The Comedy Bible, by Judy Carter

This one’s also geared around standup, but focuses on a particular style that may not be for you if you like flexibility in your humor. Still, the book offers great information about writing and improving your act, with lots of helpful tips from established comics sprinkled throughout the text. There’s even a large section on finding different types of work and marketing yourself. If you’re looking for a thick, comprehensive all-in-one manual, this is the book for you.

Damn! That’s Funny! Writing Humor You Can Sell, by Gene Perret

You can tell I like this guy’s books, can’t you? This one deals with writing funny articles and filler for magazines and the like. Not only does it explain how to write humor articles such as essays and parodies, but the first part of the book covers a lot of places you can mine for topic ideas, which makes this book valuable to me. If you find it cheap, go ahead and pick it up.

The Comic Toolbox, by John Vorhaus

This book is exactly what it says on the tin – though the main thrust is about comedic storytelling, its main feature is to offer a variety of techniques to help enhance comedy. At the time I got this, I didn’t find it all that useful – I still believe you need to understand the basic mechanics of writing humor, and Gene Perret’s books do a much better job of explaining this. However, for humorists who like tinkering with “optional rules” (for you Dungeons and Dragons fans out there), it covers a lot of classic comedy storytelling techniques you can plug in when neccessary. If you’re less of a joke man and more of a classic author, this book is worth a look.

Of course, I always advocate giving books a read before committing to a purchase, especially reference books like these. You don’t want to blow a lot of dough on something you may not need in the future, do you? (You’d be surprised how often this comes up…especially when it comes to yours truly!)

Still, see what sticks out for you. Everyone’s different and works best with different things. A classic rule of comedy and life. Keep at it!

Today I’d like to give you an expanded list of ideas to consider when looking for relationships. Use it to spurn your thinking. These questions are deliberately huge so you can fit any kind of subject into them, but feel free to narrow accordingly. Above all, don’t dwell on these for too long – speed is always good.

1. Without further ado, here’s the list:
2. Who can be related to the subject?
3. What can be related to the subject?
4. At what time did the subject occur?
5. Where did the subject occur?
6. Why did the subject occur?
7. How did the subject occur?
8. When does the subject exist?
9. How does the subject exist?
10. Why does the subject exist?
11. How can the subject be related to current events?
12. What if the subject acted in an unexpected way?
13. How does the subject solve a problem?
14. What kind of problems does the subject cause?
15. How might you break or repair the subject?
16. Where does the subject stand in belief systems?
17. How might people come into conflict over the subject?
18. How might the subject influence the future or past?
19. Who might love or hate the subject?

Happy thinking…about…stuff. I guess.

This Became A Problem.

I mean, this is perfectionism. It’s always a problem. Yeah, a desire for excellent quality will ensure you strive to write the best material possible, and I love how that anal-retentiveness keeps me on autopilot. But then you get too anal and it becomes a self-doubting war of “is this good enough” and “I should make this even better” and blah blah blah. We’ve all been here before.

But writing humor is a double perfectionist sword in that it’s easy to obsess over writing amazing articles AND amazing jokes. There’s enough material out there to cover perfectionism for other types of writing, so I won’t get into that. But since it’s tempting to keep fiddling with a joke until it’s “perfect”…how do you know when a joke is good enough?

Personally, the easiest way for me to consider a joke “finished” is to match it next to my goal for the piece. Usually when I write comedy, I want the humor to unfold in a certain way. Sometimes it’s observational, sometimes it’s bizarre, sometimes it’s character-driven…things like that. So I look at these jokes after the initial revision and think, “does this joke match the tone I’m trying to set?”

This is important. Because sometimes you WANT the joke to feel basic. There’s a real risk of alienating your target audience through clever wordplay, so sometimes you need to ask yourself, “is this enough for my readers to get the point?” And then, I push it a LITTLE bit more, just to satisfy my need for cleverness. But anything after that is overworking it, and I’m much better off moving on.

Like dealing with other forms of perfectionism, this takes practice and awareness. With enough effort, you’ll learn when to press on for this as well. (Though that little technique called a “deadline” is always helpful!)

Rule of three jokes work like a list, and the first two parts serve to setup whatever assumption you’re trying to shatter. Let me demonstrate by writing up a rule of three joke on the fly. (As always, these concepts don’t have to be attached just to verbal humor, but this is the easiest way to show you.) The other day I was musing about careers I wanted as a kid. Here’s a few of them:

Detective
Reporter
Game designer
Fiction author

From that we could start it off like this:

Like many kids, I wanted to be a lot of different things when I grew up.

Next, let’s add two of the careers to extend the setup.

Like many kids, I wanted to be a lot of different things when I grew up. Detective…reporter…

You know what’s coming next. Now we need to twist the assumption. In this case, it’s assuming that the next career will be a normal job. As always, I’m gonna go out of my way to come up with something totally out of left field:

Like many kids, I wanted to be a lot of different things when I grew up. Detective…reporter…plantation owner…

Now, usually rule of three is pretty indisputable, but I find that you can sometimes stretch it to a list of four items. This only really works if A) the items are short to list and B) the fourth item is even more unexpected than the third one.

And now that I’ve just taught you the easiest filler for Twitter you can ever write, go forth and rule-ify!

A notebook can be filled with all kinds of topics:

Current Events

Hit up your favorite newspaper or news website for the latest updates to Planet Earth. Don’t just stick to top stories – look in the Life section or even the comics and write down the broad topics you find there. For example, Easter’s around the corner and maybe you’ve seen some articles about Easter egg hunts or Easter baskets. What else relates to Easter? Use assosciation to come up with potential ideas.

Weird Encounters

Every once in a while, you’ll be going about your daily business, only to stumble upon a peculiar sight. For me, it was the time I was standing in the mall and noticed a toddler in a carriage handling a pack of cigarettes while his mom was looking at jewelry. Before telling your friends about it, write it down! You’ll never know when you find a use for it down the line.

The Daily Routine

Mind you, not every day can be graced with a strange encounter, but normal days can feed the notebook just as well. Think about everything you did yesterday from morning to night and use those events to come up with topics. For example, if you had cereal for breakfast yesterday, some topics stemming from that could be “I love how easy cereal is to make” or “cereals I would invent”.

Opinions and Beliefs

We’re all hopelessly biased in one way or another. Fortunately, that makes perfect notebook food. Weigh your current thoughts and beliefs from an objective standpoint. Which opinions make the most interesting topics? What might other people think about your beliefs? How would they react? An introspective adventure might serve up topics you would have never thought about at face value…you just need to be honest and open-minded.

These are but a few ways you can fill the pages of your notebook with topical goodness. Do you know any other ways to come up with interesting things to write about? If you do, go ahead and drop me a line in the comments.

1. You gotta have a sense of humor.

Painfully obvious advice, I know, but you’d be amazed how people can be given obvious advice and never acknowledge it. (Trust me, I’ve been there.) You need a lighthearted view of the world. Optimally, you should approach most situations, especially the negative ones, with a humorous outlook. This isn’t easy even for the funniest men and women, of course, but it pays off.

2. You need the desire to be creative.

Lazy humor stinks because everyone’s heard it before. Blond jokes, why cats are different from dogs…boring, been-there-done-that tedium. The best humor is unexpected, clever, unpredictable, and other great words now available in your local thesaurus. You can’t write that kind of humor without a thrill and passion for making something new.

3. You must be observant of the world around you.

And I don’t just mean looking at a bird and going “yep, that has wings”. I mean writing it down, prodding it, looking for the absurd and strange. I’m not perfect here but I’m doing better – just today I noticed a bag of chips that prominently displayed “40% LESS FAT”, which made me think, “FAT is just one letter off from EAT, isn’t it?” It’s that ability to notice what is truly off about this weird world that helps us find the humor in it.

4. You must want to solve the puzzle.

Chewing over humor is a lot like chewing over any other piece of writing, yet humor has its own rules. Do you adore the puzzle of wordplay, the challenge of setting everything just right for the greatest comedic effect? Can you rely on it to keep you going time and time again? Mind you, the satisfaction of laughing at one of your own awesome jokes is great, but you might as well have fun getting there first.

What other principles do you think a person of wit requires? Let me know in the comments.

But you’ve already heard this “failure is good” part before, I bet, so lemme cut to the finish line. You want to know the single best way to develop your humor writing skills? Shoot, you want to know the single best way to develop ANY skill?

Keep these two factors in mind and you’ll go far:

1. Always be having fun.
2. Always be learning about your craft.

At first glance, these sound painfully obvious. Especially number two – a good crafter of words knows that reading a lot is essential. But notice that it comes after “Always be having fun”. Why? Because having fun is the highest priority.

If you’re not having a grand ol’ time with your work, pack it in and go do something else. Trust me.

And again, this sounds obvious…but let me explain deeper, with my own personal experience.

Now, your friendly neighborhood Matt Willard didn’t always want to be a comedian. He wanted to publish graphic novels for a living and he figured, “well, if I want to make this happen, I need good art skills”. And so he started drawing a lot, purchased and read many drawing books in an attempt to become prime artist real estate.

But those results didn’t come as fast as I hoped. So I figured I’d step it up. I’d practice more, read more books, work hard to discover that one secret I needed to become an incredible artist. At one point I set myself on a daily program where I drew shoes and lamps for an hour. Maybe I’d get better if I kept it up.

There was just one problem: drawing became a total pain in the ass.

You know how you’re supposed to practice every day? I didn’t. Why? Because I saw it as a CHORE. I failed to realize that, if I really enjoyed drawing, I wouldn’t be looking at it as work. But by forcing myself to draw shoes and lamps, or daily practice with portraits and figures, I lost sight of the reason I started drawing – because I ENJOYED IT.

And eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I got fed up. I tossed my books and supplies in the closet and haven’t bothered with this artist business since.

Yes, you need to develop skills and techniques to succeed at any craft. But if you’re sitting there like I did, doodling boring junk out of OBLIGATION, you’ll drive yourself crazy. However, if you made it your holy mission to draw out of enjoyment, draw only cool and fun stuff, draw comics and fanart and other sweet pictures, then you’ll be having a blast AND developing your skills. Maybe you won’t get there as fast…but at least you won’t want to punch the entire world on the way.

If you take anything away from these columns, it should be your priority on keeping things fun. Everything else should branch from this single desire. You won’t always be having fun, but you’ll be fine as long as you don’t treat it like a grim duty. It’s not business before pleasure…it’s a balance of both.

Do you have any questions about humor writing that you want me to answer? What would you like to see me cover in future columns? Leave me a comment telling me what you’d like to see!

“I simply have a penchant for INTELLIGENT conversation.” – Megatron, Beast Wars

Ego issues aside, rambling to myself has actually helped me come up with a lot of great ideas. Often my mind wanders to certain topics, which naturally leads me to trying out joke lines, to laughing to myself once I stumble on a nearly-perfect gag to use. Of course, as mentioned in the title, this only seems to work when I’m in the bathroom. Hey, what else am I gonna do in there when I’m finishing up?

Still, that got me thinking. Many writers advocate writing a terrible first draft to get everything on paper and avoid censoring yourself. Same’s true for joke writing. I’m thinking that this tendency of mine to make up material in the bathroom is my own way to bypass self-censorship and really get my creative juices flowing. And if it works for me, why not anyone else?

So here’s what I want you to try. It might by silly, but do it at least one time. Go to a place where you can be alone and do something to keep your hands busy. While you’re doing that, let your mind and mouth wander, speaking aloud what you’re currently thinking about. And as you do this, try to let your natural thoughts and reactions to things bubble through. You’ll find that, even as the risk of looking like a mad person, the lack of a barrier can summon some authentic and truly original material.

Of course, this might not work for everyone. If you’re like me and you tend to bop through life and make jokes, this will feel more natural to you. Even so, I think it’s worth a shot. Who knows? Jokes on the can just might turn out to be a valuable tool in your comedy arsenal.

Do you have any questions about humor writing that you want me to answer? What would you like to see me cover in future columns? Leave me a comment telling me what you’d like to see!

The Comedy Writing Workbook, by Gene Perret
I absolutely adore this book, and if you can get only one book on comedy writing, I’d make it this one. It covers a variety of techniques with detailed examples and exercises for you to try. If you can’t find it, though, you can make do with The New Comedy Writing Step by Step, another book by Perret that condenses this information. Either one is worth reading if you’re serious about improving your jokes.

Step By Step to Standup Comedy, by Greg Dean
This book is primarily geared to developing stand-up comedy routines and improving your performance, but it also offers the “joke prospector” system to help create great jokes. I’ve adopted some of the tips in this book into my own writing, so even article writers can get some mileage out of this one. Definitely a worthy purchase.

And Here’s The Kicker, by Mike Sacks
Sacks has gathered interviews with 21 fine folks in the comedy writing business, from column to film, in this neat little volume. There’s the obligatory advice on how to break certain markets and how to get your material in the right hands, but the strength of this book is reading where all these people came from and how they got to where they are now. And some of these cats come from poor or unpleasant backgrounds. It just goes to show you (and me) how you can get anywhere you want as long as you keep faith and stay tenacious. Without that, no dream is possible, especially one as tricky as comedy writing.

There are a few other books on comedy writing out there, but these are some of the best as far as I’m concerned. Of course, you can be sure I’ll feed you helpful comedy writing advice as well! Learn from everything you can, I say. And keep on laughing.

Do you have any questions about humor writing that you want me to answer? What would you like to see me cover in future columns? Leave me a comment telling me what you’d like to see!

Remember that jokes start with a setup and end with a punchline. The trick to using other jokes is to change the setup or the punchline to create a fundamentally similar line. This way you can preserve part of the original joke while putting your own spin on it.

Let’s demonstrate with one of the jokes I wrote for Twitter:

Life is full of disappointment and pain. Most of it comes from my performance of The Mikado.

Now, let’s try switching out the setup. Remember, it should still logically flow to the punchline in some way. Feel free to modify the punchline’s wording as well in order to accommodate your new setup.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people fall ill from contagious airborne substances. This is why my performance of the Mikado was labelled a “biohazard”.

And now, let’s try switching out the punchline.

Life is full of disappointment and pain. But that’s not a very marketable name, so instead they called it “Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark”.

You can do this to both setup and punchline, creating your own new wording while keeping the essence of the joke idea intact. As long as the idea’s funny, it should work.

Of course, I still recommend you make your own original humor when you can, and if you feel bad about stealing from other writers, you can always rephrase jokes you’ve written yourself. But like they say, nothing is original…might as well take advantage of it a LITTLE bit, wouldn’t you say?

Until next time, keep on laughing.

Do you have any questions about humor writing that you want me to answer? What would you like to see me cover in future columns? Leave me a comment telling me what you’d like to see!