How to write comedy?

[Anonymous No.10741196]

I'm a serious motherfucker that has no funny bones available.
What are the best books on how to write the funnies?

[Anonymous No.10741215]

>>10741196
Just do what every other talentless hack does and write terrible satire.

[Anonymous No.10741249]

>>10741196
The vagina is on the inside.

[Anonymous No.10741270]

I don't understand people who claim not to have a sense of humour, or to be able to write funny stuff.

Personally I'm rather ashamed of the fact that my first instinct is to make something funny. I feel like I'm cheapening my work or simply begging for approval / cheap attention, rather than being serious and risking being boring for the sake of writing something genuine.

[Anonymous No.10741291]

>>10741196
Why not just make something serious with the occasional humor. See: Gaddis

[Anonymous No.10741403]

>>10741196
Comedy is significantly more difficult to write than drama. If you succeed, the reader gets a chuckle, but if you fail (which is very easy to do), it lands with a resounding thud and scars the whole work.
For the most part, you can't teach comedy - which works out fine, because your own original brand of silly is probably better than whatever a "How to Funny" hack can come up with. Just write something you think is funny. If it's still funny after 2+ weeks, you're good. In the highly likely event it's not funny, keep reading it over to see WHY it's not. Maybe it's the timing, maybe it's the word usage. Good comedy is extremely fickle.

[Anonymous No.10741425]

>go to piratebay
>write "comedy" and select "e-books"
>read what's there

>go to youtube
>search for "comedy 101" or something like that
>watch those

The theory is not that complicated, you'll learn what makes things funny and the random formulas of doing it. Now, if you're one of those persons who can't come up naturally with witty things at all (sadly, they exist), then I'm not so sure if the theoretical stuff could help.

[Anonymous No.10741432]

>>10741270
>boring
>genuine
u wot m8?

[Anonymous No.10741438]

>>10741196
screencap all the post that make you laugh and study them

[Anonymous No.10741440]

Comedic talent is a specialized skill, and one that relatively few people have, or at least to any notable extent. In the past (this is a generalization I know, but I think it's somewhat accurate) humor was handled accordingly, with "wit" being regarded as a talent, and humor was understood to only be appropriate under some circumstances. Plenty of people weren't funny, but they knew that and everyone understood that humor is one of many desirable traits one can have, and is not essential.
However, the invention of social media has distorted humor's role in the public domain. Every individual is now expected to become a producer of content. Notice how Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and Youtube all have little or no technical differences between personal accounts (target audience are individuals known personally outside of social media) and public accounts (target audience are individuals who do not know you personally) and every private account can easily become a public content producer without changing "modes."
Accounts run by people with good senses of humor naturally rose in popularity, and their content became dispersed across the platforms. Overtime, this led to comedy and quality becoming equated in the mind of the general public, and emulating the humor became highly incentivized.
Everyone is now expected to be funny, and not being funny is considered a personal failure to meet a standard
This directly led to the leak of meme culture out of small communities where they were partially serving as indicators of group identity, into the mainstream. Memes, particularly the ones majorly popular now, are templates to be filled. We are outsourcing comedic talent to the producers of those templates, because conceptualizing a structure within a joke can be made is a big part of comedic talent. Some templates have even transcended meme status and become linguistic constants in the lives of many: "when _______" and "same" don't require any comedic talent at all to properly use, because they simply create an expectation of humor in reference to a subject. They have become tics. "Memes" in the formal sense of the word. A repeated mechanism that feigns comedic talent to influence social status.

[Anonymous No.10741457]

just read gogol's inspector general, pinecone, bernhard, roth's sabbath and try to learn

[Anonymous No.10741460]

>>10741196

[Anonymous No.10741511]

>>10741438

[Anonymous No.10741587]

>>10741196
Christopher Moore.
I like to think I'm funny, but I'm also kind of autistic, so who fucking knows. I write humor with a bit of absurdism.
I maintain that humor is completely dependant on surprise. If you break down humor, it's always surprise at its core.

That naked guy who just demolished that one american ninja broadcast? Funny because we didn't expect a naked guy. Twice as funny because we REALLY didn't expect him to fucking pull it off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDb-U35oBFo


People like to think to say that someone in pain is funny, but that's just not fucking true. It's a fucking dumbass opinion and it pisses me off.

A guy gets stabbed and then goes "awww, what the fuck?" it's funny because you expect him to be mad, but instead he's just mildly annoyed, not because he's hurt.

Best examples are Brooklyn 99 and Parks and Recs and Always Sunny. Even if people get hurt, it's because the situation turned out differently than we expected.

In fact, Brooklyn 99 is the perfect example of humor not relying on pain or personal humiliation.

Anyway, this post REALLY got away from me, but ALWAYS remember that Brevity is the Soul of wit. Do not explain your jokes. That's the worst mistake you can make. If you think they're too dense for the reader to figure out on their own, rework them.

[Anonymous No.10741599]

>>10741249
so's your mouth
it's talkin at her obvi

[Anonymous No.10741600]

>>10741196
>I’m a serious motherfucker
Don’t you see it? You’re a living comedy.

[Anonymous No.10741607]

>>10741511
I rmemeber this, probably the greatest thing that ever came out of 4chan.

/lit/'s work pales in comparison

[Anonymous No.10741609]

>>10741587
By the way, this is my favorite B99 joke of all time, and it perfectly illustrates my point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7znzcrcFAck

[Anonymous No.10741611]

>>10741599
whispering clitoris...
vocal vulva...
logorrheic labia...
loose lips...

[Anonymous No.10741633]

>>10741440
very interesting, thanks

[Anonymous No.10742124]

>>10741440
nice copying skills

[Anonymous No.10742163]

>>10741196
Why do feel the need to be funny? Nobody respects a clown

[Anonymous No.10742688]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOb2KQHr7V0

[Anonymous No.10742779]

>>10741196
a fair amount of humour is based on the same principles of rhetoric that politicians use to write speeches etc. the rule of three, the turnaround etc.
find a good book on speechcraft and study that first

[Anonymous No.10742823]

>>10741196
Realy humor is just personal taste with good delivery. Being a comedian is way different from being a good comedic writer, because you cannot teach the latter but you can teach the former.

It’s really just a matter of finding and refining your taste (subjective appeal), and studying good delivery and joke structure by looking at great comedic writers (objective appeal).

Doesn’t mean you’ll write a laugh out loud comedic masterstroke, but you can absolutely lighten up your writing style with some well planned jokes.

[Anonymous No.10742850]

>>10741196

Write about bananas and monkeys
Slipping on the peels for their funnies.

[Anonymous No.10743826]

>be super unconfident loser in middle school
>always have to read our papers out loud
>have severe anxiety when it's my turn
>one time inadvertently my class room laughs at some joke or sly remark i put in the paper
>'o-oh shit, they like me?'
>spend the rest of my middle school life making sure all my papers are funny

i ended up having to dumb down the way i wrote but it never messed with my grades and it was also probably the only reason i got any friends or confidence. my peak was probably when i came in 2nd place in the 7th grade poetry contest. the whole classroom cracked up through the whole thing bc my poem was essentially about us dying in all these silly ways. teacher thought it was too morbid though

idk if you can teach funny op. you're better off sticking to what youre good at as a writer

[Anonymous No.10744124]

Read Giordano Bruno.
Don't listen to people that say he was burned for his cosmological views. Reading a single book from him you will understand that the inquisition had to end him because they could not deal with his satirical power.

[Anonymous No.10744791]

>>10741249

synechdoque, motherfucker

[Anonymous No.10745226]

>>10741633
lurk more

[Anonymous No.10745230]

>>10741587
>Do not explain your jokes

I'll add a caveat: that's right unless explaining your joke is part of the joke. But that's top level comedy craft so not everyone can pull it off.

[Anonymous No.10745247]

Artemus Ward

[Anonymous No.10745525]

>>10744791
The word is synecdoche.

And no, it's not a case of synecdoche. Get rope and hang your shelf.