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

How To Read A Novel Without Really Reading It

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Professors don’t have any mercy on students. If they did, they wouldn’t make them read at all, much less a whole novel (or even several of the damned things). Haven’t these old fossils heard? We’re living in the Digital Age! Books are passé, as dead as the slaughtered trees from which they’re made. If they have to be printed (and they don’t), they’re best used as doorstops, not educational resources.

 

But, for good or ill, professors, like books, are here, it seems, to stay, and since they had to read the same books they’re forcing their students to read (payback is a bitch!), they’re not about to let any of their pupils off the hook.

 

What’s a student to do?

 

I have a few tips on how to read a novel without really reading it. Hence, my essay’s title, “How To Read A Novel Without Really Reading It.” (Always put the titles of articles or essays in quotation marks.)

Follow these easy steps, and the pain associated with reading, although it won’t go away completely, will be reduced to manageable proportions. 

1. First, read the blurb. A blurb is the text on the inside of a hardback book’s flyleaf (the paper cover in which hardback books are usually wrapped) or on the back cover of a paperback. I know, I know, you’re asking, Why would I want to read even more text than I already have to read? The damned novel is way more than enough already. No doubt, you’re also thinking, This is the stupidest advice I’ve ever run across for avoiding reading! Don’t quit reading! Not yet. Give me a chance to explain. You’ll see there’s a method to my madness. There’s somewhere between 200 and 250 words in the typical blurb. That sounds like a LOT of “extra” words to read, I know, but, by reading them, you’re saving yourself from having to read maybe fifty, or even 100, PAGES of the novel itself, each one of which can contain 400 word or more, so, conservatively, that’s a savings of between 20,000 to 40,000 words! (Aren’t you glad you didn’t quit reading my essay.) It gets better. As a result of having read the blurb, you will know certain facts about the novel that you can use in your book report, lit crit essay, or whatever the hell your professor’s making you write. For example, you will know the main character’s name. (In your essay, refer to him or her as the “protagonist”; professors are windbags, and they like to read, as well as speak, long words.) You will know the setting. You will know the basic storyline, or plot. You will probably learn the inciting moment. You may also learn the names of lesser, supporting characters. All this for only 250 words or less!
2. Realize that a chapter can be summarized in one sentence. Then, read the chapter only until you can summarize it in one sentence. (Unfortunately, a “Prologue” and an “Epilogue,” if they are part of the novel, must also be read and summarized.)
3. After each chapter, write a sentence that summarizes what it presented. Here are examples, summarizing the prologue and the first two chapters of Lincoln Child’s novel, Terminal Freeze (always italicize the title of a novel): (Prologue) A Native American shaman’s attempt to appease the gods for a woman’s careless violation of a taboo fails, requiring him to take the woman southward, to a mountain, where a greater violation of a different taboo has occurred. (Chapter 1) The face of a melting glacier falls away, revealing the mouth of an ice cave. (Chapter 2) Scientists exploring the cave find a monstrous beast frozen in the ice. (When you finish summarizing each chapter of the novel, you will have summarized the whole book. For example, there are 53 chapters, a “Prologue,” and an “Epilogue” in Terminal Freeze. Therefore, the whole damned thing can be summarized in 55 sentences. Not bad.)
4. Keep a list of characters’ names, brief phrases that identify them, and the names of the places in which the action takes place. Here are examples from the first three chapters of Terminal Freeze: (Prologue) Usuguk (shaman), Nulathe (woman who violates taboo), Koukdjuak the Hunter (god); igloo village in an “arctic desolation”; (Chapter 1) Evan Marshall (protagonist; a paleoecologist), Gerald Sully (research party leader)., Wright Faraday (evolutionary biologist)--they work for Northern Massachusetts University in Woburn and are researching global warming in Alaska’s federal Wildlife Zone; their base is at Mount Fear Remote Sensing Installation, which they’ve rented from the government; (Chapter 2) Penny Barbour (fourth member of the scientific research team, a computer scientist), Ang Chen (graduate student)
5. Most of the text in a novel is unnecessary. It’s filler, the rambling philosophical musings, existential questioning, and self-indulgent wishful thinking of the author, or descriptions of various persons, places, or things, including, believe it or not, the weather, little if any of which has any bearing on what is actually happening in the story itself and may be ignored without any ill effect on your grade, so SKIP IT. Instead, read just the dialogue (the words supposedly spoken by people--the characters--who don’t even exist). By reading just the dialogue, you will be able to keep track of the story well enough to summarize it (remember,. Each chapter can be reduced to a single sentence!). Only dip into the descriptive or expository (explanatory) blocks of text when you need to do so to reestablish a sense of continuity and context--maybe twice or so every four or five chapters. You will find that you are skipping entire pages of the text and still know what’s going on, kind of like returning to a movie after a bathroom break, which just goes to show you that most of a novel is unnecessary padding.
6. After reading and summarizing each chapter and updating your list of characters and settings, stop! You are done with the book. Do NOT return to the novel. Close the cover! You are finished! Do not second guess yourself, wondering whether you missed something (you didn’t) or whether your summaries are detailed enough (they are). It’s a novel you’re reading (or, if you follow my guidelines you are not reading, not the Bible or the Koran of the Bhagavad Vita or even the Kama Sutra. How important can a book of fiction be, anyway? (Not very!) You’ve done more than enough, so quit already!

That’s all there is to it, six simple steps. Now you have all the information you need to write your book review or your lit crit essay, or whatever the hell your professor’s making you write. What you do with the information is up to you.

 

Sights To See Along Dalton Highway

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Dalton Highway was just another Alaskan route to nowhere until Ice Road Truckers made it famous. Now, it’s a renowned Alaskan route to nowhere.

Well, that’s not exactly true. It goes places. In fact, it goes several places: Livengood, Coldfoot, Wiseman, Sagwon, Deadhorse, and Prudhoe Bay.

Come to think of it, even though Dalton Highway does go somewhere, technically speaking, it really is pretty much just another Alaskan route to nowhere, because, whether a traveler’s in Livengood or Prudhoe Bay, he or she’s still pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

People from any of the dots on the map along Dalton Highway who are arrogant enough to call their homes “towns” (no one’s supercilious enough to refer to such a speck as a “city”) are used to having conversations like this:

None-native: “Where are you from?”
Native: Livengood.
Non-native: Where’s that?
Native: Near Fairbanks.
Non-native: Where’s that?
Native: Alaska.
Non-native: Where’s that?

Named for James Dalton III, one of the original members of the Dalton Gang that harassed Coffeyville, Kansas, the highway runs through mountainous, snowy terrain, startling polar bears, white foxes, and caribou, for a distance of 414 miles before calling it quits at Deadhorse. It was built, Alaskan Eskimo spirits claim, to supply the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, or TAPS, back in 1974.

People with positively no lives whatsoever--we’re talking the walking dead here--actually travel the Dalton Highway so they can see the Arctic Ocean. Their first stop, as they travel north out of Fairbanks, is Livengood, where the living’s not all that good, the median annual family income being approximately $26,000. Travel time to work is roughly 16 years, round trip.

The population, which numbers 29, is three percent Asian, six percent Eskimo, and 91 percent Caucasian, neither African-Americans nor Pacific Islanders being stupid enough to live there. The good news about Livengood? It takes just three minutes, by bus, to pass through the town.

 

Coldfoot’s not a town per se. None of the “towns” along Dalton Highway are. It’s a glorified truck stop. It was founded by Dick Mackey, who, homeless after an illustrious career as an Iditarod dog musher, began selling dog meat “hamburgers” out of a broken-down school bus. Pitying the fool, truckers helped him build a truck stop and a decent café. Viola! Coldfoot was born.

That’s not the most interesting fact about Coldfoot, though. We saved that for last, so here it is. Before it became the sprawling metropolis it is today (population 13), the place was a mining camp called Slate Creek. Prospectors on their way to Koyukuk River got “cold feet” while wading the river’s icy waters and decided to turn back, figuring what good was all that gold if they froze to death trying to mine it. (Grammatically, the “town” should be called Coldfeet, but this is Alaska, where people are concerned with more important matters, such as getting through another endless winter without being eaten by a starving polar bear).

Today, Coldfoot boasts two stores, a gambling house, a post office, two roadhouses, seven saloons, and 124 brothels.

When the miners left Slate Creek, they had to have somewhere to go, so they started another camp, calling it Wiseman, because, settlers said, the name sounded better than Idiotsville.

Today, Wiseman is famous for its occasional mention on a “not reality, actuality” series, Ice Road Truckers, which features grizzle-bearded, mustachioed men (and one grizzle-bearded, mustachioed woman, named Lisa) who never bathe, smell really bad, and are too unskilled (and unkempt) to earn a living any other way than by delivering freight to Prudhoe Bay’s pipeline terminus and bitching to the camera crew who film their exploits. Topics of the truckers’ “conversation” are mostly limited to road conditions, the weather, and their own sad, pitiful lives.

There’s one other fact about Wiseman that travel guides claim merits mention. A log cabin post office, built over a century ago, has been sinking into the earth ever since, so that it is now a couple feet underground. There’s no denying it: Alaska is inhospitable, even to buildings.
 

Situated above the Arctic Circle, an imaginary arc that encircles the globe as a sort of antithetical equator to warn people not to journey any farther north because they’re entering a really, really cold and inhospitable, if not downright dangerous, part of the planet and should turn back immediately, Sagwon has one claim to fame: the Gallagher Flint Station Archaeological Site and Emergency Frostbite Treatment Center, discovered during the construction of TAPS.

Nothing is known about the archaeological significance, if any, of the site, but it was felt that some sort of tourist trap was needed as a “point of interest” to include on the Rand McNally road atlas’ map of the area.

Deadhorse was founded by a Pony Express rider who got lost in a blizzard in Kansas and wound up in Alaska. When his horse froze to death, leaving him stranded in the middle of nowhere, a. k. a. Alaska, he pitched a tent and incorporated himself as a “town,” named in honor of his deceased companion.

Deadhorse is famous for its caribou, geese, swans, seagulls, eagles, arctic foxes, arctic ground squirrels, grizzly bears, polar bears, musk oxen, and arctic hares. (It’s also a good place to lay in a supply of chewing tobacco and to catch an exciting episode of Ice Road Truckers as it’s being filmed.)

Prudhoe Bay (population, 5) is located on Prudhoe Bay, but that’s not how it got its name. It was named by a British explorer, Sir John Franklin, after his classmate, Captain Algernon Percy, Baron Prudhoe, with whom the explorer had, it appears, an unusually close personal relationship.

Because of the oil fields located just to the east and south of the “town,” it is the home away from home of thousands of transient workers, and a good time can be had there by all. Even the sun cooperates, extending daylight to twenty four hours a day, every day, for six months of the year, so bring plenty of suntan lotion, a swimsuit, and some dark shades. The beaches are plentiful, beautiful, and pristine, despite the massive oil spill that occurred here in 2006, spewing 267,000 gallons of crude across two acres of beachfront property and causing a spike in gasoline prices as far south as middle America.

In addition, Prudhoe Bay is one of the “Six Official Places Mentioned on Ice Road Truckers” and the place at which trucker Lisa had her upper body depilated during the inaugural episode of the show’s second series.

Note: In the interest of Full Disclosure, Ice Road Truckers is not the proud sponsor of this “article.”