is consistently in the five figures of amazon’s sales rankings The audiobook edition was a #1 new release on Audible. The book has been written up in national publications such as Forbes, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Washington Post. Scott regularly speaks at corporate and college events, and is featured on international media including CNN, NBC, and the BBC.
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.
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.
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; it’s 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, 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?
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Translated by Mariano Donato
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