“A sketch starts off as an idea, or a point of view.

You then take it and you

twist it and play with it and try to find an ending for it. But each sketch

needs an idea. Robert just had a sense of what the core idea for a joke

should be — what mattered in a sketch and how to construct the sketch

around what matters”

-bob odenkirk on robert smigel

JOKE FORMULAS

1. Double entendres, the plays on words that include cliche reformations and

take-offs

2. Reverses, that trick the audience by a switch in point of view

3. Triples, that build tension and are the framework for an exaggerated finale

4. Incongruity, that pairs two logical but unconventional ideas

5. Stupidity, that encourages the audience to feel superior to silly thoughts

or actions

6. Paired phrases that utilize the rhythms of antonyms, homonyms, and

synonyms

7. Physical abuse (slapstick), that caters to our delight at someone else’s

misfortune.

-comedy writing secrets paraphrase

WHY WE LAUGH

1. Surprise

2. Superiority

3. Biological

4. Incongruity

5. Ambivalence

6. Release

7. Configurational

8. Psychoanalytical

Three ways to attract attention

1 do something legit

2 criticize something/someone
3 be unconventional

-comedy writing secrets

“Comedy works in two ways. Either you have a normal person in an

extraordinary situation, or an extraordinary person in a normal situation.”

-Michael Shamberg via Harold Ramis

“What are you rebelling against? And the answer was, what do you got?

Anything you cherished or held safe, Michael would go after. That was the

soul of the lampoon style.”

-Harold Ramis on Michael O’Donoghue

“Multi level tic tac toe might be more accurate. What happened in the past?

What’s going to happen? What does the audience think will happen? What

does the audience think has already happened?”

 -Mitch Hurwitz

“Your style is formed by what you can’t do”

-Mitch Hurwitz quoting Larry Gelbart

“So I started tying things together, trying to make the story the joke --

figuring out the last laugh first and then making it the answer to the first

joke. I could write half the number of jokes that way and still, hopefully, get

the same number of laughs.”

-Mitch Hurwitz

“To be different, we'd twist the twist. We might have had the character of

Gob [Will Arnett] talk to the family about this little girl who thinks she can

beat him up. Michael [Jason Bateman] might have said, “We should get a

parking space at the hospital now, just to save time.” Everyone would have

expected this adorable little girl to beat the shit out of this grown up.
Or, in the next scene, Gob would enter the house and say something like, “I

feel awful. I'm so embarrassed.”

“She beat you up?,” Michael would ask.

“No, I put her in the hospital. I thought she was gonna flip me. Don't people

with black belts always flip you in James Bond movies?”

Whatever I would have done, I would have tried to find a way to point out

that the situation was a cliché — and I would then try to get a surprise out of

it.”

-Mitch Hurwitz on Little girl blackbelt vs grown adult

“I really followed the rules that I first learned at The Golden Girls. There was

never an episode where the characters didn't learn at least one thing. And,

as much as the critics praised us for being different, we had a hug in almost
every episode.”

-Mitch Hurwitz on Arrested Development

“The scourge of comedy is when it eats itself — when comedy writers watch

sitcoms and think, Oh, you know, such and such a show is great. Let's do

something a bit similar to that. I think that's wrong, really. I think the idea is

to live life and take inspiration from that experience, as opposed to just

getting inspiration from other artists and their work.”

-Dan Mazer

“Well, like many of the jokes I make, that was said to get a laugh, but it was

also true. That line was actually used in the “Utter Failure” article. That was

an honest joke. That's kind of my rule about jokes. I don't think there is any
point in making a joke that is not an honest joke. And I don't find jokes funny

if they're not honest. Unfortunately, the truth usually hurts.”

-Todd Hanson

“The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow.”

-Todd Hanson quoting Mark Twain

“If you want to tell a person the truth, make him laugh or he’ll kill you.”

-George Bernard Shaw

“They asked John glenn what he thought about just before his first capsule

was shot into space, and he said: ‘I looked around me and suddenly realized

that everything had been built by the lowest bidder.’”

-Comedy writing secrets

“Impropriety is the soul of wit.”

-Somerset Maugham

“Most good jokes state a bitter truth.”

-Larry Gelbart

“The basic two-step humor is (1) to state some commonly acceptable

problem, frequently with a cliche, and (2) in the last word or two change the

expected ending to a surprise.

-Comedy writing secrets

“We only laugh because we are surprised.”

-Garson Kanin

“There are thousands of phrases that lend themselves to this simple truth
construction. The basic rule is that the first part or first sentence is a cliche.

The second part (the punch line) is an unexpected interpretation that’s

realistically literal.”

“doctor: I don’t like the looks of your husband.

wife: neither do I, doctor, but he’s good to the children.”

-Larry Wilde

-Comedy writing secrets

Shaggy Dog Punchline:

Long winded anecdote terminated by an anticlimax or pointless punchline

“I think that's what the best sitcoms are about, such as Cheers, Seinfeld,

Roseanne, and all those shows — they're about creating an environment in

which you want to return and poke around for another half-hour.”

-Stephen Merchant
“Initially, we started off trying to improvise, and then we typed the dialogue,

but that was a very slow way of working. Ultimately, we bought a Dictaphone

tape recorder. We would improvise into it and sort of refine the dialogue a

little, and then we would edit it down later so that it could be typed up. It just

seemed the only way to create that ebb and flow of real dialogue, where

people stop and start and they don't use proper grammar. Speech patterns

are very different from what you would get if you were to just write

dialogue.”

-Stephen Merchant on the office script

“We knew that viewers weren't going to watch the show on a big screen with

the best sound. They were going to watch it out of the corner of their eye on

a television in their homes. We didn't want viewers to have to struggle for

any of the visual information.”

-Stephen Merchant on cinematography

“Most everything I know, I learned from Garry Shandling. Whenever we got

stuck, he always said, “What is the truth here? What would someone actually

do?” He pushed his writers to go deeper to the core.”

-Stephen Merchant

Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild; August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an
American poet, writer, critic, and satirist based in New York; she was best
known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.

-wikipedia on Dorothy Parker

How hilarious is “she was best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for
20th century urban foibles.

Urban foibles.

“A good premise required some idea of what you expected everyone to say.
But Dave was free to add and subtract and ad-lib whatever he wanted. Then,
in post-production, I would go through all the footage and create a script.
Somehow it would eventually be arranged into a coherent whole. I was very
scrupulous about never putting words in anyone's mouth except for David's,
via voice-overs. Everyone else was free to respond honestly to whatever
stupidity we were hurling their way.”
-merril mark on David letterman bits

“And bad decision- making is, in a lot of ways, the key to comedy.”
-Paul Feig

“Tom Stoppard has said that laughter is the sound of comprehension”

-Marshall Brickman

“Every writer harbors two personalities: the infant who generates the raw
material and the editor who evaluates it. Both are crucial to the process and
each is inescapably at war with the other.”
-Marshall Brickman

“I love that type of stuff. I think it really grounds it in its time and place. If
people don't get it now, too bad. I think you always have to be as specific as
possible; that's the only way you can achieve the universal. But that's the
problem with TV — it tries for the universal and gets nothing.”
-Marshall Brickman

“Right. So it's the abhorrence of unearned sentiment, I guess. Which is

defined as asking the audience to feel more for the characters than God
does. By the way, I still can't believe I wrote Jersey Boys.”
-Marshall Brickman

“I trim when the piece is too long for the space we have or because the
concept doesn't quite sustain itself. I probably subtract jokes more than I add
them; I tend to make pieces dryer rather than wetter. I also like to clarify a
narrative throughline when there is one. I prefer pieces that tell a story with
a beginning, middle, and an end to pieces that are just some kind of a list.”
-Susan Morrison

“You can learn a lot by reading your stories to a live audience. When I hear
myself reading out loud, I hear things I don't hear when I read to myself.
When I read aloud, I always have a pencil in hand. If I feel I'm trying too hard
or I'm being repetitive, I make a mark. An editor can tell you those same
things, but you don't necessarily believe the editor. So it's good to just learn
those things on your own, and then to fix them as much as you can before
you turn in the piece to the editor.”
-David Sedaris

“He showed me that hilarious runs could be created with simple,

unpretentious language. He taught me to can the preamble and just to get to
the funny part.”
-George Meyer on Jack handey

“It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around
neglected.”
– Mark Twain

“The only art I’ll ever study is the art I can steal from.” – David Bowie