The Unfunny Person’s Guide to Writing Humor

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. First Draft Pro, a 2022 NaNoWriMo sponsor, is a collaborative writing app built for story-nerds. Today, they’ve partnered with novelist and screenwriter Sam Beckbessinger to share some tips on writing humor. Don’t forget to check out the offer to NaNoWriMo writers to try out First Draft Pro for free this month!

Here’s the problem: you love a joke. You’re perfectly able to get into a good banter with your buddies. You’re hilarious in a DnD game. You’re the comedian of your group chats. But put you in front of a blank page and suddenly you’re about as funny as a statistics textbook*. Your manuscripts are full of notes like << INSERT JOKE HERE??? >>. You wouldn’t actually want to sit next to any of your characters at a dinner party.

* There is a marginal likelihood that a funny statistics textbook exists somewhere, but it would be a real outlier.

Well, I have good news for you! Writing humor is a skill that can be learned like any other.

How comedy works

If you’re going to try to write humor, it helps to understand how comedy works. It’s very simple: the logic of humor is surprise.

Fundamentally, here’s how most jokes work: you create an expectation, and then you do something wildly unexpected. Take standup comedian Mitch Hedberg: “This shirt is dry-clean only, which means it’s dirty.” The first sentence by itself isn’t funny; it becomes funny when the second sentence subverts it. A joke is a story, and a punchline is a mini plot-twist.

You’ve got to build up to the subversion. Humor has a specific rhythm to it. You start off slower and more detailed, establishing the pattern, painting the picture, ratcheting up the tension… then BAM, you come in with the twist. Take this exchange from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“You know,” said Arthur, “it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.”

“Why, what did she tell you?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”

Notice the rhythm of this exchange. The first paragraph is slow, with long sentences and dry multisyllabic words, then the writing speeds up to deliver the punchline. You build the tension, then you break the tension. A lot of humour is in the timing.

So if you’re trying to be funny, the trick is to pull off this little tension > surprise dance on every level of granularity in your prose. There are funny words, funny individual sentences, funny situations, and entire characters who are hilarious (usually, the ones who take themselves very very seriously).

And there are specific tricks to help you do this, like:

The rule of threeDouble meaningsExaggeration & absurd comparisonsCallbacks

Come join us over on the First Draft Pro blog, where I’ll show you how they work!

Sam Beckbessinger writes weird horror stories and kids tv shows, and helps people learn to adult better (she’s still figuring it out herself).