Ideas for Comedy Writers

by Dave Haslett

  See what other paradoxes you can come up with. Try to make them as funny as possible. If they don’t sound very funny, try changing them a little so that the situation is funny even if the paradox isn’t.

  91. Paradoxes 2.

  Let’s give our character a difficult problem to solve. He can’t solve it himself, so he asks someone else to help. But no matter who he asks, they just scratch their head, look concerned, and then ask him (anxiously): ‘What are you going to do?’ He might end up asking hundreds of people and always gets the same answer. So let’s play with that idea. Imagine him standing in the middle of a packed football stadium, microphone in hand, explaining his problem to the crowd. When he’s finished they all turn to each other, scratch their heads, look concerned, but then, as one voice, they all shout back: ‘What are you going to do?’ And from their anxious tone it’s clear that they really are concerned and want to know how he’s going to solve the problem.

  92. Pathos.

  It’s best to avoid using characters that generate too much sympathy in comedy stories. It’s hard to laugh at someone when you’re feeling deeply sorry for him. A little sympathy and empathy and pathos are fine, provided that everything works out well for him in the end. But there’s a limit – a point at which it stops being a comedy and becomes a tragedy or misery with a sprinkling of comedy that seems shamefully out of place.

  93. Performing – local opportunities 1.

  You should easily be able to find all sorts of local venues where you can tell your jokes, perform stand-up routines, deliver witty monologues, read funny poems and sing comic songs. You probably won’t get paid, but you will get to try out your material in front of an audience, iron out any problems with it, and build a following – all of which will help your career later on.

  Local opportunities might include:

  Warm-up act (and entertainment during the interval) at the amateur dramatics society’s performances.

  Half-time entertainment at football and rugby matches – which could also lead to paid bookings at the clubs’ evening functions. (You’d better be good, as this could be a hostile crowd.)

  Pub entertainer – start out performing for free, but expect to be paid when you become good enough that people come along specifically to see you.

  Voluntary work – a comedy show at a hospital, old people’s home, or on hospital radio, and so on.

  Entertain the crowds during January sales, Christmas shoppers, and so on – have a cash bucket available and use it to raise money for charity.

  Perform a short show at school fêtes, and so on.

  Go looking for opportunities to perform free of charge and you’ll find that there are more of them than you ever imagined – and many of them will turn into paying opportunities when you get better at it – or when you prove how good you already are.

  94. Performing – local opportunities 2.

  Although you’re giving these performances for free, that doesn’t mean there’s no money in it. Record a CD of one of your best shows, or record yourself telling jokes, witty monologues, one-man sketches (two-man if you can find a helper), funny poems, and so on. At each performance, announce that the CDs (or even DVDs) are available for sale.

  Depending on your style, you might make two versions available: one suitable for family viewing or listening, and one for broad-minded adults only. Which version do you think will sell best?

  95. Performing your own material.

  Comedy writers increasingly perform their own material as well as writing it. Consider whether you could do this too as it’s an excellent way of gaining exposure – everyone can name several performers but hardly anyone knows the names of those who write for them.

  If your material is brilliant then it doesn’t matter quite so much if your performance isn’t quite as good as it could be. Some very well-respected performers have awkward styles – which they probably aren’t faking. So just get out there and perform it as much as you can. The more you perform it the better you will become at performing it. People will soon realise that your material is excellent, and other performers might start asking you to write for them. Or maybe you could team up with some better performers who you meet while performing your own work.

  If you write for a group of performers (including yourself) give yourself a lesser role and give the best parts to the best performers (unless you are the best performer) as this will make your material look even better.

  If you write for other people and it’s very popular, write some additional material that you can perform by yourself, and practise it until you can perform it perfectly. You can then advertise yourself as ‘the writer of…’ so people will know who you are and want to come and see you.

  It’s also worth taking acting and improv classes if there are any in your area. Or you could join an amateur dramatics group – there’s bound to be one nearby and they always welcome new members. (They might let you do some writing too, such as adding local references and topical jokes to their latest performance.)

  96. Personal problems.

  Tell the story of a man who tries to get help for his embarrassing personal problem. Perhaps he collapses in a giggling heap if a beautiful woman looks at him. Follow him as he struggles (and fails) to overcome his problem by himself, and then undergoes various counselling and therapy sessions. You could include such things as hypnotism and past-life regression as they try to identify the cause and find a cure. Show him going out into the world after one of these sessions, confident that he’ll now be able to act normally. And then show him behaving in an even more bizarre and extreme way then he did before – the therapy has made things worse not better. Will he ever be cured? Probably. But it’ll take a long time, and the method that finally works will probably be quite unorthodox. It might even require the love of a good woman – which could turn it into a romantic comedy.

  What other embarrassing problems can you think of? You should be able to make a long list – or find plenty of ideas by searching online for the phrases ‘embarrassing problem’ or ‘embarrassing personal problem’

  97. Planting clues.

  Comedy writers can borrow some ideas from crime writers. For example, consider planting clues early in your story or comedy routine that give hints about an event or topic you’ll mention later. When you eventually get around to covering that issue your readers or audience will remember that you mentioned it earlier. They’ll admire the clever link and think you’re really smart. Little do they know just how easy it is – as long as you prepare properly. This can work particularly well on stage, where it looks like you’re making up a story on the spur of the moment, but in fact it’s carefully written and well-rehearsed.

  [VARIATION] Another approach is to cover a topic in depth near the beginning, then move on to other subjects. But then suddenly link back to the earlier topic with a one-liner or an off-the-cuff remark. Again, this is seen as extremely clever stuff and will earn you great admiration, as well as laughs and applause.

  98. Plausible … implausible … impossible.

  String together a few seemingly plausible events in such a way that your audience initially thinks it could happen. Add a few more events to the list and they’ll begin to have doubts. Keep adding more and more and they’ll realise it could never happen. As you make the list longer and ever more implausible, the laughs grow bigger.

  [EXTENSION] You could end your long list of events with a ridiculous conclusion. For example, after listing a long string of true (but exaggerated) safety failures involving nuclear power and chemical processing plants, you could say something like: ‘And that’s how the French make beer’.

  99. Please try to keep up.

  There’s a lot of comedy to be had from watching someone desperately trying to keep up with someone else – especially if he’s ill-equipped to do so. For example, he might try to prove that he’s someone’s intellectual equal when it’s patently obvious (or soon becomes apparent) that he’s not. Or he might try to
keep up with the other person’s extravagant spending, but soon finds himself in debt.

  Other ways in which someone might try (and fail) to keep up with someone else include: looks, fashion, possessions, size, speed, and so on. You’ll find hundreds of other examples in real life. But you need to make it clear to your readers that they should be laughing at this character rather than feeling sorry for him. Everything should work out all right for him in the end.

  100. Professional speech writer.

  People often dread giving speeches, especially at weddings and so on, where they might be doing it for the first time. Worrying about having to give a speech can ruin what is supposed to be a special day. They might try to make something up on the spur of the moment, or put a few notes together during the days and weeks beforehand, or even write several versions of it out in full. But on the day, it either falls flat or ruins the day for everyone. At best it’ll be ‘workmanlike’ and get the job done and generate polite applause. But there will be nothing particularly memorable about it.

  So if you can write really good, funny speeches that are guaranteed to have everyone in stitches, offer your services as a professional speech writer. Do the first few for free to get things moving and show how good you are. And then get your friends to spread the word – talk to people connected with weddings: vicars, gents’ outfitters and bridal wear shops, photographers, florists, limo hire companies, and so on. Get them to hand out your business cards. You’ll soon be in great demand as a speech writer. And you could also publish a book of your collected best speeches. Weddings aren’t the only places where speeches are given, of course, so you could branch out into all sorts of other areas.

  101. Public humiliation.

  Public humiliation can be hilarious. It can be as simple as someone not looking where he’s going and falling down a hole, or walking into a glass door or lamp-post, or failing to do up his zipper properly after visiting the men’s room. Or perhaps his view of the world is wrong. For example, he might believe that the Earth is flat, the Moon is made of cheese, the Sun revolves around the Earth, or that babies are delivered by storks, and so on. Take special care that he comes across as funny rather than pathetic or sad or ignorant.

  102. Punch lines.

  When you’re writing jokes that end with a punch line, the easiest way to is to start with the punch line itself. The punch line might be an everyday phrase, a cliché, or some other play on words. Once you’ve found one you like, work backwards and see if you can find a seemingly innocent question that becomes hilariously funny – or shocking – when coupled with it.

  I thought about including a couple of examples here, but it was so easy to write jokes this way that I decided to leave it up to you – try it!

  103. Rapid switching.

  For a great comedy effect, try writing a scene where you keep swapping between characters. Each character is trying to guess the thoughts, actions and reactions of the other(s) but gets it hopelessly wrong. I would recommend using the first person point of view for this, but you could use the third person point of view if you prefer it.

  104. Reader/audience superiority.

  The characters in a comedy story often work best if your readers feel superior to all of them. Even your most heroic characters will have so many faults and failings that your readers can laugh at them and be glad that things aren’t like that in real life.

  105. Recognition.

  Recognition is a useful tool for the comedy writer. Mention some small detail or habit that the majority of people have but prefer to keep secret and you’ll always get an embarrassed laugh. This can work particularly well in a live comedy performance, where the audience not only recognise it in themselves but in the other people with them. So they not only laugh but give each other knowing winks and slaps and pokes. And that leads to more laughter.

  This is where a writer’s people-watching skills come in handy. Watch people behaving naturally when they think they aren’t being watched. You’ll be amazed at what they get up to.

  But as you scribble it down in your ever-present notebook, you’ll often realise that you do exactly the same thing! If you then make a point of looking out for that specific type of behaviour you’ll see it going on all around you – when people think no one is looking. Nose-picking, bottom scratching, underwear adjustments, trying to smell their own breath to check that it’s fresh, looking at their reflections in shop windows, and so on.

  You can use any of these things in your own comedy material, but it’ll be even better if you can spot something that no one else has mentioned before. Watch people for long enough and you’ll see all sorts of other things. Now all you have to do is write about it, or include it in your comedy routine, for guaranteed laughter as people recognise that behaviour in themselves and their friends.

  106. Reusing rejected scripts.

  If you’ve written a great script for a TV show or sitcom but none of the TV companies were interested, there are other ways of using the same material. For example, you could rewrite the script as a novel. If this was to find its way onto the bestseller lists you might well find yourself being asked to adapt it for television. If that was to happen, you could take their advance, go on holiday for several months, then come back and hand over the original script they rejected previously. Think about some other ways of reusing your work. Perhaps you could split a script up into a series of sketches, short stories, jokes, fillers, cartoons, and so on.

  107. Reusing rejected sketches 1.

  Many comedy writers start out by writing sketches for TV and radio shows. You might have done this yourself, or be considering doing so. The problem is that some of your best sketches might never be used. But what can you do with them? You certainly don’t want to waste them. One solution is to turn them into a humorous novel. You just need to put the sketches into the right order, create a framework that holds everything in place (i.e. the main storyline) and then write a few more sketches to fill in any gaps. It’s a quick and easy process.

  You might need to rewrite some of the sketches so they all use a core set of main characters and locations, rather than using different ones for each sketch. If you write sketches for a particular show that always uses the same actors then you’ll be used to doing this already, and you might not need to rewrite them very much at all. You’ll also need to give each character a distinct personality, and put the sketches in an order that shows their lives and personalities developing over time as they strive to solve the central problem.

  108. Reusing rejected sketches 2.

  You could also use this idea if the idea of writing a novel scares you. Write some comedy sketches instead, using the same core set of characters, sets and locations. Much less daunting!

  You needn’t turn them into a novel of course; they could just as easily become a play or a movie script or something else. And if you ever tire of writing comedy, you could adapt this idea for other genres – horror sketches, thriller sketches, romance sketches, and so on – then link them all together to tell one continuous story.

  109. Reversal.

  The reversal technique is a very effective way of creating comedy situations. Simply think of an everyday situation and reverse it. P.G. Wodehouse used the reversal technique with Jeeves and Wooster. Jeeves, the servant, is considerably more intelligent than his master and has to help him out of all sorts of difficulties. There are thousands of other reversals you could come up with. When you’ve found a good one, keep working with it, refining it, extending it, taking it to its logical conclusion and beyond, to see what stories and situations emerge.

  [EXAMPLES]

  In a teacher-student relationship we’d expect the teacher to be more knowledgeable than the student. But if we reverse it then the student knows more than the teacher – plenty of scope for hilarity there!

  Or how about a patient who knows more than his doctor – the doctor goes scurrying off to look up medical text books after every conversation with him.

&nbs
p; Or an employee who is better at managing staff than the manager. The manager relies on him to organise everything. He’s the only person who knows what an incompetent idiot the manager really is, but he’s being paid (or otherwise rewarded) to keep quiet about it.

  110. Rewriting a different life.

  You could rewrite your life the way you wish it had been, and turn it into a great story. Or how about rewriting other people’s lives? Take your relatives for example; some of them must have had a few interesting adventures in their time – and if not you can make some up for them, or give them different ones. But perhaps you hated them. Maybe they were dour, bitter people who always resented you and your friends. Here’s your chance to fix all that. Make them happier, jollier, more adventurous, more outrageous, more generous, more loving, funnier, more bizarre, more entertaining, more daring, more willing to take risks, and so on. These are the sort of people we all want to read about. Do what you will with them!

  111. Satire.

  Satire is an interesting form of comedy. You can exaggerate a particular characteristic, or show someone blindly or repeatedly following a particular path out of ignorance or stupidity rather than working it out rationally. For example, someone starts a new job and does it exactly the same way as it’s always been done – despite the fact that the previous incumbent was severely injured or even killed. Think about how this can also be applied to politics, medicine, religion, business, men, women, sport, customs, superstitions, and so on.