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