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

by Scott Dikkers

  This approach is detailed on the opposite page in the first of many humor-writing tips that will dot this book.

  One final thought for this Introduction: A lot of people who write books about how to write humor feel a pressure to make the book funny. I won’t be making any overt attempts. That’s not really the point here. If you want to laugh, I suggest you put down this book and pick up any of my other books—or any humor book—and enjoy yourself. If you want a no-nonsense book about how to write humor, read on.

  2: YOUR BRAIN’S COMEDY ENGINE

  Writers write. This is one of the first tidbits of advice you get when you start getting serious about writing. And it’s good advice. You should be writing. A lot.

  But how do you get motivated? Where do you get ideas to write about? And most importantly for our purposes, how do you make your writing funny?

  Productive writers of humor churn out a lot of material. They write in a journal, they write in notebooks. They have to write. They’re an unstoppable force of nature. If they didn’t have jobs as comedy writers, they’d be writing in their spare time. It’s how they process what’s happening in their lives, how they make sense of their world. It’s who they are. Naturally, with all that practice, along with some positive reinforcement and guided skill development (if they’re lucky), they usually get pretty good at it.

  You can, too.

  In order to become a successful working writer, you need to get yourself amped up to write as though you have a volcano welling up inside of you that has to blow. I’ve never met a successful comedy writer who didn’t have this essential quality—that of being compelled to write.

  To get to that state, you will likely need to solve one of two problems. Each one holds you back from reaching this high level of productivity.

  The first is that you’re unmotivated. Lack of motivation is usually a symptom of a lack of confidence. When you lack confidence, you don’t believe you’re going to write anything worthwhile. Worse, you hate everything you write, and can’t bear to see it written down. The end result is writer’s block. So, you spend a lot of time fretting while staring at a blank sheet of paper or empty screen, producing nothing. Or you clean your desk, pick up around your house, get grout out of your shower stall with a toothbrush—anything besides writing.

  Humor-Writing Tip #2: Quantity Is the Key to Quality

  By writing more, you produce a larger pool of raw material to draw quality ideas from. No writer writes only one joke that’s pure gold as soon as it’s written. One of the myths of writing in general, and comedy writing in particular, is that a genius sits down and cranks out a perfect piece of writing in one draft, without rewriting, editing or proofing. The best comedy writers write dozens and dozens—sometimes hundreds—of jokes, and then carefully select only the best ones to present to readers. They make it seem easy because they never show us all the bad jokes they throw away.

  The second problem is far less common. It’s the opposite: you have too much confidence, and love everything you write. You think it’s hilarious. However, you can’t seem to cull it down to the stuff that will resonate with readers. Your overconfidence renders you immune to any meaningful feedback from the outside world.

  Both of these problems are the result of an imbalance in the two key mindsets that a humor writer must learn to balance. A humor writer must be a Clown and an Editor.

  The Clown is the right side of the brain: creative, subjective, outside the box, and nonjudgmental. To write humor well, you need to be a Clown. You need to write down every idea you have, no matter how stupid you think it is.

  Overconfident writers favor their Clown brain. They love being silly. They’ll try anything to get a laugh. They’re comedically unrestrained. And while they may not always succeed, they’re always “on.”

  Being a Clown is a big plus if you’re a performer. One extremely successful Clown is Jim Carrey. He’s a dynamic performer with a magnetic stage and screen presence. He can say or do just about anything, and the audience loves it because he performs it with unstoppable confidence. Jamie Foxx has a similar quality as a stage performer. He owns the audience, no matter what he’s doing.

  But when you try to be a Clown on the page, a lot of that confidence and lovable personality that buoyed you in a live-performance medium is lost in translation. Those magical qualities of charisma and presence require in-person delivery. Material that kills on stage comes across as little more than a big mess when put down in the hard light of black-and-white text.

  That’s exactly what happens when a writer has a Clown-heavy imbalance in the brain.

  The Editor is the left side of the brain: logical, objective, organized, and analytical. Most writers are too much of an Editor. Instead of trusting their instincts, they question every choice, and judge every idea before it has a chance to shine. More often than not, they cut every line before they even write it. Nothing is ever perfect enough for the Editor.

  To write humor well, you need to be an Editor, but not too much of one. You need to have a reliable system for judging your ideas to make sure they’re not drivel, to workshop and finesse the raw material your Clown comes up with, then craft it into superb humor. But if you’re too much of an Editor, you’ll rarely produce any work.

  Just like we need to balance both sides of our brain to function in the world, humor writers need to balance both sides of their comedy brain in order to function as a writer. You need to be a good Clown and a good Editor.

  DEVELOPING YOUR INNER CLOWN

  I recommend two simple exercises to cultivate your inner Clown.

  The first exercise is the Morning Pages: Write for a half hour every day, without stopping, no matter what you’re writing—and no matter how bad you think it is. (It doesn’t have to be in the morning, but mornings tend to work best for a lot of writers). This is an extremely helpful habit for writers who tend to be more of an Editor.

  The idea comes from Dorothea Brande’s schoolmarmish Becoming a Writer. Julia Cameron named it in her much friendlier The Artist’s Way. Many writers have discovered on their own the astounding results that come from forcing themselves to write for a solid chunk of time every day, without judgment.

  You can write about your dreams or your fears, or whatever comes to mind. You can even write, “I don’t know what to write,” over and over. But eventually you’ll want to start spouting some varying thoughts, opinions or ideas. It doesn’t matter what they’re about. No one’s going to see this writing. The important thing is to keep your fingers moving. Don’t stop to think, don’t stop to correct typos. Just keep writing until the half-hour timer beeps.

  Since your focus is humor writing, one tweak I suggest to this exercise is to gently guide your mind to think amusing, funny thoughts while you write (but it’s worth repeating that you still must write without judgment—even if you think what you’re writing is terribly unfunny, you must keep writing). If you find it too difficult to guide yourself toward writing amusing things, that’s a valuable discovery. If you tend to write dark, intriguing thoughts instead of funny thoughts when you’re in the unconscious “flow” state spurred by this exercise, you may realize that your true calling is to be a mystery writer.

  This exercise primes the pump. It forces out material, causing a kind of drain-cleaning that clears out all the gunk in your brain so the good stuff can start flowing more easily.

  The second exercise: Always keep a little notebook with you. Write down every idea you have, especially ones you find amusing. If you have a thought or make an observation at any point in your day that strikes you as funny, you must write it down. If you have an idea that’s not amusing—even just an opinion about the world or humanity—write that down, too. These little observations are precious raw material for a writer. They’re the crude oil of the humor-writing business. Failing to save them in your notebook is like letting oil from your well spill out all over the sand, costing you thousands—maybe millions—in lost revenue.

  D
o the Morning Pages exercise every day for a couple of weeks. Make the notebook a part of your lifestyle. If you make a habit of these two simple things, you will go a long way toward rebalancing your brain away from its unproductive Editor and more toward its resource-rich Clown.

  Being a Clown is how you generate the raw material you’ll use to mold top-notch humor. Much of this raw material is probably not going to be very good, but don’t let that concern you. It’s still in its raw form. Keep it all—cherish it—and set it aside to be assessed later when you have your Editor hat on.

  Once a week, flip through your notebook and save any ideas you still find amusing. This employs the skills of your Editor. If you reject every idea, you still have some rebalancing to do.

  Once you have an idea that you like, be it for something big or small, it’s time to put on your Clown hat again and write a first draft. If it’s a short joke, write it many times, in many different ways, without worrying about whether it’s working. If it’s a story, crank out a bad first draft. If it’s a screenplay or novel, write an unorganized outline. Then put your Editor hat on and assess what you’ve written. You’ll get even better results if you can wait a few days, weeks, or even longer after writing something before you dig it up and put on your Editor hat to assess it. The more you can forget the work of your Clown from days or weeks past, the better your Editor will be at judging it objectively.

  If you do this dance between Clown and Editor a few times, you’ll improve your dexterity. The back-and-forth reliance on these two very different halves of your brain is like doing mental calisthenics. The more you do it, the more adroit you’ll become. Soon you’ll be able to move seamlessly between one side and the other as needed, quickly. This is the basic process that a humor writer uses to produce work.

  Practice the above regularly, and you’ll unleash your inner writer. You’ll experience the floodgates of your mind open wide, and you’ll never have writer’s block again.

  Furthermore, you’ll occasionally discover gems within all of your raw source material, wonderfully funny concepts that would have remained forever buried had you not carefully, meticulously sifted through your mind by using this process to find them.

  DEVELOPING YOUR INNER EDITOR

  As you can see, developing the Clown side of your brain is not too difficult. Simply practice the exercises above.

  Developing the Editor side of your brain is much more difficult. It’s a more involved and complicated process. If you feel like you’re too much of an Editor, you need to not only strengthen your inner Clown, you need to refine your skills as an Editor so that you won’t simply slip back into your old pattern of rejecting everything your Clown creates. You need objective criteria for assessing your work sensibly, and you need tools to reshape material so that your Editor is justifiably satisfied with the end result.

  If you feel like you’re too much of a Clown, you need to develop your inner Editor by learning the same tools and criteria.

  Beginning with the next chapter and for the remainder of this book, we’ll focus on the specific skills your inner Editor must use to create great humor.

  CHAPTER 2 ACTION STEPS:

  1. Buy a little notebook and keep it with you at all times. Write down any thought or observation you have that strikes you as amusing, or even merely interesting.

  2. Every day for at least two weeks, do the Morning Pages exercise: Write without stopping for half an hour. Most of what you write in this exercise will be garbage, but you must love and accept it all.

  3. At the end of each week, go through your Morning Pages and your notebook. Save any thoughts, ideas, notions or anything amusing to a “short list”—this is your bank of potential comedy ideas.

  3: THE HUMOR WRITER’S BIGGEST PROBLEM

  The biggest problem a humor writer faces—and it’s the same problem all writers face—is a practical consideration that a lot of beginning writers chose to ignore. But it must be confronted, unpleasant as it is.

  This problem is not, How do you come up with funny ideas? It’s not, How do you get motivated to write? You can solve both of these problems by doing the exercises in Chapter 2. I’m talking about a much more serious problem. This book can help you solve it, but the solution is going to be different for every writer.

  Let’s say you churn out a few pages of brilliant, funny prose. Then what? Who’s going to read it? Your mom, probably. Maybe your best friend. But who else? How are you going to find an audience?

  You may think this problem doesn’t have anything to do with you or your writing. You may think it’s someone else’s job to figure it out how to market your work. You may think this problem is largely out of your control, that you just have to sit helplessly and suffer the callous indifference of potential readers, hoping against all odds that your writing gets noticed.

  You may plan to post your work online, where potentially millions of people will have access to it. Maybe you know about search-engine optimization, and can use those trick to draw people to your writing.

  You may expect that your writing will be published in a high-traffic online or print magazine, then be dutifully promoted on the front page.

  You may expect a publisher to buy your book, then promote it with advertising and a book tour, sending you to various cities to do book signings and appear on TV shows.

  Let’s be realistic. Even if your goals are modest, and you plan to post your work online, do you know how many blogs there are? How about websites and twitter feeds? There’s more writing published online every day than has ever been published in the history of human civilization. And that number doubles the next day. The sheer volume of writing available for the discerning modern reader is unfathomable. And it’s safe to assume that all of this writing is using SEO, link exchanging, or even paid advertising to find readers. Anyone trying to publish writing online is so far behind before even starting, it’s enough to make you want to give up.

  If you’re lucky enough to have your humor piece published by one of the tiny handful of name-brand magazines that still buy unsolicited humor, you’ll still need to make sure your writing is sharp enough that it stands out among the other stories in the magazine—all of which are professionally calculated to compete for readers’ limited time and even more limited attention. This is to say nothing of standing out among the stories in the stacks of the hundreds of other magazines released every month.

  If a publisher sends you on a tour and books you on TV, you have enjoyed a privilege afforded only the most established and successful writers, and even they—every one of them—would, if you pressed them, in fact complain that their publisher doesn’t promote their work nearly enough.

  There’s no magic marketing spell that the Internet or a publisher can put on your writing to get readers to read it.

  This problem is compounded by the fact that readers are a rare thing. Most people don’t like to read. They’d rather do just about anything else. In our culture of easy entertainment and instant gratification, reading is akin to homework in most people’s minds.

  Have you ever noticed how newspapers and magazines list the box-office receipts for movies in millions of dollars? They also list TV ratings, showing how many millions of households tuned into the most popular shows. By contrast, have you ever noticed that they don’t list how many books were sold, or how much money those books made? Books are treated differently. Bestseller lists like Amazon and The New York Times rank books in order of which ones sold the most. But that only tells part of the story. Where’s the money, like in the TV and movie rankings?

  The reason they don’t tell you the dollar figures is because the numbers would be embarrassing. In some weeks, a book only needs to sell a few hundred copies in order to make it onto the bestseller list. So, in comparison to the number-one movie of the week, which may have grossed $40 million, the number-one book might have grossed $4,000.

  So, the big problem remains: How are you going to get people to read your work? If you d
on’t solve this problem, you’ll never find an audience, and your hope of being a working humor writer will be crushed.

  Solving this problem is in many ways what the craft of writing is all about, and it will super-charge the quality of your writing if you can boldly face this problem as a necessary challenge.

  The good news is, this problem is not outside your control. And it’s not someone else’s problem. It’s your responsibility to find readers, and that means you’re in complete control of the solution. There are tricks you can employ to get yourself noticed among the sea of other writing in the world. In fact, you can become a popular humor writer by turning this biggest problem into your biggest advantage.

  Don’t wait for readers to find you. Make yourself easy to find. The first and most important step to being found is to make your writing accessible. That is, make it understandable to the widest possible audience, appealing to them with as universal a message as possible. Also, present it in a format or medium that readers have easy access to.

  By pushing the limits of accessibility, you will virtually compel readers to read your writing. It will jump of the page or screen, grab them, and force them to read it.

  There’s a thing I used to do when reading the Sunday comics. I never liked “Garfield.” I thought it was one of the worst comic strips in the newspaper. But it was so economically written that even as my eyes passed by it in on their way to looking at another comic strip (one that I actually wanted to read) I would read it involuntarily! Jim Davis, the comic strip’s writer, demonstrates an extremely effective first line of offense in the quest for accessibility: make it short. Brevity, as we’ve heard, is the sole of wit. Brevity is also the soul of accessibility, which is arguably no less as important than wit.