Comedy Writing Self-Taught Workbook: More than 100 Practical Writing Exercises to Develop Your Comedy Writing Skills

By Gene Perret and Linda Perret

"Can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?" "Practice, practice, practice." That's more than a joke; it's solid advice. Consider world-class performers in any field -- golf, figure skating, music, whatever. One thing you can safely say about each is that they achieved their level of skill through practice. To excel in any endeavor, you must work on and perfect your technique. Comedy writing is no exception. In this book, Emmy-winning TV writer and producer Gene Perret and professional writer Linda Perret have compiled a collection of over 100 comedy writing workouts that will challenge your joke writing skills and develop your sketch and sitcom writing abilities. This book suggests that talent is earned through observation, study, analysis, and repetition. The authors also encourage you to analyze your writing, discover where improvement is required, and create your own skill-creating exercises. The work can be demanding, but that's what it takes to become a success in any field, including comedy writing. If you study "Comedy Writing Self-Taught Workbook" -- with or without the companion volume, "Comedy Writing Self-Taught" -- when your break comes, you'll be ready.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Quill Driver Books
• Release date: Jan 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781610352611

Gene Perret

Gene Perret has been a professional comedy writer since the early 1960s, writing stand-up material for Slappy White and Phyllis Diller, among others. He began in television in 1968 on The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show. He wrote for Laugh-In and collected three Emmys as a staff writer on The Carol Burnett Show. Gene was on Bob Hope's writing staff for twenty-eight years, the last twelve as Hope's head writer. He traveled with the Hope troupe to several of the Christmas shows from war zones. He produced Welcome Back Kotter, Three's Company, and The Tim Conway Show. Today, he lives in Southern California and teaches email classes in comedy writing. His hobbies include painting, sketching, and playing the guitar. He paints rather well and sketches adequately, but you don't want to listen to his guitar playing. No one does.

Book preview

Part One

General Joke Writing

Exercises 1 to 24

The exercises in this section are designed to help you develop creativity and general joke writing techniques.

Exercise 1

Collect Fifty Great One-Liners

You just read how we want you to write and the purpose of this book is to get you to write. Now we are on to our first exercise and guess what? We don’t want you to write.

Your first assignment is to collect fifty great one-liners. These should be jokes that in your opinion are above all others. Not just lines that make you laugh, but ones that make you say, I wish I had written that.

Even though you won’t be writing right now, this exercise is important. If you were building a house, you wouldn’t just start nailing walls together. First you would need to lay the foundation. But even before the foundation you would need to do some groundwork. You need to decide what style of house you are going to build. Will it be one story or two? What will it look like? You need to draw up plans. Consider this exercise the blueprints for your future writing.

You may be saying to yourself, Can’t you just give me a list of great jokes to use? The easy answer is yes, but then you would miss out on the benefits of this assignment. Also you would have a list that was geared toward us and not one that is your own.

There are a number of benefits to tackling this assignment and devoting care to it. Don’t just pick the first fifty lines that make you laugh. There is a difference between enjoying a comedy performance and analyzing it. We want you to do the latter. Look at the material with a critical eye—at least while doing this assignment. Afterward you can go back to just enjoying the humor. Watch all kinds of comedy—young comedians, old comedians, newcomers, and seasoned professionals. Record some comics on TV as well as go to a few live performances. Read various joke books. Immerse yourself in comedy and capture the lines that really stand