The following comedy writing secrets were notes I made to myself as a result of reading and digesting 6 books on comedy writing. These tips are presented here in a very compact form, and you may need to read them very slowly and think of examples to make them sink in.
You may also want to read the two best books I read, which were:
The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even If You’re Not, by John Vorhaus, Silman James Press, Los Angeles, California, 1994.
Comedy Writing Secrets: How to Think Funny, Write Funny, Act Funny and Get Paid for Ir, by Melvin Helitzer, Writer’s Digest Books, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1987.
Other books on which these notes are based include, in the order of usefulness:
Comedy Writing Step by Step: How to Write and Sell Your Sense of Humor, by Gene Perret, Samuel French, Los Angeles, California, 1982.
How to Write Funny: Add humor to every kind of writing, edited by John B. Kachuba, Writer’s Digest Books, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2001.
Funny Business: The Craft of Comedy Writing, by Sol Saks, Lone Eagle Publishing Company, Los Angeles, California, 1991.
Tragedy & Comedy, by Walter Kerr, Da Capo Press, New York, New York, 1985.
COMEDY
To be funny is to have been where agony was. Comedy is not relief but the rest of the bitter truth. Comedy is truth plus pain. Comedy is the other side of tragedy, ridiculing tragedy’s presumptuous and overconfident affirmations. It’s difficult to produce laughter where there is no incongruity, no real vulnerability, no façade to pull down. There’s nothing funnier than boldly telling the simple truth, without euphemisms, political correctness, etc. Humor is serious stuff-it observes, analyzes, and comments on the human condition while helping us cope with some of life’s harsher realities through laughter. Humor is as real and honest as human suffering. It is used for feelings that are too deep for tears.
Honesty is indispensable in humor. (Do not write a funny line untrue to the premise or characters.) Relevancy means relating to the present characters and situations. Humor doesn’t have the time to be hypocritical nor the patience to be polite nor the tolerance to be timid.
To critique a viewpoint with humor, pretend to seriously adopt it and then take it to its
logical extreme (where exaggeration reveals the truth that the viewpoint is ludicrous
when all its logical implications are stated).
A situation is invariably comic when it belongs simultaneously to two altogether
independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different
Trisha Howell. Howell Canyon Press info@HowellCanyonPress.com 888.252.0411
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