Development Blog
Ok fine, I can’t actually teach you how to be funny from nothing. I don’t have that kind of talent. But whatever level of funny you’re at right now, whether in writing or in everyday conversation, I might have a trick or two for wringing out a little more.
Holt: (pretending to be straight) You should have seen Jamie-Lynn. She looked exactly like Maxim Hot 100 honouree Jasmine Sanders.
Guard: It just seems like you want to be with Jamie-Lynn. I mean, you keep talking about her thigh gap.
Holt: That’s my favourite part of a woman. There’s nothing more intoxicating than the clear absence of a penis.
- Brooklyn Nine Nine, S05E02
Humour is intrinsically linked with surprise. Jokes generally have a punchline: a word or handful of words that reveal the surprise. To deliver the surprise, shuffle it to the very end of the last sentence. You might need to contort your grammar, but it’s worth it.
Consider this much worse alternate phrasing:
Holt: (pretending to be straight) You should have seen Jamie-Lynn. She looked exactly like Maxim Hot 100 honouree Jasmine Sanders.
Guard: It just seems like you want to be with Jamie-Lynn. I mean, you keep talking about her thigh gap.
Holt: The clear absence of a penis is my favourite part of a woman. There’s nothing more intoxicating.
See how it just kind of…flops out? After the word “penis” the joke’s been revealed, but you still have a bunch of sentence left to say. You want that reveal right at the end.
Another example:
Luke: [holding a music keyboard] Hey dad, I think I found a place online where I can sell this organ. Can you drive me to the black market?
Phil: I think they mean a different kind of organ, buddy.
- Modern Family, S02E07
I love this joke. It’s a run-of-the-mill lame pun, but by following this structure, its reveal is genuinely surprising and so it works. The punchline here is “different kind of organ”, and it’s gotta go at the end. Pull people through the setup without revealing where you’re going, drop the punchline that reveals the joke and the surprise, then stop talking. Set up, punchline, shut up.
This is good advice in general, but applies doubly for humour. Humour is leading your audience blind down a garden path. They’re trusting you have something worthwhile to show them at the end, and the longer the path, the more worthwhile it’d better be. Choose a shorter path and you merely have to be funny, not religious-experience hilarious.
Jokes are often interjections. They exist between plot points, or are off-topic diversions in a conversation. The quicker you drop your joke and hand back the talking stick, the less people mind the interruption.
In the same vein as being brief: Don’t linger. In writing, don’t have characters spend a ton of time reacting to the joke, or calling attention to its insanity. Either no reaction or a lightning fast reaction, then move on. Gina’s reaction to the first joke here is about right.
This is also a good defence against a joke not landing. A percentage of your jokes flopping is a certainty, but if the line only took three seconds to deliver, no biggie.
Son: Dad, why is my sister named Paris?
Dad: Well, your Mom and I were in Paris when your sister was conceived.
Son: Makes sense, thanks Dad!
Dad: You’re welcome, Coachella Outhouse.
If instead you used “You’re welcome, outhouse” or “You’re welcome, backseat”, it’d be the same joke. But the extra specificity calls to mind an image that really adds flavour. A Coachella outhouse flavour. Yum.
Another example:
Holt: Here are two pictures [holds up two photos]. One is your locker, the other is a garbage dump in the Phillipines. Can you tell which is which?
Peralta: [Points at one] That one’s the dump.
Holt: They’re both your locker.
- Brooklyn Nine Nine, S01E02
See that “in the Phillipines” bit? In the name of being brief, you might have considered cutting that. But specific is funnier than vague. Make it concrete, something we can visualize, something we can relate to. It’s worth the three extra words here.
If you’re The Office and Michael is impressed at the car GPS, don’t just have the GPS send him down the wrong route, have him drive into a lake. If you’re Community, don’t just have a housewarming party go wrong, have it devolve into a fiery nightmare.
Push your jokes as far into the ridiculous as you can. You can always dial it back if you don’t like it, but it usually gets funnier the more ludicrous it is. Foregoing that is leaving humour on the table.
Exaggeration pairs nicely with Be Specific. A specific, visceral hyper-exaggeration is an artform unto itself.
Your audience is smart. I’d rather ten jokes fly over their head than have one joke I over-explained. The first draft of this article pointed out the use of “flops out” above as a penis joke. But I removed that in an edit. Everyone gets it already, and if they don’t, that’s fine too. Besides, this way I can use it here as an example, where I still get to point it out, but now in an acceptable meta way. Win-win.
I’m not telling you to censor your hard-hitting hyper-political standup routine. Just know your audience, and make sure you’re actually being funny to them. Humour often lives at the border of what’s comfortable, and it’s okay to walk that line, just maybe run it through your head once before you say it out loud. Different audiences call for different humour.
Besides appropriateness, filter for quality too. Plenty of jokes will arrive in your head half-formed, and if you can’t work it into a proper joke, leave it be. If you want to be known for quality, prune anything that’s only half-funny.
No joke idea in your head is holy. There is no line that must be said no matter what. If the conversation moves on, if you never get your opening, if the moment passes, let it go. Another opportunity for a new joke will come along, focus your effort on that.
I plagiarized this rule from Colin Mochrie of Whose Line is it Anyway fame. Something tells me he might know his stuff.
It’s an unbreakable rule of rule lists that every list of rules has a rule that says to break the rules. Some of the rules above conflict with each other, and you’ll have to decide which to prioritize. Sometimes you’ll see an opportunity for a joke that’s funny, but the rules here don’t seem to improve it. Humour is fickle and unscientific. If you have good reason, break the rules and don’t look back.