How to Write a Joke

The rules for joke-writing can vary wildly depending on whether you're crafting humor for a speech, movie, website or other medium. The following guidelines, however, should give you some solid direction regardless of the context.

Things You'll Need

• Computer with wordprocessing software--or at least a pen and some paper
• A sense of humor

Instructions

1. Consider your audience. A joke that fills the room with laughter at a hardware convention might not get the same reaction at a meeting of doctors.

2. When in doubt, keep it clean. Sure, plenty of people enjoy an 'off-color' wisecrack, but unless you're sure why take the risk of unnecessarily offending someone?

3. Try to keep it short and sweet when possible-a few sentences or so is ideal. No joke is guaranteed to receive big laughs, but there's nothing worse than a looooong joke with no payoff.

4. Include something unexpected or contextually inappropriate, usually the heart of the joke's finale, or 'punch line.' A good example of this is Rodney Dangerfield's old classic, "My wife just signed me up for a bridge club. I jump off Tuesday."

5. Don't be afraid to take a chance with a joke. The worst thing you can do is bomb, but the plus-side is the chance to make someone's day with a good laugh.

6. Dead-pan humor, a la the great Steven Wright, is big these days. The key here is following up a normal statement with something completely out of left-field, such as, "I recently installed a skylight in my living room. The upstairs neighbors are furious."

7. Timing is everything with comedy, even with written humor. You need to build up to the punch line enough that it packs a wallop, but not for so long that you lose your audience.

Tips & Warnings

• Oops, we've almost forgotten the most important rule of writing a good joke. Two little words of wisdom here: Be Funny!