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How can I write jokes?

Malik

Auror
"The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it."
- Mark Twain

I tell my jokes straightfaced IRL. Completely deadpan; gallows humor. I get stared at a lot, but it won me my wife, so there's that. On the other hand, my coworkers leave Nick Offerman memes on my office door, so you can't have everything. (It used to be Dr. House, but the times, they are a'changin'.)

Also, and this is just me, but I rarely use emoticons, and to my best recollection, I have never once in my life typed "lol." I actually think that the emoticon and that ****ing idiotic "lol" have hand in hand crippled the joke-telling ability of an entire generation. Use your words. Get out there and make people smile and pay attention to the words that do it. Clitoris. See?
 

Vaporo

Inkling
Mmmmmh. Humor. So many people write it badly. Only a sadly low number can write it even competently, let alone write it well.

Try not to rely on your narrator for jokes. I've read a lot of books where the story itself is fairly standard for (insert genre here), but the humor comes entirely from the narrator's observation of the situation, or the narrator going off on a completely unrelated tangent. It usually doesn't work. I think it fails because the audience requires some sort of investment in a joke. The audience has no investment in the narrator's spiel and may even find it an annoying distraction from the story, so any jokes made there tend to fall flat. It can work, but it takes a lot of skill. Even then, I'd say that the humor rarely reaches above a "meh" level. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy does this sort of humor a lot, and I think that it's one of the better examples. Instead, try to weave jokes into the plot and setting. Make the actual story funny, don't just have it be told by a funny person.

Here's a (paraphrased) joke I read in a book a while ago that I thought worked really well:
"Hello, this is your captain speaking. I just wanted to mention some of the sights you'll be seeing during our flight. If you look out the window to your right, you should be able to see Lake Chekovia, formerly known as the nation of Chekovia. Out on our left you'll see..."

And that's a perfectly good joke. It gives the reader a moment of "wait... what?" but the story has already moved on. What was Chekovia? How did it get destroyed? Why is everyone treating this so nonchalantly? Well... who cares? It's much funnier to withhold information and leave the reader guessing at the sort of horrible, violent place Chekovia must have been in order for it to have been destroyed.

That's a good tool in the jokemaker's toolbox. Withholding information. Because whatever your readers imagine to fill in the obvious blank you've left is going to be much funnier than whatever you could describe.

I'm writing a story for the Top Scribe challenge. One of the prompts was "A ridiculous outfit." I interpreted "ridiculous" as "totally and absurdly skimpy." So skimpy, in fact, that I can't even describe how little it covers. In fact, I don't describe it. Instead, I make vague references to its absurd features. e.g. One character describes it as "insanely complicated" and having "lots of straps." Another mentions that it has a "negative coverage rating." But I never actually describe it because as soon as I give the reader a solid picture to work with, the joke is ruined.

You know what, I've thought a lot about this subject and could literally go on all night, so I'm going to stop here.

I think that the best advice that I can give is to just try to write something funny. Even if you're the only one who gets the joke, write it. Then, try to figure out how to make others find it funny. A good way to do this is to sit your writing aside for a week or two and look at it with fresh eyes. It's a lot easier to critique yourself once you've distanced yourself from your writing a bit.
 

Caged Maiden

Staff
Article Team
Ooh, I love that last reply. I haven't thought a lot about humor in writing, but I write stuff people think is amusing and sometimes pretty funny. For me, I use awkwardness. And now that I read that passage about the skimpy outfit, I recognize that I use the same sort of technique. If I'm going for humor, I aim at "I'm really miserable/ hate this/ don't know about this thing, so I'm going to take a crack at it" sort of humor.

I leave stuff unsaid and show reactions instead. For me, it's funny when people feel awkward or uncomfortable and then something even more taxing happens to them. Then, not only is it funny that they get even more uppity about the situation, but they have a natural reason to say something funny about it and it doesn't feel like out of character slapstick or whatever.

I love stories that incorporate humor. So much. Best wishes as you find the right fit for your story.
 

Vaporo

Inkling
Something else that I've noticed are stories that almost seem to "trick" the audience into thinking that they're funny. It's like the author knows how to structure a funny story, but don't actually know how to write jokes. It's kind of hard to explain what I mean. A story will have the rhythm of a comedy, will seem to have all the lead-up for a joke: setup, comedic timing, etc. But when it comes time to actually make a joke, there just... isn't one. It's like the author was planning to go back and put something funny there, but forgot. The result is a story that has the feel of a comedy, but has very little actual humor. And the sad part is that it often works. A story will have such a strong comedic rhythm, and people are so used to seeing jokes and laughing at particular points, that they'll find themselves laughing at things that they don't actually find funny.

I mean, I see it from time to time on TV and in books, but it's kind of hard to explain. Needless to say, you should probably avoid doing this.

Something similar is when an author thinks up a legitimately funny premise, but then goes and plays it completely straight. Which can be funny if done right, but I'm talking about how this is done wrong. The story will read something like, "A priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar. The priest orders wine. The rabbi orders beer. The minister orders a martini. Over their drinks, they discuss golf. They agree that Tiger Woods is past his prime, then decide to split the bill evenly and each go their separate ways." Aside from the absurd premise that it's a priest, a rabbi, and a minister going to a bar together, there's no real joke. No real punchline. It never reaches that critical mass that makes the audience laugh.

Apparently, some people prefer this sort of punchline-free absurd-premise-only humor and consider it to be more "subtle," but I consider it to be lazy and prefer to actually laugh at some point.

One more tip: Profanity is not automatically funny. A lot of the "comedic structure only" stories that I talked about above do this. Instead of a punchline, they'll just have a character swear, as though that's supposed to be the joke. I've never really understood this. I mean, is it supposed to be funny because most authors don't swear when they write? So it's supposed to be shock humor (and thus will only work the first time you see it)? Or does everyone else just secretly find cursing hilarious and I'm just the only one whose oblivious?

Anyways, just thought I'd put out a few more thoughts.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
If I didn't use lol, I'd get more death threats.

A band I hired back in the day had a game they played on the road... take a song title and replace one word with "penis". I try to be above such things, but yeah... funny ensued. Whiskey didn't hurt the humor.

Head Like a Penis by Nine Inch Nails

"The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it."
- Mark Twain

I tell my jokes straightfaced IRL. Completely deadpan; gallows humor. I get stared at a lot, but it won me my wife, so there's that. On the other hand, my coworkers leave Nick Offerman memes on my office door, so you can't have everything. (It used to be Dr. House, but the times, they are a'changin'.)

Also, and this is just me, but I rarely use emoticons, and to my best recollection, I have never once in my life typed "lol." I actually think that the emoticon and that ****ing idiotic "lol" have hand in hand crippled the joke-telling ability of an entire generation. Use your words. Get out there and make people smile and pay attention to the words that do it. Clitoris. See?
 

A. E. Lowan

Forum Mom
Leadership
Comedy is tragedy... with timing.

In the book I'm currently working on, we have a demon playing a grand piano, singing a song parody. "People. People who eat people, are the luckiest people..."

Let your humor evolve organically, with the needs of the story. There is nothing worse than a forced joke. And gallows humor is great! If something occurs to you as funny, chances are that someone else will think so, too.
 

Vaporo

Inkling
A band I hired back in the day had a game they played on the road... take a song title and replace one word with "penis". I try to be above such things, but yeah... funny ensued. Whiskey didn't hurt the humor.

Head Like a Penis by Nine Inch Nails

I'm not sure if this was meant as a response to my comment on profanity, but I'm going to take it as such anyways because I enjoy talking about this.

Even that's not quite what I'm talking about. Taking something non-profane and making it profane is usually at least slightly funny. It's crude, low-brow, low-effort humor, but it is still humor. I mean, I've even heard people define humor in its simplest form to be the defacement of something refined or serious. I don't know if I agree with that assessment, but interpret it as you will.

What I'm talking about is authors using regular old curse words as their "punchline." The author will write like they're about to make a joke, but all that actually happens is that a character says "Oh (gosh-darn) it" with nothing else to make it funny. They're not abnormally harsh or abnormally tame curse words, they're just regular old curse words. I mean, it may work the first time you see it simply because of how it subverts your expectations, but after that it just falls flat.

Also, the first joke image one the previous page (the British one) could be translated to a text format fairly easily. In fact, I like showing off, so I'll do it now:

Robert and Jerry's heads broke the surface broke the surface of the Thames, gasping for breath.

"Help!" Jerry shouted, "Help! I can't swim!" There were dozens of people on the banks, but none of them on the banks even looked up.

"Please! I need..." Suddenly, Robert's hand whipped around and slapped Jerry across the face.

"You idiot." he said between mouthfuls of water. "We're in London!" Robert's voice suddenly shifted to a posh British accent.

"Excuse me, sirs. Yes, you on the riverbank, there. I'm terribly sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if you would mind helping me for a moment? As long as it's not trouble, of course." Almost immediately, a life preserver smacked into the water next to them.

"You see?" Robert whispered as they were pulled ashore. "You just have to speak the local language."

But, that's only easy because the joke was already largely text based. The other one, the hopscotch one, could be done with enough preparation, I think. But, it would be extremely difficult because it's mostly a visual gag. Visual gags are typically very difficult to get working in writing, simply because of how long it takes to set up the joke. You'd probably have to slowly build up the reader's understanding of the space without breaking the flow of the story, until finally you gave them some last critical piece of information that made the gag click. And it's made worse by the fact that your readers aren't going to catch every detail you mention or visualize everything exactly as you plan. And after all that setup, you'd better make sure that it's a good joke.

It's related to the thing I mentioned earlier about withholding information. It's way easier to let the reader fill in the absurdity themselves than describing it, since describing something funny basically means explaining the joke, and as you probably know explaining a joke basically means ruining it.

Maybe try listening to some stand-up comedians, since they have to rely almost entirely on spoken word as opposed to imagery.
 
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