The single most important element of comedy is surprise. Every joke must have a punchline. That’s the surprise. That’s what prompts the laughter. Comics and comedy writers must remember that if you don’t prompt the laughter, you probably won’t get laughter. You must tell the audience when to laugh. It’s too important to leave to their discretion.
Jokes also have an economy to them—an economy of words. Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” It’s usually beneficial in writing jokes to be concise. However, each joke must convey a certain amount of information. If you’re going to tell an audience when to laugh, you have an obligation to tell them what they’re laughing at. You have to supply enough data for them to get the joke. At the same time, though, you don’t want to supply so much information that you dilute the gag or tip off the essential surprise.
Your jokes should also be clever. You want to bring uniqueness to your humor. You want to offer your audiences something they never thought of on their own. Either that or you want to present something they all know and recognize with different, offbeat phrasing. In other words, you want to avoid the obvious. Strive to say something different or say something ordinary in a different way.
Jokes are important to all forms of humor, so it’s essential for aspiring humorists to teach themselves to write jokes. Some writers who are primarily interested in other forms of writing besides stand-up may be tempted to skip over these lessons. In a word, don’t—for many reasons.
Joke writing is good training in observation. You have to see the humor around you before you can condense it into a powerful one-liner. That’s a talent that is certainly required in crafting a story.
Joke writing develops a facility with words. The exact word and precise phrasing can often make or break a joke. Certainly an extensive and colorful vocabulary coupled with scrupulously correct phrasing will benefit writers of all genres.
Also, even though they are the smallest unit of humor, jokes have a dramatic construction of their own. Each one tells its own tale. If you teach yourself to construct a joke well, you’ll also gain experience in telling a story well.
Regardless of which type of comedy writing you aspire to, devote a generous amount of time to learning to write gags. Mark Twain wrote some pretty quotable quips. Oscar Wilde did, too. Both were accomplished writers.
Teach yourself to write one-liners. Do some of the practice exercises. It will pay dividends.
Many years ago, when I was in high school, our class got word that a new kid was coming to our school. All of us were excited because this wasn’t just an ordinary kid; this was a kid from Managua, Nicaragua. Just saying those two words was an adventure: “Managua, Nicaragua . . . Managua, Nicaragua.” The anticipation was electric.
The rumor around the school was that this guy was a pretty good athlete. That was important to fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who would rather chase a ball around the playground than do practically anything else, especially study.
Our new classmate, when he arrived, was no disappointment. He was friendly and outgoing and did look like a solid athlete. He was a good student, too, but none of us really cared about that. He arrived during basketball season so we were eager to get him into one of our pickup games to see just how good an athlete he was.
He may have been friendly, outgoing, well built, and a good student, but he was one terrible basketball player. He dribbled the ball like a third-grader. His attempts at shooting the basketball were laughable. Defense wasn’t his forte, either. Most of us could drive around him for an easy basket just about anytime we wanted. Besides all that, this guy didn’t understand the game of basketball. He was familiar with neither the strategy of the game nor the basic rules.
We endured playing with him rather than enjoyed it. However, we did wonder how he got the reputation as an athlete. Judging from his basketball skills, we concluded that he was not gifted in sports.
However, once the game ended, we saw a different side of our new classmate. He performed a virtual juggling act with the basketball. Through some sort of maneuver that the rest of us couldn’t quite figure out, he could pick a ball up off the ground using only his feet. Somehow or another the ball would jump into the air and fly up behind him and over his shoulder. From there he would keep it bouncing up and down using his knees, his feet, and even his head. The ball would stay aloft for as long as he wanted it to stay aloft. Every so often he would “catch” the ball on the back of his neck and balance it there. Then he’d let it fall and once again kick it into the air.
His wizardry fascinated the rest of us, and we were eager to try some of the maneuvers he could do. We couldn’t. We kicked it one, two, or three times, but then we lost control. He seemed to have athletic ability that none of us had.
On the other hand, most of us could dribble the basketball easily. Most could dribble the ball behind the back or through the legs. But our new classmate was happy if he could bounce the basketball three times without losing control of it.
What was the difference? Our new classmate was raised in a country where soccer was the most popular sport. He watched it as a youngster. He played it growing up. He practiced the maneuvers incessantly. Soccer was not a well-known sport in America then. Most of us high schoolers had never seen a soccer game. We didn’t know the purpose of the sport, the rules, or any of the ball-handling skills associated with it.
The point of this story as it relates to teaching yourself to write comedy is that much learning is accomplished by absorption. We accumulate knowledge or skills by being around whatever it is we want to learn. This youngster from Nicaragua was magical with a soccer ball. Some of us in the States were fairly proficient with a basketball.
We American youngsters watched and played the typical American sports—football, baseball, and basketball. None of us, at least in those days, ever took lessons from a pro. We didn’t go to baseball or basketball camps. We watched the games and somehow we acquired the skills necessary to play those games well, or at least competently.
Our new classmate probably never had any formal soccer training. He absorbed knowledge of that game and a mastery of many of the maneuvers used in it by being familiar with it. Some knowledge we acquire almost by osmosis. We needn’t study, memorize, or read textbooks. We simply absorb it. For instance, children learn to speak in coherent sentences without studying vocabulary or syntax or grammatical rules. They learn to speak because they’re around people who speak. It’s a genuine learning process, but it doesn’t require any formal study.
People who work in a hospital—even nonmedical people—soon learn the meaning of abbreviations that are associated with medicine such as stat, qid, tid, cath, and EEG. People who work with lawyers soon acquire fluent “legalese.” We acquire much knowledge through nothing more than association.
One aspect of teaching yourself to write good comedy is to surround yourself with good comedy. Be aware of it. Make it available to you and make yourself available to it. That will be your first assignment in teaching yourself to write comedy.
Here are a few steps you can take to familiarize yourself with comedy and begin to absorb some of the fundamentals without consciously studying the craft:
Watch and listen to as