Humor Writing 101

How to Be Intentionally Funny & Craft Comedy for Any Story

Learning Objective: By the end of this post, you will know how to analyze joke structure and punch up the humor in your own stories.

Talent is bullshit. People are not born with a quantifiable aptitude for any skill, be it a creative endeavor like writing or music or something more analytical like math or science. Ever since I was a kid, whenever someone called me a “talented writer,” it rubbed me the wrong way. For me, what most people call “talent” is the result of rigorous observation, practice, and repetition. I’m not the writer I am because I have a “natural talent” for crafting imagery, writing dialogue, or structuring a story. I’m the writer I am because I sit my ass in the chair. I read widely, and I write and revise constantly. As a young writer, I often felt like chalking the quality of my writing up to “talent” dismissed all of the hard work I did to make my stories possible.

Despite these strongly held beliefs about talent, my writing life had been plagued with a misbelief around humor. For much of my life, I believed that some people were born funny and some people just weren’t. I held this belief as firmly as I held my beliefs about talent until grad school. At the University of San Francisco, I took Dave Madden’s humor writing class, and he taught us that there is a science to joke writing. Over the course of fifteen weeks, he broke down the structure of jokes, demystified how punch lines get laughs, and redefined what it means for a person or story to be “funny.” This class taught me that humor—like talent—isn’t something that a person is born with. People become funny when they’re able to quickly recognize the patterns of joke structure and capitalize on those patterns in their own writing or everyday conversations.

Today, we’re going to learn the patterns of humor writing by analyzing jokes in memes, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-nine, and more. This analysis exercise will help us see opportunities for jokes in our own work by (1) identifying set ups that create concrete expectations and (2) discovering ways to subvert those expectations with a punch line. Last year,

Courtney Maum

wrote about eight things a novel needs to have a fighting chance with Big Five editors, and humor was one of the things on her list. My debut novel, Good People, is a humor novel, and today’s writing exercise helped me punch up the comedy in my book and sell it to Simon & Schuster.

Before we get started, you know what to do: take anything that’s useful to you and your writing life and leave everything that’s not behind.

Joke Structure

Let’s kick things off with some basic definitions. In general, a joke consists of two parts: the set up (or premise) and the punch line. This structure applies to most forms of comedy from stand-up and sitcoms to pretty much everything Aegon says in House of the Dragon. In order for a joke to be effective (i.e. funny), its set up typically needs to do six things: