Comedy writing

How to write comedy?

If you’re wondering how to write funny or you’re getting stuck on writing, go through the quick summary from Writing Comedy, which may help you break out of the prison in your mind:

Start writing what you want to write, what amuses you. Then learn to modify and improve it to reach a bigger audience.

Get inspired:

• Work with other people 
• Stay up to date with popular culture
• Have an opinion on everything
• Be a comedy consumer (watch sitcoms, comedy movies)
• Keep note of funny materials 
• Anarchy: let yourself be anarchic and childlike, have crazy ideas like “The modest proposal” by Jonathan Swift (a satirical essay suggesting that problem of famine in Ireland could be solved by poor people selling their babies to rich landlords to eat.)
• Freethinking
• People watching
• Daydream
• Negative emotions like frustrations of everyday life, which are great materials
• Gather comedy materials from socializing with friends, family, and all sorts of media
• Networking (find publisher, editor)

Create incongruity:

• Opposites (funerals and weddings; big and small)
• Misdirection (a twist in the end)
• Misunderstanding
• Exaggeration
• Double entendre
• Rule of three

Comedy format:

1. Set up
2. Small laughs
3. Punchline (the surprise)

Create comedy characters: 

• Deadpan/jester
• Fish out of water/neurotic
• Innocent/know-it-all
• Klutz/loser
• Social climber/vulgarian
• What’s the characteristics and desires of characters?
• Give the character some sort of conflict—inner conflict, conflict with other people and conflict with society
• Give crisis and obstacles to characters

Write it:

• Set time aside for writing 
• Show in a comedic way, don’t tell 
• Get personal (insults, embarrassment)
• Use specific vocabulary
• Don’t be too direct
• Read your work out loud to feel the rhythm (pause before punchline)

Edit it:

• Edit the draft
• Mark the laughs
• Fine-tune the ending 

 

In short, entertain yourself first, get the joke done, and laugh out loud.

Creative doing!

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