Haha funny

[Anonymous No.20509657]

I want to become a more humorous writer. Post the funniest words/phrases/passages you have read.

[Anonymous No.20509665]

>>20509657
Write it yourself you miserable fuck

[Anonymous No.20509699]

>>20509665
I'm looking for inspiration

[Anonymous No.20509874]

>>20509657
Make frequent use of the word that begins with N. That's what Mark Twain did and his books are pretty funny. Probably a correlation there.

[Anonymous No.20509917]

>>20509657
There’s a funny part in Suttree where one of the characters sneaks into a water melon patch and cuts all of them open to fuck them. Afterwards, the farmer is looking at his ruined patch and says something to his friend like, “Couldn’t he have just used one?”

[Anonymous No.20510266]

This is the hexagram of Adolf Hitler

[Anonymous No.20510373]

>>20509699
Look in the mirror

[Anonymous No.20510564]

>>20509657
I laughed out loud during Waiting for Godot, so check it out.

[Anonymous No.20511109]

>>20509657
Kancolle.

[Anonymous No.20511125]

>>20509657
"I have transmogrified my body into a gherkin. My name is Gherkin Richard."

[Anonymous No.20511156]

>>20509657
Look in the mirror

[Anonymous No.20511213]

>>20509657
Thirty something years later, Raven's introduction in Snow Crash remains the funniest character introduction I've ever read:
>Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
>Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.

[Anonymous No.20511228]

Nick Mullen describing fat people as doing things "fatly" is always funny me. Maybe try unconventional adjective usage, or making words into adjectives.

But you can only do that every once in awhile, otherwise it becomes real fucking annoying.

[Anonymous No.20511681]

>>20511109
moonrunes...

[Anonymous No.20511700]

>>20509657
the only book to ever make me laugh was catcher in the rye

[Anonymous No.20511715]

It’s not a comedy but Call of the Crocodile by F. Gardner. It’s like the greatest unintentional comedy of all time. Pic related.

[Anonymous No.20511718]

Auto da fe is the funniest book I ever read.

[Anonymous No.20511720]

>>20511715
This. CotC is literally “The Room” of literature.

[Anonymous No.20512025]

“I had to stop at Tower Records on the Upper West Side and buy ninety dollars' worth of rap CDs but, as expected, I'm at a loss: niggerish voices uttering ugly words like digit, pudding, chunk.”

[Anonymous No.20512885]

Funny words / phrases

Honey-sweet melody
Chase off sleep, dear companion
Comrades of the air ( birds )
Foaming deep
Cool your wrath
Beasts of the wild
The land of the wise
What fate leads you hither?
The slyest of foxes, cleverness its very self, men of the world,cunning, the cream of knowing folk.

Slack jaw gawkers
Why this act of domination?
How long has this been going on?
Hunches and innuendo
Seahorse posture
Damn skippy
Toasting our weenies
Nights were long on the prairie
Tootling
Hard hittin'
You know he's big time
Set to jet
Consummate
Right off the rip
Big shot
Big rig
Little sneakster
Wise guy

[Anonymous No.20512893]

>>20512885


Burns: "You're the fattest thing I've ever seen, and I've been on Safari"
Homer: "If anyone needs me I'll be in the fridge"

"Now listen champ - that's short for champion"

"It's easy to blame ourselves, but it's even easier to blame someone else."
"He couldn’t grow stink on a monkey."

"I know. Everyone ones."
"Ha - that's not possible. I'm adorable."
"There's no problem - everything is fine."

He possessed a robust constitution.
I'm not a scoundrel, only broad minded.
Sitting on top of the world, everything’s peach fuzz.
The plane has crashed into the goddamn mountain.

My tricks have finally paid off
I act decisively and with great speed

[Anonymous No.20512900]

>>20509657
"I'm doney with the funny"

[Anonymous No.20512902]

>>20512893
>>20512885

Guy who posted both of these.

Most of these are each their own thing, line by line. The only one that is a dialogue is the Burns / Homer one, and that's made pretty clear.

I'm reading Norm MacDonald's Based on a True Story and Voltaire's Candide right now, because I myself am trying to write more humorously.

Also, I'll say that just watching The Simpson's ( seasons 4 - 8 especially ) really helps a lot. That show has really tight comedic writing. I also just watch a lot of Conan, Colbert, Norm, and Gaffican lately.

[Anonymous No.20513920]

>>20512902
Thanks, this is good

[Anonymous No.20513929]

>>20509657
>From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class.
>From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

[Anonymouṡ No.20514060]

>>20509657
When you read something funny, make a note of it. Work out why it's funny and then write ten variations using that basic mechanism. (Not many jokes are entirely sui generis.) This process might seem very bloodless ("humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing itself dies in the process") but it's what professional comedians do. (One of my many works-in-progess is a definitive Encyclopaedia Of Humour with thousands of examples from literature, film & TV.)

Half-a-dozen random examples:


1)
"And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need."
— P.G.Wodehouse

MECHANISM: Saying something indirectly; the contrast of elegant phrasing + rude sentiment.


2)
It isn't often that Aunt Dahlia lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them.
— P.G.Wodehouse

MECHANISM: Evoking a piquant, absurd, cartoon-like mental image.


3)
The hall was crowded by students, some of them deporting themselves in a quiet civil manner.
— Flann O'Brien

MECHANISM: Saying something by not saying it.


4)
It is between twice and three times as dangerous as it might be.
— Flann O'Brien

MECHANISM: The absurdity of trying to build a house of mathematical precision ('between twice and three times') on a foundation so insubstantial ('as it might be').


5)
VLADIMIR: That passed the time.
ESTRAGON: It would have passed in any case.
VLADIMIR: Yes, but not so rapidly.
— Samuel Beckett

MECHANISM: Nihilistic humour. Starting with a clichéd, slightly platitudinous phrase and riffing absurdly on it.


6)
Even the night he came so close to leaving, Harold had *that* on his mind about ten minutes later. She went to bed with her back turned to him and wouldn't roll over, but the bed had a trough down the middle (from *that*), and when she was half asleep and her grip on the mattress loosened, she fell into the trough and there he was, waiting.
— Garrison Keillor

MECHANISM: Contrast. Mock-thrilling tone ('and there he was, waiting') in a non-serious situation.

[Anonymous No.20514193]

>>20514060
Brilliant. What is the common denominator here, why do a person finds something funny?

[Anonymouṡ No.20514246]

>>20514193
The best common on the psychology of humour I've read comes from Nietzsche. He said, in the past, if something unexpected happened, it was likely to be fatal, e.g. a saber-tooth tiger suddenly jumps out. That means, if something unexpected happens, we build up energy for fight/flight. Then, if the expected thing happens NOT to be threatening, we have to get rid of the excess energy, and we do it by laughing. So the core of humour is something that's unexpected-but-not-threatening.

I think this only covers one sort of humour, but it feels quite perceptive to me. Nietzsche was a good psychologist.

[Anonymouṡ No.20514279]

>>20514193
The best comment I've read on the psychology of humour comes from Nietzsche. He said that in the past if something unexpected happened it was likely to be fatal (e.g. a saber-tooth tiger suddenly jumped out). Therefore if something unexpected happens, we instantly build up energy for fight-or-flight. If the expected thing then turns out not to be threatening, we have to get rid of the excess energy, and we do that by laughing. So the core of humour is something that's unexpected-but-not-threatening.

This only covers one sort of humour, but it feels right to me. Nietzsche was a good psychologist.

[Anonymous No.20514397]

>>20514279
The evo psych answer says the same thing.
Smiling comes from the primate fear grimace.
Two apes meet on a bridge, both are anxious about it becoming violent so both display the fear grimace. Now both know the other is scared, the anxiety is released and what was danger flips into something positive. There's evolutionary pressure to make the flip extra positive so the built up chemical signals from the fear don't result in violence despite both recognizing it's not needed.
In modern human humor the danger that's resolved is usually more abstract, like stuff about social status or presenting an absurd worldview as normal.

[Anonymous No.20514416]

there's this section in dead souls where chichikov arrives at some estate and gogol writes that the dogs are barking as if goodness knows what their wages are, that always made me kek. well that entire book is pretty humorous i would say.

[Anonymous No.20514504]

>>20510564
Did you read Mercier & Camier?

[Anonymous No.20516021]

>>20514504
no

[Anonymous No.20516052]

We can now go further and describe, to a doctor or to anybody else willing to listen to us, the condition of this primate's soul. He could read, write and reckon, he was endowed with a modicum of self-awareness (with which he did not know what to do), some duration consciousness, and a good memory for faces, names, dates and the like. Spiritually he did not exist. Morally he was a dummy pursuing another dummy. The fact that his weapon was a real one, and his quarry a highly developed human being, this fact belonged to our world of events; in his, it had no meaning. I grant you that the idea of destroying 'the king' did hold for him some degree of pleasure, and therefore we should add to the list of his personal parts the capacity of forming notions, mainly general notions, as I have mentioned in another note which I will not bother to look up. There might be (I am allowing a lot) a slight, very slight, sensual satisfaction, not more I would say than what a petty hedonist enjoys at the moment when, retaining his breath, before a magnifying mirror, his thumbnails pressing with deadly accuracy on both sides of a full stop, he expulses totally the eely, semitransparent plug of a comedo - and exhales an Ah of relief. Gradus would not have killed anybody had he not derived pleasure not only from the imagined act (insofar as he was capable of imagining a palpable future) but also from having been given an important, responsible assignment (which happened to require he should kill) by a group of people sharing his notion of justice, but he would not have taken that job if in killing he had not found something like that rather disgusting anticomedoist's little thrill.

I have considered in my earlier note (I now see it is the note to line 171) the particular dislikes, and hence the motives, of our "automatic man," as I phrased it at a time when he did not have as much body, did not offend the senses as violently as now; was, in a word, further removed from our sunny, green, grass-fragrant Arcady. But Our Lord has fashioned man so marvelously that no amount of motive hunting and rational inquiry can ever really explain how and why anybody is capable of destroying a fellow creature (this argument necessitates, I know, a temporary granting to Gradus of the status of man), unless he is defending the life of his son, or his own, or the achievement of a lifetime; so that in final judgment of the Gradus versus the Crown case I would submit that if his human incompleteness be deemed insufficient to explain his idiotic journey across the Atlantic just to empty the magazine of his gun; we may concede, doctor, that our half-man was also half mad.

[Anonymous No.20516350]

>>20509657
I lolled out loud when I read the passage in Moby Dick where he describes all the different types of sailors, and says that when a pirate feels a prideful superiority over the other types of sailors even when hung at the gallows, in his belief he has no firm foundation to stand on.

[Anonymous No.20518215]

>>20511681
Yes

[Anonymous No.20519173]

>>20514193

80% of humour is contingent on body language, facial expression and tone as well, which is why stand up and sketch comedy are inordinately more popular than literary comedy. The great barrier of comedy writing is the ability to evoke posture, tone and delivery through text in the imagination of the reader.

Wodehouse is an excellent comedy writer for example because his Jeeves and Wooster stories take place in a very stratified and codified social milieu where one can easily imagine how an intelligent butler might give a backhanded complement to his moronic aristocratic superiors. Here we can see the importance of stereotypes in writing comedic scenarios; reading a joke on its own can elicit a chuckle, but when that joke is delivered by a stereotyped character in a way that subverts his stereotype, an extra layer of comedy is added, even more so when that line is delivered to another stereotyped character. Stereotype and its subversion is a tool for the comedic writer to employ to allow the reader to fill in the absent physical aspects of comedic delivery in their own mind and turn a dry well crafted joke into an evocative, easily imagined scenario - it transforms the joke from humorous to funny.

His books can still be enjoyed by a contemporary audience because the humorous coupling of the loyal English butler and his buffoonish employer have entered popular media in general thanks to the books themselves; they are scenarios and stereotypes that someone today can understand even though they've never met a butler or British lord before.

Narrative comedic writing is only really good when it is enmeshed in an entire semantic field of signifiers that the audience is also familiar with, which is why many people don't find novels like Catch-22 "funny" - because they likely aren't in tune with the historically contingent time, place, scenarios and stereotypes that the humour plays out in. Probably the primary reason why contemporary narrative comedy literature is terrible is the fear of stereotyping and the "Mary Sue-ification" of the protagonist.

[Anonymous No.20520315]

>>20514504
No, is it by Beckett as well?