How To Write Hilarious Humor: An Analysis of Professional Comedians' (and Comediennes') Techniques to Tickle the Funny Bone

Chapter 1: Choosing Your Theme

Copyright 2011 by Gary Pullman 

Most humor books are based upon a theme, or central topic, as the following sample of titles indicates:

• Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys
• Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need
• Dave Barry’s History of the Millennium (So Far)
• Dennis Miller’s Rants
• Dennis Miller’s Still Ranting After All These Years
• Dennis Miller’s The Rant Zone: An All-Out Blitz Against Soul-Sucking Jobs, Twisted Child Stars, Holistic Loons, and People Who Eat Their Dogs!
• Dennis Miller’s I Rant, Therefore I Am
• Dennis Miller’s Rants Redux
• Art Buchwald’s You Can Fool All of the People All of the Time
• . . . And Then I Told the President: The Secret Papers of Art Buchwald
• Erma Bombeck’s At Wit’s End
• Erma Bombeck’s Just Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own
• Erma Bombeck’s If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits
• Eat Less Cottage Cheese and More Ice Cream: Thoughts on Life By Erma Bombeck
• Erma Bombeck’s I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression
• Erma Bombeck’s Family: The Ties That Bind. . . And Gag!
• Gilda Radner’s It’s Always Something
• Bunny, Bunny: Gilda Radner, A Sort of Romantic Comedy
• Gilda Radner’s I Still Have It . . . I Just Can’t Remember Where I Put It
• Gilda Radner’s Turning the Tables
• Gilda Radner’s Naked Beneath My Clothes
• Gilda Radner’s Tickled Pink
• Gilda Radner’s Guide to Men

That’s just a short list, of course, but it suggests several points that are useful to the aspiring humorist. Some of these points might not seem all that significant. However, notice that all the author’s names on this list have something in common. They’re professional comedians (or, in some cases, comediennes). They also have something else in common: they’re all hilarious! Therefore, if you can learn anything from any of them, whatever it is, it’s not insignificant.

 

Having made that point clear, let me list some of the significant points you can learn from considering the list:

• Many of the titles use alliteration. Although alliteration is not necessarily humorous in itself, it is pleasing both to the ear and the eye. In other words it’s attractive. No, make that aesthetically attractive. That’s alliterative.
• Several of the titles are long. More specifically, the subtitles are long (the titles themselves tend to be rather short, the better to fir the limited space available to book reviewers). Theirs is something funny about long subtitles. Why? You might as well ask why the sky is high or the snail is slow. They’re just funny: that’s why. (Keep that ion mind when you write your book’s title.)
• Puns and other plays on words (such as Post-Natal Depression, If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits, and Ties That Bind. . . And Gag!) are funny, even when they’re painful. Bombeck uses them, and, if they’re funny enough for Erma, they’re funny enough for you.
• By making a list and talking about it twice (or more), it’s possible to get off the track and stay off the track for some time without your reader realizing it, wasting a lot of his or her time without him or her realizing it, and filling a page or more with irrelevant digressions without your editor or publisher realizing it, as I have done here.

Sooner or later (later is usually better), even as a humorist, you have to come back to the point, which is, if the title of this chapter is any guide (which, of course, it isn’t), is “Choosing Your Theme.” As I mentioned at the outset of this chapter, a theme is the central topic that a humorist writes about throughout his or her whole book and the tie that binds (and gags!--Thanks, Erma) the book together, giving it unity. (It never hurts to repeat yourself in writing a humorous book, either, to stretch things out, as long as the reader, the editor, or the publisher doesn’t catch on.)

 

So, anyway, let’s talk theme.

 

A theme should be universal, appealing to as many people as possible, because you want to sell as many books as possible and make as much money for yourself (and your publisher, too, of course, who will be reading your manuscript if he or she isn’t too lazy to do so, in which case he or she will assign someone else to read the damned thing and report back to him or her).

 

The titles of the humorous books by Barry, Miller, Buchwald, Bombeck, and Radner suggest (at times, at least) their respective themes: Barry is into guys, travel, and history; Miller rants, rants again, and rants some more; Buchwald is obsessed with politics; Bombeck is up to her neck in family issues; and Radner is concerned with romance and aging.

 

Other good topics: animals (especially pets), babies and babysitters, camping, children, college, dating, friends, marriage, neighbors, sex, shopping, teenagers, vacation, weddings, women, and work.. Experiences that make people uncomfortable or anxious are, paradoxically, also good fodder for humorous treatments. That’s why there are chapters in some books concerning visiting doctors, dentists, and lawyers. That’s also the treason that there are whole books on marriage.

 

After you’ve chosen your theme (or, in some cases, it has chosen you), break it into topics. These will become the subject matter for your book’s chapters (except for the first chapter, which will introduce the theme for the whole book, rather than for its own chapter.) For example, let’s say you choose the theme of aging, as Radner does for her book, I Still Have It . . . I Just Don’t Know Where I Put It. Her first chapter, “I Can’t Believe I’m Filthy,” introduces it as the theme of the entire book. Other chapters consider various (usually only slightly, or loosely) related aspects of this topic, such as old-fashioned shopping by shopoholic (“Catalogue Addiction”); contrasts between children’s youthful behavior and Radner’s older perspective (“Do It Again”); a mother’s lasting influence on even her adult children (“Oh, Mother!”); the difficulty of opening packages that older people sometimes experience (“Go Ahead, Open This Bag”); and so forth. Notice, the chapter topics tend to be lighthearted; address relatively trivial, everyday situations; and pertain to familiar experiences. These characteristics endear these topics to millions of readers (one hopes) by offering humorous, knowing depictions of common annoyances and frustrations that make experiencing them (or remembering experiences concerning them) seem more tolerable and less exasperating than they actually are or were.

 

One other point. The titles of the chapters should be worded so as to disguise the fact that the chapters are really about just another of the aspects of the book’s overall theme. Each title should suggest that its chapter is about a brand-new, never-before-seen (or read) topic. Alternatively, at the very least, the chapter titles should be so vague, yet, somehow familiar-sounding, that they mean absolutely nothing (but still, somehow, seem to relate to the chapter’s contents). Check out some of the chapter titles from Radner’s book: “Catalogue Addiction,” “Do It Again,” “Oh, Mother!,” “Go Ahead, Open This Bag.” Although one chapter title does indicate its topic (“Catalogue Addiction” is obviously about obsessive catalogue shopping), another chapter title (“Do It Again”) seems to be about something other than what it is, in fact, about--sex, maybe--whereas the other chapter titles (“Oh, Mother!“ and “Go Ahead, Open This Bag”) are so vague that they could be about anything, from motherhood to collecting corpses in body bags.

 

So, what have you learned--or what have I taught, at any rate--in this chapter? It’s time to highlight the key points (because conclusions eat up even more space, enabling you, as a writer, to achieve your contracted word count).

 

Conclusion

 

Like the book’s title, which may contain either alliteration or a pun (or both) and will probably include a long subtitle, the first chapter introduces the theme, or central topic, that unifies the book’s contents, laying the groundwork for the topics that subsequent chapters will explore. The titles of the chapters should disguise the fact that the chapters are merely addressing yet another aspect of the central topic, or theme, by seeming to be about something--anything--else than what they really introduce. The book’s theme and the chapter’s topics are often about an annoying, frustrating, familiar, and universal experience with which readers can identify and appreciate. In writing the book, occasional digressions are welcome, as are needless repetitions (but not too many), lists, and end-of-chapter conclusions to round out (and, more importantly, lengthen) the book’s page count. That about sums it up 


Next:  Chapter 2: Introductions, Set-Ups and Punch lines, Transitions as Loose Associations, Metaphors, Similes, Allusions, Malapropisms, and Other Techniques

How To Write Hilarious Humor: An Analysis of Professional Comedians' (and Comediennes') Techniques to Tickle the Funny Bone

Introduction

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Some of us have it, and some of us don’t. Even when one has it, one can lose it, as the title of Gilda Radner’s hilarious book, I Still Have It . . . I Just Can’t Remember Where I Put It. The “it” in question is, in this book, not Radner’s, one’s sense of humor--and Radner certainly still has hers, that’s for sure.

Moreover, in my book, she’s going to teach you how to use it if you have it. She’s so funny herself that she might teach you how to use it even if you don’t have it yet but are doing everything you can to acquire and develop it

Her secrets will become your knowledge, as you learn how to make people laugh the same way that Radner herself makes her audiences laugh, through such techniques as thematic and topical humor, alliteration, allusions, puns, plays on words, catalogues or lists, intentional digressions, setups and punch lines, metaphors, similes, apt comparisons, personification, exaggeration or hyperbole, repetition, rhetorical questions, run-on text, and many others. End-of-chapter conclusions keep you focused on the meat of the lessons, rather than on the potatoes, and a discussion of her book’s format and her writing style suggests the importance even of these considerations to the generation of laughter.

It will be enormously helpful, to both you and Radner, if you buy her book as an adjunct textbook, because it displays in detail the many techniques for generating humor that are identified and discussed in this handout. Otherwise, you already have it all, because, about all How to Write Hilarious Humor cannot provide you is talent of Radner‘s caliber..

But, then, you already have that.

Next: Chapter 1: Choosing Your Theme