How to Become a Comedy Writer

In a world that is filled with negative and unfair circumstances, sometimes the best way to deal with those hardships is through laughter. They say that laughing releases a chemical that can bring healing to not only the soul, but the body as well. A step-by-step look at how to become a comedy writer just might be the ticket you need to giving you a new lease on life!

Things You'll Need

• Drive
• Ambition
• Creative thinking
• Quick Wit
• Writing team

Instructions

1. Introduce the three "R's." You need to gain "respect" from your audience, make people "remember" you and be "rewarded" for being funny.

2. Use "What Ifs" to rearrange reality into funny patterns and learn the basic joke construction formula. Consider the theories of comedy: we laugh because of surprise, superiority, biological inclinations, incongruity, ambivalence, tension release, filling in configurations and psychology.

3. Learn the essentials of humor--target, hostility, realism, exaggeration and emotion.

4. Learn to play on words. Playing on words packs a punch when you are writing. Use these cliches as springboards to writing humor: twisted cliches, double entendres, too-literal truth, reforming familiar phrases in surprising ways, take-offs and odd associations.

5. Practice on your family and friends to find out what is funny. If you can make them laugh, you will be able to make anyone laugh. Encourage them to be brutally honest with you; your reputation depends on it.

6. Turn your ideas upside down, inside out and every which way but dull or obvious. Don't telegraph your jokes or you'll stamp on your punchline and your audience will cancel their laughter.

7. Learn what words are funny. "Pickle" is funny, "tomato" isn't. Learn the funny noises that can get a laugh all by themselves.

8. 

   Get a writing team together. Start out with two and build from there. Two heads are better than one. You can try material and bounce ideas off of one another.

9. Exaggerate and understate everything you write. Make mountains out of molehills and squeeze mountains of meaning into the smallest gags. Surprise and shock your audience with your humor.

10. Stay in character. Speak softly, but carry a big schtick. Develop one of the many masks of comedy to create a comic character. Not only will your jokes be funnier, you will also project a funny attitude.

11. Learn to write one-liners and funny visuals for single-panel cartoons, or go for the running gag such as found in comic strips and political cartoons. Get your feet wet by writing pieces for newspapers and magazines.

12. Try on one of the tried and true comedy formats for consistent audience appeal. Aggressions within the family or at the workplace, mistaken assumptions, manic intrusions, heartbreak, moral/ethical conflicts, sympathy with the underdog and disadvantaged, physical mishaps, single-minded greed or ambition and total incompetence are just some of the formats you can try.

13. Learn about toppers, writing jokes backward, localizing, timing, working the audience, hiding the joke and other generally hysterical tips about the serious business of humor (see Resources below).

14. 

    Find a publisher. The best resource for finding publishers is through the "Writer's Market" publication (see Resources below).

Tips & Warnings

• Don't be discouraged by rejection. The greatest comedy writers of our day were rejected by some major publishing companies, before they hit their big break. One opportunity is all it takes for you to see your dreams come to pass.

Resources

• Take an online humor writing course from the Gotham Writer's Workshop.
• Find a publisher for your humor writing here.