How to Write Comedy
Created | Updated Apr 9, 2014
To laugh, one of lifes great pleasures. Not only that, but it has been proved to be scientifically good for you. So how do you go about igniting that irrepressable flame in someone else? You could a) dress up like a clown and fall over comically in the streets b) glue a pound coin to the floor and supress your laughter comically from a distance or c) you could write comedy. The main fault with a) and b) is that other people are likely to find you sad and lonely. The great thing about c) is that people will never know who you are, so they don't know that you've got nothing better to do, because nobody gives credit to us dear writers. If you'd like to try a) or b), then go and get yourself a flower that squirts water, big red shoes, a pound coin and a tube of superglue. For the rest of us with lives, I'll examine c).
Writing comedy is not easy. If you've already fallen asleep at this stage of the tutorial, you probably won't have the attention span needed to write comedy. There are many different types of comedy you can write, from the humourous novel (where you have the invaluable tool of a narrative), sitcoms, comedy screenplays - pick what's best for you and get scribbling.
In this tutorial, we will be focussing on novels and short stories, because they are the easiest to get started with. We'll look at examples of how comedy novels should be written and you'll probably find out whether or not they're for you. So let's get started.
Comedy novels use gags in three different ways:
1) Narrative
2) Character driven gags
3) Throw away gags.
The narrative is an essential part of comedy writing in books. Without it, your book would be a screenplay with no stage directions. It is your voice. Your authoritive view on the way the world works. You can open up the brains of your characters, and tell the reader what they're really thinking. It is a way of telling the jokes that either you think of, or that your characters think of, but would be too inappropriate to say in front of other characters. A good first example of this is from Terry Pratchett's The Fifth Elephant.
'Colon followed the huge man around the corner. Fred usually liked All's company because, next to All, he was very skinny indeed. All Jolson was a man who'd show up on an atlas and change the orbit of small planets. He combined in one body - and there was plenty of room left over - Ankh-Morpork's best chef and it's keenest eater. Sergeant Colon couldn't remember what the man's real first name had been; he'd picked up the nickname by general acclaim, since no-one seeing him in the street for the first time could believe that it was all Jolson.'
This is a perfect example of how a narrative can give you an extra comical dimension to your story. Colon couldn't say what he thought of how fat All was, but the narrative could easily say it. It gives us a 3rd dimension. Without it, we'd only know what Colon said to All, which wouldn't be anything, because he wouldn't want to offend him. But with it, we know all about All's background, and what Colon thought about him. Also, note a good tip - when making bizarre comments, ' show up on an atlas and change the orbit of small planets' that the usage of the word 'small' in there really makes it so much funnier. Because it makes it seem more likely, we find it funnier. It may seem obvious, but time and again, we'll see how much difference just adding a small word can make to an overall comic sentence.
Character driven gags make up a huge chunk of the overall comic novel. Who's ever heard of a funny novel with straight and boring characters? An excellent example of this is the Discworld's CMOT Dibbler. He's a salesman, and his main export are sausages-inna-bun. His character is funny because we all know how annoying salesman can be. We understand his jokes, and we find that the character is a gag in himself. CMOT by the way, is Cut-My-Own-Throat. Characters have to have certain traits that make them amusing. Neville Longbottom from The Harry Potter series, for example. His amusing trait is that he forgets everything, and he bumbles through life making as many mistakes as is humanly possible without already being dead.
Here is an extract from 'The Place', by yours truly. This extract is the introduction of a character called Bob Bobbins, who is, as you'll gather, a rather enthusiastic drunk.
' Later on that night, on the other side of town, one man's drunken stupidity continued unabated.
" And then...I says to 'im, I says Daryl, yourrr standing in myy popcorn." This relatively sane comment quickly became insane, as it was directed at a lampost.
Bob Bobbins wasn't technically stupid. Alright, he thought IQ was a home-shopping channel, but compared to many of the customers at the 'Lot's o' Beer' pub, he was highly intellectual. In many ways, he was the biggest enigma never to have been tried to have been solved. After getting into a nasty scuffle with a particularly cheeky young Post-Box, he swaggered home. Swaggering was something Bob was good at, and would have been renowned for if anyone cared. He could make it look decidedly drunk, whilst making it look like an art-form at the same time. With the amount of times he had returned home from the'Lot's o' Beer' pub on the wrong side of sober, he'd had lots of practise. He somehow managed to open his front door, crawl up the stairs, and fall into bed in a record time of twenty minutes, and fifty-four seconds. And he slept.'
This is a good way of introducing a character. You don't have to tell the reader everything - you can let other things come out during the course of the book. In the first piece, just let out the essentials - He's always drunk, he may be stupid, but he's not completely without intelligence, and he is some what of an enigma. This will whet the appetite of the reader, and hook them to read more.
And finally, throw away gags. These are said by your characters, but don't really give anything away about character development or plot, but add to the ambience of a 'funny book'. They'll also please the reader a treat. There aren't really any examples, as you probably already have a good idea of what a joke is. But don't use a joke like ' Knock-knock. Who's there? Cows go. Cows go who? No, cows go moo.' These will only add to the groan ambience, and is liabel to make your reader want to hurt you with a big brick. And besides, you'd be getting back into sticky pound territory...
Hopefully you have found this tutorial helpful and that plot that's been stewing in your head for the past five months now seem not too difficult to put into print. The best thing you can do is just let your imagination run wild and have fun with it. If you don't enjoy writing comedy then it will show up in your work.
So, keep writing, and who knows? In the future, it could be your work being used as an example of fine comic writing at it's best.
Writing comedy is not easy. If you've already fallen asleep at this stage of the tutorial, you probably won't have the attention span needed to write comedy. There are many different types of comedy you can write, from the humourous novel (where you have the invaluable tool of a narrative), sitcoms, comedy screenplays - pick what's best for you and get scribbling.
In this tutorial, we will be focussing on novels and short stories, because they are the easiest to get started with. We'll look at examples of how comedy novels should be written and you'll probably find out whether or not they're for you. So let's get started.
Comedy novels use gags in three different ways:
1) Narrative
2) Character driven gags
3) Throw away gags.
The narrative is an essential part of comedy writing in books. Without it, your book would be a screenplay with no stage directions. It is your voice. Your authoritive view on the way the world works. You can open up the brains of your characters, and tell the reader what they're really thinking. It is a way of telling the jokes that either you think of, or that your characters think of, but would be too inappropriate to say in front of other characters. A good first example of this is from Terry Pratchett's The Fifth Elephant.
'Colon followed the huge man around the corner. Fred usually liked All's company because, next to All, he was very skinny indeed. All Jolson was a man who'd show up on an atlas and change the orbit of small planets. He combined in one body - and there was plenty of room left over - Ankh-Morpork's best chef and it's keenest eater. Sergeant Colon couldn't remember what the man's real first name had been; he'd picked up the nickname by general acclaim, since no-one seeing him in the street for the first time could believe that it was all Jolson.'
This is a perfect example of how a narrative can give you an extra comical dimension to your story. Colon couldn't say what he thought of how fat All was, but the narrative could easily say it. It gives us a 3rd dimension. Without it, we'd only know what Colon said to All, which wouldn't be anything, because he wouldn't want to offend him. But with it, we know all about All's background, and what Colon thought about him. Also, note a good tip - when making bizarre comments, ' show up on an atlas and change the orbit of small planets' that the usage of the word 'small' in there really makes it so much funnier. Because it makes it seem more likely, we find it funnier. It may seem obvious, but time and again, we'll see how much difference just adding a small word can make to an overall comic sentence.
Character driven gags make up a huge chunk of the overall comic novel. Who's ever heard of a funny novel with straight and boring characters? An excellent example of this is the Discworld's CMOT Dibbler. He's a salesman, and his main export are sausages-inna-bun. His character is funny because we all know how annoying salesman can be. We understand his jokes, and we find that the character is a gag in himself. CMOT by the way, is Cut-My-Own-Throat. Characters have to have certain traits that make them amusing. Neville Longbottom from The Harry Potter series, for example. His amusing trait is that he forgets everything, and he bumbles through life making as many mistakes as is humanly possible without already being dead.
Here is an extract from 'The Place', by yours truly. This extract is the introduction of a character called Bob Bobbins, who is, as you'll gather, a rather enthusiastic drunk.
' Later on that night, on the other side of town, one man's drunken stupidity continued unabated.
" And then...I says to 'im, I says Daryl, yourrr standing in myy popcorn." This relatively sane comment quickly became insane, as it was directed at a lampost.
Bob Bobbins wasn't technically stupid. Alright, he thought IQ was a home-shopping channel, but compared to many of the customers at the 'Lot's o' Beer' pub, he was highly intellectual. In many ways, he was the biggest enigma never to have been tried to have been solved. After getting into a nasty scuffle with a particularly cheeky young Post-Box, he swaggered home. Swaggering was something Bob was good at, and would have been renowned for if anyone cared. He could make it look decidedly drunk, whilst making it look like an art-form at the same time. With the amount of times he had returned home from the'Lot's o' Beer' pub on the wrong side of sober, he'd had lots of practise. He somehow managed to open his front door, crawl up the stairs, and fall into bed in a record time of twenty minutes, and fifty-four seconds. And he slept.'
This is a good way of introducing a character. You don't have to tell the reader everything - you can let other things come out during the course of the book. In the first piece, just let out the essentials - He's always drunk, he may be stupid, but he's not completely without intelligence, and he is some what of an enigma. This will whet the appetite of the reader, and hook them to read more.
And finally, throw away gags. These are said by your characters, but don't really give anything away about character development or plot, but add to the ambience of a 'funny book'. They'll also please the reader a treat. There aren't really any examples, as you probably already have a good idea of what a joke is. But don't use a joke like ' Knock-knock. Who's there? Cows go. Cows go who? No, cows go moo.' These will only add to the groan ambience, and is liabel to make your reader want to hurt you with a big brick. And besides, you'd be getting back into sticky pound territory...
Hopefully you have found this tutorial helpful and that plot that's been stewing in your head for the past five months now seem not too difficult to put into print. The best thing you can do is just let your imagination run wild and have fun with it. If you don't enjoy writing comedy then it will show up in your work.
So, keep writing, and who knows? In the future, it could be your work being used as an example of fine comic writing at it's best.
