The unfunny person’s guide to writing humour

Some people have a knack for writing comedy. Here’s a step-by-step guide for the rest of us. Brought to you by tragically unfunny novelist and screenwriter Sam Beckbessinger.

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.

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

How comedy works

If you’re going to try to write humour, it helps to understand how comedy works. It’s very simple: the logic of humour 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. Humour 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 three
• Double meanings
• Exaggeration & absurd comparisons
• Callbacks

How to weave more humour into your writing

Tip 1: The rule of three

If you pay attention, you’ll notice that a lot of stories, especially funny stories, involve three parts: three billy goats gruff, Scrooge’s ghosts of past, present and future, “answer me these riddles three”, the three people who walk into a bar.

Here’s why — three is the smallest set of anything that can create a pattern. With the first two items you create an expectation, then you pull the rug out with the third. We call that the rule of three.

You’ll find the rule of three everywhere in comedy, even in one-liners and quips. Take Laura Kightlinger: “I can’t think of anything worse after a night of drinking than waking up next to someone and not being able to remember their name, or how you met, or why they’re dead.”

Tip 2: Let humour reveal your characters

The best humour organically comes from character. Some people are just very funny. Don’t mistake me: I don’t mean your wisecracking jokers who are dropping quips all the time. No, the funniest characters are often the ones who take themselves the most seriously. Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy is much funnier than Star Lord.

One of the funniest scenes I’ve ever read in a novel is the opening to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, where a depressed Londoner named Archie tries to gas himself to death in his car, parked outside of a halal butcher in Cricklewood. He is stopped by the grumpy owner, not out of sympathy, but because, “We’re not licensed for suicides around here. This place halal. Kosher, understand? If you’re going to die around here, my friend, I’m afraid you’ve got to be thoroughly bled first.”

In the words of Flannery O’Connor: "It is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy."

Some characters aren’t really funny in isolation, but become hilarious when they interact with other characters that highlight their absurdity. Take Terry Pratchett:

“What some people need," said Magrat, to the world in general, "is a bit more heart.""What some people need," said Granny Weatherwax, to the stormy sky, "is a lot more brain." …What I need, thought Nanny Ogg fervently, is a drink.”

The best place to mine ideas for humorous characters is to think about the absurdity about the people you know best. Humour works best when it’s specific and surprising, and observation is what saves you from stereotype. Every human being is ridiculous on some level, so observe the lovably hilarious behaviour of your friends and family. Even better, observe the ways that you, too, are ridiculous.

Tip 3: Steal from life

Train yourself to write down the funny conversations, details, and observations you encounter in your life. Reality is full of absurd details. In high school, I knew a family of three daughters who were named Ray, Misty and Storm. During the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, I saw a woman pushing around a Persian cat in a pram covered in Union Jack bunting. A few years ago, I taught my mom to use Google and literally the only thing she uses it for now is looking up how old various celebrities are.

You can’t make this stuff up!

First Draft Pro’s notes feature can be a great place to store observations for use in your writing, like stocking a little creative pantry.

Tip 4: Choose the right (or wrong) word

We laugh at the absurd. One of the ways to make something absurd is to use entirely the wrong tone/register/diction for the context. In Meg Mason’s awkward sex scene above, “He had the set expression of someone trying to endure a minor medical procedure without anaesthetic” is funny because the formal language doesn’t match with the context — two people canoodling.

Some words are just funny-sounding, by themselves. “Canoodling”, that’s a great word! See also “shenanigans”, “hullaballoo, “splat”. Also, some names are more fun to say than others. There are so many jokes about Benedict Cumberbatch because “Benedict Cumberbatch” is just the objectively funniest sequence of syllables you can make with your mouth.

Tip 5: Try a bizarre comparison

We all love an absurd comparison. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, Flannery O’Connor describes the mother as a woman “whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage” (“cabbage”, another superb word!). In Nobody is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood says that discovering Twitter had led to the election of Donald Trump was “like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian”. Or on the pleasure cruise he takes in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Wallace says he experiences “what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21,000 pounds of hot flesh”.

This is the surprise principle on sentence-scale.

Tip 6: Use callbacks

The funniest novels find ways to deliver surprise twists over the course of whole scenes, or even a whole story. There’s no joke more satisfying than a callback, or a small detail you establish early that’s forgotten about until a crucial moment. Early on in my favourite Terry Pratchett book, Witches Abroad, the main characters receive the gift of some dwarf bread to nourish them on their travels.

“It was miraculous, the dwarf bread. No one ever went hungry when they had some dwarf bread to avoid. You only had to look at it for a moment, and instantly you could think of dozens of things you'd rather eat. Your boots, for example. Mountains. Raw sheep. Your own foot.”

The dwarf bread is mentioned a couple more times in the novel, as a throwaway joke (“there’s always the dwarf bread”). It gets dropped in the river, sat on, left out in the sun, peed on by the cat. And then halfway through the book, the characters find themselves kidnapped by some dwarfs. And, lo! They start reminiscing about the food they miss from home.

"Well, now," said Granny, rubbing her hands together, "Could be I've got some dwarf bread to spare.""Nah. Not proper dwarf bread, " said the spokesdwarf moodily. "Proper dwarf bread's got to be dropped in rivers and dried out and sat on and left and looked at every day and put away again. You just can't get it down here.""This could be," said Granny Weatherwax, "your lucky day."

The fact that this joke takes over 100 pages to pay off makes it even more satisfying when it does.

Tip 7: Have characters misunderstand each other

In real life, a lot of hilarity happen when we mishear or misunderstand each other. That can happen in fiction, too. Pratchett, again:

It’s a lion,’ said Granny Weatherwax, looking at the stuffed head over the fireplace.‘Must’ve hit the wall at a hell of a speed, whatever it was,’ said Nanny Ogg.‘Someone killed it,’ said Granny Weatherwax, surveying the room.‘Should think so,’ said Nanny.  ‘If I’d seen something like that eatin’ its way through the wall I’d of hit it myself with a poker.

Tip 8: Rewrite and rewrite

Humour is so sensitive to rhythm, sentence construction, word choice**. Nobody nails it in the first draft. When you’re writing to entertain, it’s more important than ever to read your work out loud. Even better, ask a friend to read it, and see if you elicit a giggle.

Cliches and stereotypes aren’t funny, because they aren’t surprising. The only exception to this rule is the Dad Joke, which is a joke that’s so unfunny that it’s gone all the way around to being funny again.

Writing is rewriting. When you’re editing, keep a lookout for tired phrases and cliches, and challenge yourself to replace them with authentic, more specific observations. Every simile or metaphor you make in your fiction is an opportunity to delight your readers. Tired: “She had a laugh like a hyena”. Inspired: “She had a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.” (P. G. Wodehouse).

Tip 9: Strike the right balance

Most novels benefit from a bit of wit. But don’t overdo it. No-one wants to read the novel that’s the equivalent of being stuck in the car with an uncle who thinks he’s much funnier than he is.

Remember that the jokes are there to support your story, not the other way around.

Jokes reveal your characters, so be ruthless about cutting out gags that your characters wouldn’t say.

When in doubt, just tell the story. If you’ve imagined three-dimensional characters, they’ll come up with funny stuff all by themselves. I promise.

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

** I’m convinced that this is why so many funny novelists (Terry Pratchett, Suzanna Clarke, David Foster Wallace, Douglas Adams…) like to keep their gags in footnotes: jokes don’t work unless they have a specific rhythm to them, and keeping them as asides allows you to not disrupt the rhythm of the main story too much.

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