Comedy Writing Secrets Quotes

“Surprise is one of the most universally accepted formulas for humor. A joke is a story, and a surprise ending is usually its finale.”
― Mel Helitzer, Comedy Writing Secrets

“The first part, the setup, sets the stage. The second half, the punch line, provides an unexpected ending. It’s the surprising conclusion that causes laughter.”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself. —James Thurber”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“Humor comes out of the unexpected: If there’s no surprise, there’s no laugh. In a triple, as discussed in chapter seven, the first two lines are often straight lines; this is the realistic element. The third line is the surprise twist—logically related to the first two lines, but unexpected and exaggerated. Realism is the setup, while exaggeration is the joke. “Get your facts first,” wrote Mark Twain, “and then you can distort them as much as you please.”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“Even the gods love jokes. —Plato”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“Angst is the intellectual observation that fairy tales aren’t true—that there is an unhappy end to every happy beginning. Angst”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“The penis, when you pull the underwear down, it's like a drunk friend just falling out of a car. —Jo Koy”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“Laughter is an orgasm triggered by the intercourse of sense and nonsense.”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“A key prerequisite to thinking and writing funny is understanding funny. And,”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“As Mark Twain observed, “Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“Clever wordplay engenders grudging appreciation in your peers, but surprise wordplay gives birth to laughter. We smile at wit. We laugh at jokes.”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“The basic two-step in humor is to (a) state some common problem, frequently with a cliché, and (b) create an unexpected ending or surprise.”
― Mel Helitzer, Comedy Writing Secrets

“What if you tell a joke in the forest, and nobody laughs, was it a joke? —Steven Wright To create your comedic MAPP, you start with the purpose.”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“Refining the relationship between exaggeration and realism in humor can be related to stretching a rubber band. Imagine the unstretched band is the realism, and exaggeration stretches the band. When the rubber band is stretched to capacity, several things happen at once. Stretching alters the shape of the band; exaggeration changes the perception of reality. The rubber band can be stretched a little (understatement) or a lot (overstatement). Just as tension increases in a rubber band that it is stretched, exaggeration increases tension in the audience—up to the breaking point. When you pluck a rubber band, it makes a sound. The pitch of this sound gets higher as you stretch the rubber band further. This sound can be compared to emotion in an audience. The more you stretch the rubber band, the greater the emotion in the audience. Finding the proper balance between realism and exaggeration is the ultimate test of a comedy writer’s skill. Humor only comes when the exaggeration is logical. Simply being ludicrous or audacious is not a skill. It’s amateur. Many novice stand-up comedians struggle with exaggeration. They’ll start with some realistic premise—the way women dress, picking up men in a singles bar, outsmarting the police, or advertising slogans—but then they’ll shift into fifth gear in a wild display of ludicrous fantasy that’s not well connected to the initial premise. Their material has limited success because they make the same mistake repeatedly: They disrupt the equal balance of realism and exaggeration. Outrageous doesn’t mean creative.”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“Since comedy encourages the audience to suspend disbelief, humorists can take advantage of every opportunity to stretch the truth. In other circumstances, unmitigated exaggeration would be viewed as lying. In humor, clever exaggeration is rewarded with laughter.”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“Chemistry is the study of the composition, properties, and behavior of matter—humor writing is the study of the composition, properties, and behavior of funny. The atoms, or basic units, of humor writing are words. (The subatomic structures are letters or sounds.) These comedic atoms (words) form the elements known as jokes. Although there”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“Since it appears that exaggeration is the logical antithesis of realism, it may seem ludicrous to have both within the framework of one piece of humor. But good humor is a paradox—the unexpected juxtaposition of the reasonable next to the unreasonable—and that creates surprise. Think”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“The sense of hopelessness that comes from our apparent inability to control the environment is now a universal hostility. Industrial chemicals can lead to pollution, drugs can lead to suicide, and the advertising drum beats for nonsensical fads. Humor may be our only rational way of coping with the fear of terrorism, an invasion of spooks from outer space, or the chemical mutation of our planet.”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“Charlie Chaplin exploited frustrations and fears about rapidly growing automation to make people laugh. It’s ironic that IBM once used his tramp character as an implied advertising testimonial for computers, because Chaplin’s character didn’t promote machines—he ridiculed them.”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“This need for hostility bred what is called nihilistic humor—humor based on the theory that there is no person or thing so sacred as to be beyond ridicule. Humorists, protected”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“The material must be appropriate to the interests of the audience (or readers), and each must relate to the persona of the performer (or writer). Throughout the book, we’ll show you how to create and follow the MAPP to successful humor writing.”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“To create your comedic MAPP, you start with the purpose. Why are you writing humor? Is it to motivate or to entertain? Is the humor for a speech, a presentation, a comedy gig, or the classroom? The purpose gives direction and meaning to the material.”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“MAPP stands for material, audience, performer, and purpose. A”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“Once you can consistently make people laugh, it’s essential to target your material so you don’t waste precious time preparing the wrong material for the wrong performer, to be delivered to the wrong audience, for the wrong purpose. This is true for all forms of humor writing.”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“The language-based portion of the brain (the left frontal cortex) “gets” the joke by recognizing the ambiguity, incongruity, and surprise of the humor. The emotional areas of the brain (such as the amygdala) appreciate the humor and trigger laughter.”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“Psychoanalysts learn a great deal about patients by listening to their humor. And you can learn a great deal about your own psychological makeup by constantly asking yourself (and answering truthfully), Why did I laugh at this joke and not at others?”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“Regression Sigmund Freud’s theory of humor contended that humor, like sleep, is therapeutic. But even more important, he argued, wit can express—in a relatively appropriate way—urges and feelings that can’t otherwise be let loose, such as the desire to act on regressive infantile sexual or aggressive behavior. More to the point, Freud believed that a lack of humor can be a sign of mental illness.”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“Comedy works best when an audience is not only prepared to laugh, but anxious to participate in a shared social experience. For release humor to work, the audience must be clued to every plot from the beginning. If the audience and the actor don’t know what’s behind the door, that’s mystery. If the audience knows, but someone else doesn’t, that’s release comedy.”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“Whereas incongruity is the clash of incompatible ideas or perceptions, ambivalence is the simultaneous presence of conflicting emotions, such”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It

“A joke is a curve ball—a pitch that bends at the last instant and fools the batter. “You throw a perfectly straight line at the audience and then, right at the end, you curve it. Good jokes do that,” Burrows said. To achieve the unexpected twist, it’s sometimes necessary to sacrifice grammar and even logic.”
― Mark Shatz, Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It