Laughing Matters: Comedic Epistemology, #2

By Jared Wynn

Most people learn to write comedy through trial and error, an intuitive process that can take years to develop. But what most people don't know is that formulas and techniques exist which can cut that process down to about a month. Whether you're a novelist, essayist, blogger, journalist, speechwriter, ghostwriter, or advertiser, if you're looking for ways to integrate more humor into your writing, this book is for you.

 

In it, we'll cover over two dozen comedy-writing techniques and formulas, including:

 

- The Algebra of Humor

- The Listing Technique

- The Mind Mapping Method

- Spoonerisms and Malapropisms

- The Backdown Formula

- The Truth and Observation Formulas

- The Smashing Assumptions Formula

- The Roast Technique

- The Clash of Context Formula

- The Switch and Reverse Formulas

 

And many more. So, what are you waiting for?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jared Wynn
• Release date: Dec 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201787691

Jared Wynn

Jared Wynn spent his formative years in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East as an expat and diplomatic dependent. After what felt like several lifetimes overseas, he returned to America to pursue a higher education while bouncing around between odd jobs. To date, he's been a cook, a bouncer, a geophysical technician, a hypnotherapist, a Jujitsu instructor, and a standup comic, all of which he thinks makes him a better writer but which probably just makes him eccentric. He currently resides in Southern California with his wife and three stepkids.

Book preview

Foreword:

I taught myself how to write comedy the same way alcoholic stepdads teach kids how to swim: by throwing myself into the metaphorical deep end that is the standup scene in Los Angeles. I sank more than I swam, but I also got lucky and found mentors who were kind enough to hang out after shows and teach me how to write better material. Now I want to share the techniques and formulas I learned with you.

The chapters are written in a narrative style, like I’m teaching in a classroom. I’ll explain how to write the jokes, and I’ll do the exercises a few times to give you both a demonstration and a jumping-off point. Sometimes writing comedy can feel like BASE jumping in that we know what to do and how to do it, but we still feel like we’re falling until our metaphorical chute opens and we get that first joke on the page.

The example jokes are in italics, and if it helps, you can just use those as templates by swapping out my elements with your own. But there are a lot of unitalicized jokes in the explanations as well; I wrote the chapters using the same techniques in this book to show how easy it is to integrate jokes into narrative writing. So, if you skip the exercises, hopefully I’ll still have given you a few laughs.

But I do recommend doing the exercises. I come up with two or three jokes every morning as a writing warm-up. Even though I discard most of the jokes I write, the benefits of doing these exercises carry over into the rest of my work and beyond.

Of course, it’s up to you to decide when and how much you want to practice. The only advice I have is, don’t stop. You may think your jokes aren’t great at first, but with time and practice they will be.

And when you’re ready, please feel free to share them with me. I can’t promise I’ll be able to answer every message; all I can say is that it’ll make my day every day if strangers on the interwebs start sending me jokes.

Speaking of free laughs, any joke I write as an exercise is free to anyone who wants it. So, if you see a joke in here that will work in one of your own projects, consider it yours, and with my blessings. All I ask in return is for some attribution. I also wouldn’t mind a heads up and a link to your project so I can promote it on my site and write glowing reviews for it elsewhere.

Final note: if you bought this after reading Volume 1, Funny Business, you don’t need to hang onto that first volume anymore. All the material that was in there is also in this volume, so feel free to lend or give Volume 1 away to someone more needy. (If someone lent it to you, I apologize for calling you needy.)

Now let’s get down to Laughing Matters!

PART 1:

Theory

CHAPTER ONE

On Humor as a Rhetorical Device

My stepkids and I love making fun of cooking sites together. We don’t read them for the recipes, but for the unnecessarily verbose and nostalgic articles that precede them. There’s nothing like coming home on a crisp autumn evening in Kenogahoagie Massachizzle, with the sound of ducks crunching beneath our  boots and the smell of Grandma’s cooking burrowing into our nasal cavities like a weasel that’s been rolled in nutmeg...

I’ve found a lot of books and articles for writers to be similar, except where the food porn in cookbooks reads like letters to the editor of Sexy Muffin Magazine, recipes for writing seem to be more focused on encouragement and self-congratulatory hype. You too can be an amazeballs author, because I’m about to reveal the secret trick that made me a qwerty rockstar, they say before diving gut-first into a pool of recycled tips on world building and character arcs.

But the thing that tickles me most about them isn’t that the trickbait is so formulaic. (For realsies, I love reading and talking about story structure.) No, the thing that makes me laugh and groan and pull all the nonexistent hair out of my already bald head is how long those introductory bits tend to go. If writing about writing were a genre, boring readers to death would be its most recognizable trope.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to murder you with lengthy affirmations about how I didn’t used to be funny (but now I am and so can you). What I am going to do is throw a bunch of ideas and formulas at you, because in the end that’s what comedy is: ideas presented through a specific and highly functional syntax. Understanding that syntax opens us up to a whole new world of rhetorical technique, allowing us to convey ideas that are otherwise difficult to process.

Take, for example, the fact that most writers will fail to make a living as such. This may be a useful point to make in a book for writers who want to improve their craft, but there aren’t a lot of ways to approach this without hurting feelings. I could try a logical fallacy (I’m sure you don’t suck because you were smart enough to buy my book), apologetics (the Bible is proof that even God sucked at descriptive writing), or hyperbole (literally every man, woman, child, and unborn fetus agrees), and I’d still get hate mail.

But what if I were to make my point with a comedic structure? I could present it as a series of factoids, like the fact that tomatoes should never be refrigerated, snails are incapable of true love, and sixty percent of self-published books never sell a single copy – even to the people who wrote them. I don’t know whether any of those factoids are true. All I know is that the idea that most books suck so bad that even the authors won’t spend money on them, when presented this way, becomes much more palatable.

The structure I used in that example is called The Rule of Threes (which we’ll cover in more detail later). It’s an easy way to broach an unpleasant truth: all you do is take the point you want to make, throw a couple unrelated ideas in front of it, and slip it under the radar of your reader’s prefrontal cortex. Which you can do by inserting it as an example in the middle of a chapter about something else entirely.

In other words, if you don’t want to present it as an argument, try putting it in a punchline. Then if someone wants to pick it apart, you can expand into the rest of the argument by introducing them to your Italian grandmother or by sending them pictures of snails fucking. Or by just saying Lighten up Francis. It was a joke.

And the best thing about it is you get to replace that boring introduction trope with hot and slimy snail porn.

(fig. 1 - two unmarried snails fornicating)

CHAPTER TWO

Comedic Epistemology

Before we begin, let me just recommend that you skip to the next chapter. You won’t learn anything useful from this one; in fact, I only included as a nod to the conventions and tropes of books on joke writing. I mean we all know what comedy is, so why do we even bother asking about its provenance?

Because no one ever gives the correct answer, which is that comedy is God. I don’t mean it’s a god, like Yahweh, Zeus, or Selena Gomez. I mean it’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time, it’s in everything we do and everything we don’t. It can be seen in every sunrise and found in every word ever spoken. And it always has a witty comeback.

Like when God said, I am the great I am, Comedy replied, "Not with grammar like that, you aren’t. When God said, I am the Alpha and the Omega, Comedy replied, That’s all Greek to me. When God looked upon the vast emptiness and said, Let there be light, Comedy replied, I couldn’t see anything, but now I can see nothing!" (That last one I’m pretty sure was Comedy replying in Ellen DeGeneres’ voice.)

But I digress. What the fuck is comedy, anyway? Why do we laugh?

Philosophers have been trying to answer this question for millennia, although I use the word ‘trying’ loosely. The first notable theory, at least in Western philosophy, came from Plato himself, who argued in the Republic that heads of state should not partake in the practice of telling jokes because when one abandons himself to violent laughter, his condition provokes a violent response. In Philebus, he called comedy a vice of self-ignorance, while suggesting that we only indulge in laughter when we perceive ourselves to be richer, sexier, or morally better than others. And in Laws, he even said that No composer of comedy, iambic or lyric verse shall be permitted to hold any citizen up to laughter, by word or gesture...

In other words, Plato was a little bitch who thought that laughter was only had at the expense of others. To be fair, Plato was a little bitch may have been their idea of a real knee-slapper at the time, because comedy and mockery were closely associated in ancient Greece. But I’ll stand by that remark because his theory of comedy as a form of insult influenced a lot of subsequent thinkers.

Like Aristotle, who defined wit as educated insolence in Rhetoric. He went on to write in the Nichomachean Ethics that A jest is a kind of mockery, and lawmakers forbid some kinds of mockery. Perhaps they ought to forbid some kinds of jesting.

Even the god of the Bible seemed to conflate laughter with mockery. As it was written in Psalms, when other nations conspired against his favorite foreskin collector King David, the lord... laughs them to scorn. But the biggest bitch of all was probably the prophet Elisha, who called upon that