Expert: Tom - 5/24/2009

Question
How do you go about writing material? It's easy to be funny in the moment
but it's hard to just write funny if you know what I mean

Answer
Louis --

This is a good question, and I suspect that different people would have quite different answers to it. I think it's important to realize that being funny in conversation and writing for comedy are two very different things. Much of our conversational humor depends a great deal on its spontenaity: A lot of what we say in conversation is only funny because others present can see that we responded quickly, without having any time to think it over. Some of this spontaneous humor isn't all that fantastically funny, if we look at it closely, but it's still fun because people realize we did pretty well, considering having no time to plan.

For performed comedy, the standards are different, but the good news is that we do get time to prepare. My advice is to approach this writing very seriously, just as you would if you were learning to write poems, term papers, or legal briefs. My own "method" is to have listened a great deal to the comedy I admired and to try to figure out the rules that make it funny.

One quick example: I've done work with Spoonerisms. You can take any text and do Spoonerisms on it, but my observation was that if the text contains no conflict, the result is only lukewarm. To get a really funny result, you need an underlying story which contains conflict or drama; applying the Spoonerisms to such a story makes it funny.

So, for me, it was important to discover that fact before I started writing material. (Actually, this I discovered after writing a bunch of boring material!) Now I know what subject matter I need to be looking for. And I've got probably a half-dozen other rules that I think are important to follow when writing this type of material.

Therefore, my recommendation is to study hard, figure out what makes your targeted type of comedy work, and then write seriously, trying to follow those rules. Write multiple drafts. Try it out out loud by yourself, then later with a trusted friend (the kind of friend good enough to tell you where you could improve or at least what parts to ditch because they're not funny).

Good luck!

-- Tom