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

by Scott Dikkers

  Humor-Writing Tip #3: Make It Accessible

  Accessible writing is easy to find and easy to read. It’s made available to as many readers as possible, written clearly and simply to appeal to as many readers as possible, and covers subject matter that’s understandable (ideally of great interest) to as many readers as possible. Because the audience for the written word is so small, the more accessible your writing is, the bigger its potential audience. Reading is hard enough work as it is. Don’t make readers work even harder to find or understand your writing. When assessing any humorous concept, you need to ask yourself, How accessible is it?

  Let’s look at other ways to solve the problem of how to get people to read your writing. All is fair in love, war and writing. You can break any rule you want in order to get readers. And the first thing you’re going to want to do is steal. That’s right, steal.

  To be very clear, I’m not talking about stealing other people’s jokes. If you do that, you may get a laugh, but you’ll lose the respect of any readers who recognize your theft, and you’ll lose the respect of your peers—especially the peer you stole from—and you’ll have a very difficult time ever shaking the reputation within the comedy-writing community as someone who steals jokes.

  Don’t ever steal anyone’s jokes, and don’t ever plagiarize.

  What I’m recommending is stealing some of the attention-getting traits of other humor media. This is a secret trick to get noticed used by some of the most successful humor writers.

  THE SEVEN HUMOR MEDIA

  There are seven media for humor: prose, TV/web video, movies, audio/podcast, stage, visual (still image only, with no words), and street art (performance art for unsuspecting audiences, such as pranks, flash mobs, graffiti and outdoor advertising).

  We’ve already laid out one of the biggest weaknesses of the written word (the prose medium): it’s not very popular. But let’s take stock of its strengths.

  Prose has your audience’s undivided attention. This is not true of the other media, whose audiences can (and often do) exercise, wash dishes, have a conversation, check their messages—they can get distracted by just about anything—while they’re consuming the entertainment. Not so with prose. If they’re reading your work, they’re not paying attention to anything else.

  Another great strength of prose is its intimacy. Prose gets inside the mind of your audience, weaving your ideas with theirs as they imagine a world that brings your work to life for them. They take ownership of this “word picture” because they helped create it. Radio drama is the only other medium that enjoys this magical strength, but radio drama is, sadly, a dead art. No one produces it anymore, and audiences have forgotten how to listen to it. So, there’s no danger of the written word facing any competition from radio drama, unless audiences start digging up 1950s episodes of “Suspense” or “Gunsmoke” in droves, which is extremely unlikely.

  One great strength of prose is that it lasts longer than any of the other media—a lot longer. We’re still reading great works of humor written by Mark Twain in the late 1800s. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (written in 1726) was recently made into a movie starring Jack Black. We’re still getting laughs from the humor writing of Shakespeare, Chaucer, even Aristophanes, whose writing dates back 2400 years. In any other medium, you can’t go back more than 20 years without the entertainment appearing hopelessly out of date in terms of production quality alone. You can only go back a few decades with movies or TV shows before a lot of modern audiences will tune out. People aren’t interested in scratchy, black-and-white movies or old kinescopes with imperfect sound.

  Great humor writing—especially Satire, which is the kind we’re going to focus on in this book—is universal. It can transcend time, fashion and taste, rising from centuries past to become just as timely and meaningful as the day it was written.

  But these strengths alone don’t make up for prose’s weaknesses: that its potential audience is tiny, that it’s perceived as impersonal, intellectual. It’s just a bunch of black-and-white symbols that feel like a chore to read. Not exactly what most jaded modern audiences would consider a good time, or “must see” entertainment.

  Let’s look to some of the other media to see what strengths we might appropriate.

  Just as a plant needs to come up with creative ways to attract bees to pollinate it, your writing needs to think of creative ways to attract readers. The prettiest, most fragrant flower is going to attract the most bees.

  We’ve already stolen a great tip from comic strips, acknowledging the importance of brevity. Another great idea from comic strips is the power of the visual medium. Comic strips are, after all, a mixed medium (a combination of prose and visual). Draw a little picture next to your writing, as I’ve done throughout my career (and this book), or include a funny photo or any other kind of image that makes the writing next to it more appealing to readers.

  Internet memes use this tactic to great effect, combining catchy images with very brief text to generate massive popularity, or at least awareness.

  One of the late 20th century’s greatest satirists, Matt Groening, got his start using the visual medium. He was a writer who, even though he couldn’t draw very well, decided to draw pictures next to his writing to make it more appealing, turning it into a comic strip (“Life in Hell”), which led to an opportunity to create “The Simpsons.”

  TV/web video is the world’s most accessible and therefore most popular medium. This is one of its strengths. People love it. We’re addicted to it. A citizen of the modern world would find it difficult to avoid consuming humor in this medium. It’s thrust at us on our computers, in our phones, and a lot of people have the TV on in their homes all day.

  The TV/web video medium has weaknesses, too. It’s expensive to produce. It takes a lot of labor from a lot of different skill-sets.

  However, a words-only web video is relatively inexpensive to produce. Perhaps set to music as well, web video is an excellent medium for writing. A lot of YouTube videos employ this tactic. We used it at The Onion to launch our web video spin-off, ONN, in the mid-2000s. Our introductory teaser trailer for ONN featured little more than a few words set to music, which led to our turning The Onion’s largely prose-based endeavor into a video one. Our web videos featured a lot of on-screen prose humor, like segment titles, lower thirds, and a moving scroll of headlines. This co-opting of the video medium brought a lot of readers to theonion.com to read our prose.

  Humor-Writing Tip #4: Make It Short

  Anything worth saying is worth saying briefly. It may take more time (Mark Twain famously apologized for a letter’s lengthiness by explaining that he didn’t have time to make it short), but this is time well spent. Sometimes cutting a word or two can make a line twice as funny, or turn an unfunny line into a funny one. Experiment with your work by cutting words. See if anything’s lost. And use simpler, shorter words when possible. By trimming your writing, you force yourself to get at the heart of what you have to say, and you’ll say it in a way that readers can more easily digest.

  The audio/podcast medium is alive and well, despite the fact that radio drama (a subset) is dead. Audio/podcast is the next most intimate medium, after prose. It’s also a uniquely accessible medium. People listen to podcasts and audiobooks on their way to work, while running on their treadmills, and anywhere else they want. Podcasts are a great promotional medium writers can use to make potential readers aware of their writing. Also, writing a script for a podcast is a great way to reach a wider audience. All of those people talking on podcasts have to get material from somewhere.

  One strength shared by just about every other medium besides prose is the human element. These media usually do best when a live person presents the written material, either as dialog or monologue. It’s impossible to calculate how much more energized an audience becomes when they’re being entertained by a person as opposed to a bunch of stifling words. They love it.

  You can give the human touch to your
writing by creating a facade. When the words become a curtain, and there’s a personality behind that curtain, your writing is suddenly electrified as if it’s a live performance. Your reader senses the intelligence behind the curtain and the writing comes alive in a way that it can’t when you write “on the nose” (the term for writing exactly what you think). There’s much more detail on how to achieve this effect in humor writing in Chapter 6.

  Street art is one of my favorite media. Audiences who get entertained on the street when they’re not expecting it are the best audiences. They’re delighted by the surprise inherent in the presentation. There are countless legal ways to get your writing in front of readers using this medium.

  The Onion began as a newspaper that was dispensed free on the street. So, part of its early appeal came from using the street art medium. This was, in fact, the primary medium used by The Onion to introduce itself to new readers in its formative years. People would walk past grocery stores or bars where free weekly newspapers are distributed, and they’d see The Onion among the offerings. At first, they’d be confused by it—the outlandish headlines were out of place among the straight-laced alternative news, music, or LGBT weeklies that were often found in the same areas. Once passersby realized The Onion was a humor publication, they fell in love with it immediately. To this day I hear people fondly reminisce about their first discovery of The Onion on the streets of Madison, Denver, San Francisco, or one of the other cities where The Onion was distributed in its first two decades, and how absolutely delighted they were to find humor in this unexpected place.

  That surprise and delight is one of the greatest strengths of the street art medium. It’s virtually impossible to achieve that level of surprise in any of the other media. In all other media, the audience is, at least on some level, expecting to be entertained, which necessarily diminishes the amount of surprise or discovery they can experience.

  Carol Kolb is a brilliant TV writer who got her start at The Onion in Madison, ultimately rising to the rank of editor-in-chief in the early 2000s. She got noticed and initially hired by The Onion largely due to her hilarious street art.

  After a college student had gone missing under dubious circumstances, flyers were posted all over campus, asking, “Have you seen this woman?” next to a photocopy of the student’s picture. Kolb produced a her own flyer and posted it all over campus, asking, “Have you seen this man?” next to a photocopy of Al from “Happy Days.” It was a bold and edgy parody that pierced straight through the media clutter to make a lot of unsuspecting readers laugh.

  How can you get your writing seen in unusual or creative ways? What rules of the prose medium can you break in order to ring out above the competition and get noticed? What tactic can you borrow from the more popular or the more fringe media to give your writing as much of a boost as possible?

  CHAPTER 3 ACTION STEPS:

  1. Write a list of some of the strengths and weaknesses of prose compared to the strengths and weaknesses of the other six media.

  2. Make a list of ideas for overcoming the weaknesses of the prose medium in your own writing. What are some strengths of other media that you could employ to help readers find your work?

  4: HOW TO GET LAUGHS

  Humor is the magic ingredient that makes a dull life fascinating, a sad life happy, and an empty life fulfilling. It’s a ray of sunshine in a cold and unforgiving universe—the light at the end of the tunnel of the human condition. Those lucky few who can find humor in a situation—any situation—will not only endure it, but enjoy it, and inspire others to do the same.

  Studies show that people who have a hardy sense of humor have more friends, make more money, and live longer.

  No less than the American Cancer Society promotes the power of “humor therapy.” Doctors endorse similar treatments for chronic pain sufferers. Laughter Yoga, the practice of fake-laughing until it becomes real laughing, stimulates deep breathing and leads to physical and mental rejuvenation, even demonstrable healing.

  Humor, along with its primary effect, laughter, is a big deal. It’s important to us all. You ought to be commended for wanting to make the world a better place by working to improve your ability to make people laugh.

  What makes people laugh, really? Not fake-laugh, but genuinely laugh. You need to be able to answer this question if you’re to succeed at making them laugh. There are different kinds of laughs, and they vary in quality and desirability.

  Over 90 percent of all spontaneously generated laughter is nervous laughter. It’s people trying to grease the wheels of a conversation or break some tension, real or perceived. There’s nothing actually funny going on with this kind of laughter. There’s no comedy being crafted. This kind of laughter, though ubiquitous, is an empty, non-healing kind. If laughter is food for the soul, this is the McDonald’s of laughter.

  Roughly 9 percent of all laughter is good, pure, hardy laughter in response to real-life situations—that crazy thing the dog just did, or the non-injurious fall Myrtle just had off the trampoline. This is the kind of laughter that’s good for your lungs, releases endorphins, and generally makes life fun. The more you can get of this kind of laughter, the better off you’ll be. Problem is, these kinds of laughs can’t be engineered. They can only happen by accident.

  The remaining 1 percent of laughter is the most rare. It’s laughter gold: an involuntary response to something that was consciously crafted for the purpose of generating laughs. The overwhelming majority of this 1 percent of all laughter is brought on by stage, TV/web video, movie or audio/podcast entertainment. This laughter is often mild, or offered in artificially enhanced form either willingly or by producers’ careful manipulation.

  When someone is performing for us on the stage, we laugh, even if we don’t really think it’s very funny. There’s a social contract at work in these situations. If we feel like laughing a little bit, we might exaggerate our response to subconsciously appease a performer or join in with a laughing crowd. We might also consciously exaggerate our laughter if we’re at the taping of a TV comedy show and the producers have spent as much as an hour prior to showtime encouraging us to laugh often and loudly.

  Hearing other people laugh entices us to laugh more readily. Producers of TV shows take great pains to record live audience laughter because they understand its power. The sound of this laughter activates the social contract in us even if we aren’t a part of that original audience, but are watching the show long after the taping, alone at home. Producers also occasionally add canned laughter to a show’s soundtrack, either to enhance existing laughs deemed too lackluster to do the job, or to create the illusion of a live audience where none exists. (Canned laughter is audience laughter pieced together from previous performances and then applied to an altogether different performance.) Canned laughter is meant to artificially trigger the social contract, encouraging at-home laughs in those not yet inured to the effects of such cheesy tactics.

  Roughly .00001% of all laughter remains. This tiny sliver of laughter is generated by nothing but the written word, no interpersonal reaction with friends or family, no performer, no personal connection, no music, no editing, no sound effects, no laugh track—nothing to enhance the experience beyond a string of words on a page or screen.

  Starting in this chapter, I’m going to dissect what type of written humor is going to result in the kind of big, hardy laughs that are the most healing—the milk-coming-out-of-your-nose kinds of laughs—using only the written word.

  We’ll unlock these tactics first by uncovering the one thing you’re absolutely going to need. The one essential ingredient in all humor, without which humor cannot take place. That ingredient is surprise.

  There are other things that are helpful to have in humor, like relatability, truth, timing, tragedy, or the breaking of taboos. But humor can still exist without those things. Humor cannot exist without surprise. Even when something expected or even downright predictable happens that makes us laugh, that predictable event mus
t unfold in a surprising way in order to be funny.

  So, how do you get laughs? Surprise people.

  Of course, not all surprise is funny. Some surprise is scary, some shocking. Some annoying. It’s the particular kinds of surprises that make people laugh that we’ll be focusing on in this book.

  CLICHÉ-BUSTING

  Because surprise is the core element of all humor, clichés must be avoided in all humor writing. This is perhaps the most important single thing you can do to instantly elevate your writing to a funnier level.

  In Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, the seminal book on how to write competently, the authors offer as a basic writing tip the simple but effective advice, “avoid clichés.” It’s a good idea to avoid using common phrases like “That’s neither here nor there,” or “six of one, half dozen of the other,” or other useful, very clever phrases in any kind of writing. In prose, these clichés, and thousands more like them, shouldn’t be used because they were originally made up by the witty writer or conversationalist who first used them.

  In overuse, such phrases become clichés, and after a time they fail to amuse. The cliché user is admitting failure by using them. The message is, “I was unable to think of a more clever or useful phrase, so I’m going to steal a clever phrase that someone else wrote a long time ago.” Because clichés are in common use, it doesn’t feel like stealing to most writers. Using them is one of the laziest and unoriginal things you can do as a writer.

  Good writing is creative. Good writers dream up new ways to say things.

  Avoiding clichés is especially important in humor writing. In humor writing, clichés are not defined necessarily as clever phrases you didn’t invent. In fact, in many cases you may want to use clichéd phrases in a joke in order to communicate a funny idea in a relatable way. In humor writing, the clichés to avoid are jokes we’ve heard before, topics that have been joked about enough, or patterns of humor that have been overused. Humor clichés tend to evolve, as old ones are quietly retired from common usage and new ones emerge. Here’s a short list of just a few examples that have stood the test of time as of this writing: