5

Bringing the Funny

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested, and it’s bad for the frog’s health.

—E. B. WHITE

Comedy is harder to write than drama. In principle all you have to do is make the audience laugh. If they’re laughing, you’re good. But it’s hard to sustain laughter without a story. A comedy series or comic drama needs everything drama needs—a central character, goal/problem/opportunity, obstacles/antagonist, stakes, and jeopardy—and it needs to be funny.

That’s one reason, incidentally, why comedy staffs tend to be larger than drama staffs. A staff of five can comfortably write a one-hour drama. Sitcoms can have twenty people on staff. Some highly paid writers do nothing more than pitch a few brilliant jokes for each script.

What’s So Funny?

As Aristotle said, “Comedy is tragedy that happens to your mother-in-law.”1

By laughing, we can step back from a negative situation and get perspective on it. If the situation is happening to a fictional character, laughter allows us to shed some of our identification with the characters and experience relief—don’t hurt me, God, hurt him! If a situation is happening to us, laughing allows us to get some perspective on it. We laugh at the part we can’t do anything about so we can focus on the part we can do something about.

Laughter is how we avoid panicking.

Comedy is an essentially sadistic genre. If you were one of the Stooges, your life would be a never-ending hell of eye gouges, head whackings, and hair pullings. All comedy is based on a strong negative emotion, and each strong negative emotion has its own flavor of comedy:

Physical pain without serious damage. Slapstick. The Three Stooges. More common in the movies than on TV: stunts are expensive to shoot.

Disgust. Fart jokes. Slimy things on Nickelodeon. South Park. Grade-schoolers tend to find disgusting things funnier than adults do.

Embarrassment. Characters get caught in humiliating situations, e.g., falling into a cream pie, getting caught in a lie, getting caught with their pants down. I Love Lucy. Much sitcom humor is embarrassment comedy.

Embarrassment comedy can also be embarrassing for the audience rather than the character. Coupling is funny because the characters say utterly atrocious things to one another. James Spader’s sleazoid lawyer character on Boston Legal is funny because we expect him to apologize for his behavior, and he doesn’t.

Frustration. Characters try, and try, and try, and can’t…get a date, get a job, get their jaws into that damn bird (Road

Runner, Sylvester & Tweety), get away from their overbearing family (Everybody Loves Raymond).

Fear. Especially fear of death. Absurdist humor like Monty Python’s Flying Circus’s “Self-Defense Against Fresh Fruit” sketch. Situations so over-the-top awful you can’t help but laugh.

In a comic plot or comic situation, you put your protagonist through one kind of hell or another; and then, usually, you bring him back to where he started, no better off or wiser than before.

Great Comic Premises

A great comic springboard often begins with a very familiar situation, then twists it, and carries the twist into the realm of absurdity. Characters deal with the same issues you and I deal with, but they take their reactions to ridiculous lengths. John Rogers (Cosby, Global Frequency):

A great comedy springboard is to take a familiar thing and be revelatory about it. There was a King of Queens a buddy wrote. Kevin’s under sedation, his appendix burst, his wife is by his bedside. And he utters another woman’s name. Turns out he fantasizes about other women. That’s a very familiar thing. Even when you’re married, you have to accept your husband may not be fantasizing about you. Then Kevin tells her, “It’s okay, because in my fantasies, you’re dead.” She’s not too pleased with that. That turns into an entirely different thing. She starts giving him acceptable fantasies: “I’m out of town because my career is doing so well.” She becomes invested in his fantasy life.

In drama, it’s stuff you’re not familiar with. Desperate Housewives—nobody in real life has murdered a woman who was blackmailing them. CSI, etc., takes you someplace new. In comedy, you start with a common thing. Then give it some bizarre spin.

Drama is usually about high stakes: I’m worried because my neighbor may have buried someone under his swimming pool. Comedy is usually about characters treating small stakes as if they were big: I’m worried because my neighbor has a bigger television antenna than I do.

Plausible Surprise

At the heart of every comic situation is what Mark Farrell (Corner Gas) calls “plausible surprise.” A character is in a situation the outcome of which we think we know; and something different and usually worse happens:

There’s a Sylvester & Tweety episode where he’s chopping down the tree to get to Tweety Bird, and the cut is getting bigger and bigger, and you just know the tree is going to fall on Sylvester the next time he chops the tree, and he pulls the ax back—and the tree falls on him right away. We laugh because we’re surprised. The outcome is plausible, and we’re surprised.

As comedian and writer D. J. McCarthey notes, this is something like what a magician does, except that a magic trick gets oohs and aahs, and comedy gets laughs. You put the viewer’s mind on train tracks, and then you derail him, and he laughs.

This suggests why so many gags are based on three similar incidents. A guy’s walking on the street. He avoids walking under a ladder. He avoids stepping into an open manhole. And he gets hit by a truck. The first two incidents set up the pattern. The third is the payoff—the comic twist. Call this the “Duck-Duck-Goose Rule.”

Comic situations can get quite implausible as they build. The trick is making sure that each step is plausible. As long as you get to the next step plausibly, and the audience is laughing, you can get the audience to swallow a basically implausible situation.

Funny Word Last

Comedians will tell you that the funny word goes on the end of the sentence. That often requires some rewriting.

More broadly, the joke goes at the end of the setup. The basic structure of a joke is: information, setup, punch line.

The joke is incomplete until the audience has all the information. You can’t expect them to hold the joke in their heads until you show them why it’s funny. The setup has to come first.

Constructing a joke is getting the audience careening down train tracks that you’ve laid, and then derailing their expectations. If you derail them first, not funny.

In drama, you can button a scene, or go with a smooth segue to the next scene. In comedy, you pretty much always button a scene. The only exception is if the segue itself is a punch line—a hello joke, a funny match cut, etc. (see “Squiggy,”).

Therefore a joke requires two things: commitment, which gets the train careening, and juxtaposition, which derails it.

Commitment

Nuance isn’t funny. You want your audience’s minds careening down the train tracks of one line of thought so you can derail them at high speed. If your scene is nuanced, they’re not careening. If a character is angry, they should be hysterically angry. If they’re feeling betrayed, they should feel the worst betrayal possible. If they step on a tack, they should be jumping up and down in pain, or moaning in suffering. Whatever your comedy scene entails, commit to it wholly.

Dramatic characters feel a lot but play down their reactions. A girl who’s been rejected forever by the man she loves might quietly take his omelet away, wrap it up, and put it in the refrigerator. Comic characters feel less, but exaggerate their reactions. A girl who doesn’t like that the man she loves called a secretary “cute” might throw scrambled eggs in his face.

Juxtaposition

Derailing your audience’s expectations with a non sequitur isn’t funny. You have to have a comic twist. That’s the juxtaposition of two things that the audience doesn’t expect to go together but have a point of reference that allows the writer to make a connection between them. What makes the juxtaposition funny is that it’s not supposed to fit, but it kinda almost does.

As Kevin Bleyer (Politically Incorrect) says, “Much of comedy is contrasting two unlikely things and extending the metaphor beyond practicality.”2

You can make a one-year-old laugh by putting a measuring cup on your head for a hat. She knows a measuring cup isn’t a hat. But it sort of resembles a hat, so it’s funny. Putting pasta on your head will not get nearly the same laugh, because pasta does not resemble a hat. Though it does resemble hair. If you don’t want to try this experiment yourself, use contraceptives.

Wordplay is juxtaposition at the linguistic level. A pun is using a word’s sound to juxtapose it with something it doesn’t mean. As my grandpa Sam said after his friends locked him in a closet until he promised never to tell another pun: “But please o-pun the door.”

The best juxtapositions, like the best metaphors, mean something. The odd juxtaposition sheds light on the original content. In metaphor, the “tenor” is the content; the “vehicle” is what the content is being compared to. In the best juxtapositions, whether metaphoric or comic, the vehicle tells you something about the tenor. My grandfather’s wordplay didn’t illuminate the phrase “open the door” in any way. That’s why his friends threw him in Sheepshead Bay.

Puns are rarely funny onscreen. But one gag that often works is using familiar rhetoric in the wrong situation: the characters are talking about one thing, but the dialogue sounds as if coming from a different sort of scene. In Friends, “The One with the Breast Milk,” Monica has gone shopping with Ross’s new girlfriend, Julie, behind Rachel’s back. Rachel feels betrayed.

MONICA

And then, one thing led to another and, before I knew it, we were…shopping.

RACHEL

Oh! Oh my God.

MONICA

Honey, wait. We only did it once. It didn’t mean anything to me.

RACHEL

Yeah, right.

MONICA

Really, Rachel, I was thinking of you the whole time. Look, I’m sorry, all right? I never meant for you to find out.

The content may be shopping, but the clichés the girls are using come from adultery. What makes the scene so telling is that for both Rachel and Monica, shopping is as passionate an activity as having sex, so Monica shopping with Julie is like cheating on Rachel with her. If it had been Joey who had spent time with Julie, Rachel would have had the same basic complaint—the same tenor—but without the comic twist—the vehicle.

Note that what makes this gag work is that the scene is fully committed to the adultery rhetoric. Courteney Cox and Jennifer Aniston play the scene all the way, Aniston behaving in every way like the betrayed lover, Cox apologizing and downplaying in just the embarrassed way a cheater might. If the scene only used one or two adultery clichés, or if Cox played the scene less guilty or Aniston less betrayed, it wouldn’t be as funny.

Squiggy

Another typical joke is the “Squiggy,” a.k.a. the “hello joke.” It’s when the answer to a rhetorical question is provided by another character’s entrance:

LAVERNE

What kind of degenerate freak would do that?

She opens the door. It’s Squiggy.

SQUIGGY

Hell-oo!

The commitment is in the first line, where we expect that the answer is “no one.” The juxtaposition—and derailment—occurs when Squiggy shows up and we realize that yes, there actually is someone who’d do it. Ditto “the red dress,” a.k.a. the flip cut, a.k.a. the Gilligan cut, when a character declares he’d never do something, and then you cut to him doing it:

GILLIGAN

There’s no way I’m putting on a red dress and dancing the samba.

CUT TO:

Gilligan, in the red dress, dancing the samba.

Gilligan commits to his position, and then is derailed, in the form of a comic juxtaposition: a goofy guy in a red dress.

Confusion

Another kind of juxtaposition is internal. A character thinks one thing is going on but another thing is going on.

For example, Ross is talking to Joey about a car; Joey thinks Ross is talking about a girl. Ross is saying perfectly reasonable things about the car, but Joey is increasingly appalled at what Ross is saying about the “girl.” In “The One Where Estelle Dies,” Joey has just found out that his agent Estelle has died. But Phoebe has been calling him, pretending to be Estelle to spare his feelings, and she doesn’t know he knows about Estelle:

PHOEBE

(in Estelle’s voice)

Joey, it’s Estelle.

On Joey: shocked.

JOEY

Estelle?

PHOEBE

Yeah, I wanted to call and tell you that there’s no hard feelings for firing me.

JOEY

O-kay. I just, I can’t believe you’re calling me?

PHOEBE

Well, I didn’t think I should just drop by.

JOEY

No, no, no!

(terrified)

Don’t drop by, don’t drop by!

Comedy Is in the Characters

A gag relies on the juxtaposition of two things we don’t expect to go together. A comic character is someone who consistently reacts in a way we wouldn’t normally expect.

There’s a paradox there because how can characters consistently surprise us? The essence of a comic character is that they’re over the top in a believable way. We believe them as human beings, yet they regularly surprise us by not behaving the way normal people would. Hence, consistent surprise.

Every stand-up comedian creates a comic persona for himself—a version of himself that exaggerates what’s most unique about him to comic extremes. Woody Allen onstage is more broadly neurotic than the real Woody Allen. Rodney Dangerfield was more down-at-the-mouth. George Carlin is angrier than the real George Carlin. Carrot Top is goofier, and probably more annoying. The comic persona is the distilled essence of the real person—the essence of how they’re not normal.

When you write comedy, you create comic personas for all your comic characters. A comic character is just a normal character taken to an extreme. Writers exaggerate the key characteristics to create a comic situation.

Jokes need to be based on the persona of the character involved in them. If your character is a klutz, the jokes should come out of pratfalls. We want to see Jerry Lewis bang his head, but Jack Benny banging his head isn’t funny. Jerry Lewis being stingy isn’t funny; Jack Benny being stingy is. We love watching comic characters because they are ridiculous in familiar ways. The laugh is in our familiarity with their flaws.

The more outlandish a comic character is, the easier it is to put them into a comic situation that plays to their flaws. South African comedy writer Dennis Venter (Madam and Eve):

Take the established personality of the characters and put them into a situation that will make them as uncomfortable as hell. Don’t put Will Truman [of Will & Grace] into a gay lawyers association dinner. Put him into a monster truck rally.

The less cartoonish the characters are, the more you shade into comic drama. Comedy is about the laughs: if a scene doesn’t get laughs, it fails. Drama is about what it’s like to be the characters, and the awkward, embarrassing situations in comic drama are there to give us insight into them. Not all scenes have to be funny, so long as most of them are.

The essence of any comic character is that she is a little ridiculous. We cannot completely sympathize with her. The moment we start really worrying about him, he stops being a fully comic character. That’s why in a sitcom the peripheral characters are more purely comic; the lead characters are less ridiculous and more believable. We need to care about the leads.

As a show stays on the air, we sometimes start caring about the core cast so much that a comedy series starts to morph into a show that is part soap and part comedy. The more we cared about Ross and Rachel in Friends as the seasons progressed, the more the show became part romantic comedy (where we wanted the lovers to end up together) and the less it was a straight-out comedy. The same thing happened to Frasier and to Niles on Frasier. On Seinfeld, though, the writers never went too deep with the characters, and so we could continue to laugh at them throughout the run of the series. The Simpsons never stop being ridiculous, so The Simpsons has managed to stay purely funny for over a decade.

Likewise, comic characters can’t become aware of how ridiculous they are. The moment comic characters get perspective on themselves, the comedy stops. Characters may be painfully aware of their own shortcomings—neurotic characters often cherish their neuroses—but they can’t put it together and laugh or cry at how pathetic they are. Then we’d have to have sympathy for them.

Comedy Is in the Pauses, Too

Your basic comic payoff is a couplet:

Ralph Kramden: says something grandiose

Alice: cuts him down to size <laughter>

Both parts of the couplet can be funny:

Ross (frustrated): says something outrageous, embarrassing himself <laughter>

Rachel (unsurprised): cuts him down to size <laughter>

If you’ve really got your characters down, you can get a lot of mileage out of their reactions. The audience has a feeling for what the character’s going to say—but what the character actually says is (plausibly) surprising, and therefore funny. As Chris Abbott puts it, “You never know what they’re going to say, and then when they say it, you think, ‘I knew he was gonna say that!’” Everybody Loves Raymond is brilliant at this:

Marie, Ray’s mother: says something annoyingly outrageous <laughter>

Ray: does a slow burn <laughter>

Ray: makes a sarcastic comeback <laughter>

The audience is laughing before Raymond comes out with his retort. Now you’ve got three laughs instead of one or two. Another example is Friends, “The One with Two Parts, Part 2.” The friends are throwing Phoebe a birthday party, but Joey is dating Phoebe’s twin sister, Ursula:

JOEY

I’m takin’ Ursula out tonight. It’s her birthday.

ROSS

Whoa-whoa-whoa. What about Phoebe’s birthday?

JOEY

When’s that?

ROSS

Tonight.

JOEY

Oh, man. What are the odds of that happening?

Ross and Chandler share a look. Joey contemplates his ill fortune.

ROSS

You take your time.

Joey thinks some more. Finally he gets it.

CHANDLER

And there it is!

The comedy is all in Ross and Chandler—and the audience—being wayyyy ahead of Joey.

Don’t Break the Frame

Any jokes that draw attention to the fact that you’re watching a movie—whether in dialogue or in a character winking at the camera—will tend to yank the audience out of the picture. You can get away with this as a joke sometimes, but it tends to rob the other jokes of their funny.

Anything that draws attention to a joke being a joke will kill the funny. Nothing kills a joke better than starting it with, “Let me tell you the funniest thing…” That’s because the audience can’t be fully committed if you tell them in advance that they’re going to be derailed. In Friends, Chandler’s character is a jokester, but his jokes aren’t funny. The laughter comes from the other characters reacting to his lame jokes. The joke is on him. He may be cracking a witticism, but we’re laughing at his embarrassment, not at the wisecrack itself.

Joke on a Joke

Two jokes cancel each other out.

A guy in a dress is funny. A guy singing a witty song may be funny. A guy in a dress and singing a witty song is just disturbing. (British audiences differ on this point.)

If a joke is going on in the foreground, the background needs to be straight. If a joke is going on in the background, the characters in the foreground need to be straight. (Also, if the joke is in the background, the foreground characters can’t be saying anything the audience needs to know.)

The reason you can’t have two jokes at once is that you can’t be fully committed to two setups at once. You can only build up steam on one train track.

Bric-a-brac

Don’t make a joke for the sake of making a joke. Make sure your jokes build on one another. A joke has to have something to do with the other jokes in the scene. Otherwise it’s clutter—bric-a-brac—and distracts from the scene’s comic movement.

A bit is a series of jokes all arising from the same comic situation or story—the same basic juxtaposition. Comedy builds, but only so long as you’re on the same bit. The longer you can stay on the same bit and keep them laughing, the harder they’ll laugh.

A bric-a-brac joke may be funny, but it forces the audience into a new bit, stopping the momentum of the bit dead. You may get a laugh, but you’re robbing the rest of the scene of its laughs.

Comedy writing staffs are always looking for the topper—the gag that tops the previous gag while staying in the same bit. The longer you can keep topping the previous joke, the funnier the bit gets. When you go into the next bit, you’re going to have to spend some time setting it up. While you’re setting it up, you’re not bringing the funny. The beauty of a topper is it requires no additional setup. Milking a bit is efficient comedy.

Up and Back

If a bit is funny but doesn’t advance character or plot, it’s an up and back. You are, after all, telling a story here. While the bits themselves may kill, they also need to move the story forward. Otherwise you lose your overall pace and energy, and your episode becomes a series of skits. Skit comedy doesn’t hold an audience the way a comic episode does. A comic episode can survive a dead bit because the plot is holding the audience. They still want to see what happens. They’re invested in the outcome. A dead bit in a series of sketches may send the audience rooting around for the remote.

Keep Your Plots Simple. People watch comedy in order to laugh. Comedy plots exist only as a peg on which to hang the comic situations. The more plot you have, the fewer jokes there’s room for in your twenty-two minutes. You need just enough plot to bring the funny. If you have a choice between milking a simple situation and complicating it in a clever way, milk it.

Don’t Be Afraid to Use the Pauses. Remember, much of comedy is in the pauses.

The More Plot, the More Bits. The more bits, the shorter you’re on each bit. Comedy builds, but only while you’re on the same bit. Each time you go to a new bit, you need to give the audience a new setup. You lose your comic momentum.

It’s Hard to Cut Plot in the Editing Room. If you run long and you have a simple plot, you can always trim a few slow bits, or even some jokes, to bring down the length. You’ll still have plenty of jokes left. But if the plot is complicated, you’re stuck. It’s hard to cut plot points. If you have to get the story from A to D, it’s hard to get rid of B and C. So you wind up cutting only gags and leaving the plot points. Now you have a drama, only one built on a ridiculous premise.

If You Keep Your Plots Simple, You Won’t Burn Through So Many Bits. Every time you throw a new bit into your story, that’s a bit you can’t use in a later episode. For sheer self-preservation, hold on to your bits. Dennis Venter:

I’ve seen too many newbie writers to the comedy genre trying to overcomplicate the plots. In comedy, plots are simple, characters are complex. It’s how they react to the situation that brings the funny.3

Trivia

A joke can’t depend on arcane knowledge. For example:

Q: What do you call the ruins of a Temple of Inanna?

A: A ho-tel.

This joke kills with Assyriologists.

You can get away with an arcane joke, though, if the meaning of the line is clear and you don’t make a moment of it. Gilmore Girls often does throwaway pop culture references. If you get the joke, great; if not, you probably don’t even know there was a joke there, so you don’t feel left out.

If a joke depends on knowledge that’s too widespread, be careful. Britney Spears is still a punch line, but once she does her inevitable Playboy spread, she stops being funny.

Moral: If a joke depends on knowledge, make sure it’s mainstream, up-to-date knowledge that hasn’t already been overused by the comic establishment.

Underwriting

One counterintuitive rule of comedy is that you can’t write characters exactly the way they sound. Not in scripts actually intended to be performed. You need to leave a gap between how the line reads on the page and how it will come out sounding. If you write the way the character sounds, it’ll be overkill. You need to leave room for the performance. According to Mark Farrell, actor/writer Brent Butt will often lower the pitch of his own lines when he does his pass on a Corner Gas script, writing them down instead of punching them up, so that his character doesn’t come across too jokey. He knows he’ll be adding the drollery back in his performance. Jacob Sager Weinstein (Dennis Miller Live):

When we got freelance submissions, they sounded too much like [Dennis Miller’s] comic persona. Anything he said on the air would seem even more sarcastic and smarter than the way it was written. So you had to underwrite so he wouldn’t come off too harsh. If you wrote like he sounds, it would seem like he was parodying himself. So I learned to leave a gap between what I wrote and how he was going to say it, to let him fill it…. One of the biggest mistakes comedy writers can make is putting too much of the character’s voice on the page.

This rule does not apply to specs, which are not intended to be performed. A spec is intended only to be read. The reader may read it carelessly, and the reader may not be as familiar with the characters and the show as you’d like. So in a spec, put the full snap into the line.

If you’re freelancing, it’s easy to check if you’re under-or overwriting the jokes. Just ask your story editor.

As stand-up comics know, comedy is part joke and part delivery. Comics argue about whether the percentages are 30–70 or 20–80 percent, but the weight is on the performance. A mediocre comic will die onstage with great material. A great comic can pull through with mediocre material. Comics will tell you that many working stand-ups are not actually funny. They just sound funny, and people laugh.

This might explain why so many “like-a-jokes” get through. An American sitcom is expected to have three laughs a page. Even a writing staff of twenty can’t write 22 episodes of a comedy and fill each page with real jokes. So they often resort to “like-a-jokes”: gags that have the rhythm of a joke, and the sound of a joke, without actually being funny. Often like-a-jokes are placeholder jokes from an early draft for which no one has come up with a functioning replacement.

Learn to recognize like-a-jokes in your own writing, and do your best to replace them with real jokes before you send your script out into the world.

Overwriting

It takes many bad jokes to find a good one. Comedy writers will often use placeholder jokes to fill up a script while they’re trying to get the story and the basic comic situations down. Then they’ll go back in a punch-up pass and, they hope, replace the placeholder jokes with actual funny ones. On a sitcom, the entire writing staff will typically go through the script together in the writing room and pitch replacement jokes for every gag in the script. On shows with smaller writing staffs, the script might just get passed around from writer to writer.

As with all other rewrite situations, don’t defend your jokes. If someone’s offering a replacement line that you feel is offtrack, you can explain what you were going for and ask for help to get a joke that does what you wanted your joke to do. But if your fellow writers don’t think your joke is funny, it’s not. That’s the beauty of comedy: if they’re not laughing, it’s not funny.

If you’re writing on your own, it’s much harder to be sure you’re replacing a weak joke with a stronger joke. You still need to pitch yourself a dozen replacement gags for every gag you have in your script.

But you need to be careful not to toss out a good gag for a new one. One of the hardest things about writing comedy is that it depends on surprise for its effect. You’ll read your comic writing over and over again, until all the surprise is gone. Any joke you’ve written will get less and less funny until you can’t remember how you ever could have thought it was funny. It will seem like the stupidest, lamest joke in the world. You’ll replace it with something new that seems funnier to you. The new joke may not actually be as funny. But you’ve lost your perspective. That’s why so many comedy writers are partnered up.

If you’re not in a partnership, you just need to develop what the best editors have: the ability to forget you’ve seen or heard something. Until you have, use time. Time gives you perspective. Write up your replacement gag pitches. But don’t replace any of your jokes yet. Hide the script for a few days. Then read it again with your pitches handy. See if the new pitches are still funnier than the original joke. Only then should you swap out the old jokes for the new.

When many writers in a writing room pitch progressively unfunnier jokes for the same spot, it’s a joke spiral—think of an airplane caught in a stall/spin. That’s why some rooms enforce the concept of first blurt: the first funny joke pitch is the one that stays.

Learning to Be Funny

When you’re a stand-up comedian, you know your jokes are funny. You’ve heard people laughing at them. Every time you tweak your joke, you can get feedback. Was it funnier this way? How about that way? But when you’re writing comedy, you usually don’t have that kind of feedback. You have the other writers’ reactions. If you’re working on a three-camera sitcom shot in front of a studio, after the first taping you can use the audience’s reaction to help you rewrite for the second taping.

Unfortunately, as John Rogers points out, “studio audiences can actually hurt you. There’s an intimacy to a live audience. You can manipulate that chemistry. Jokes are funny on their feet. They get an honest laugh.” But the jokes may not be working for the audience watching the show on their television. They have not been helpfully warmed up by a comic beforehand. Comedy is like a flywheel, say the Zucker Brothers (Airplane): it is always easier to keep people laughing than to get people laughing. About all you can do is trust your comic craft, honed from watching people’s reactions to your jokes and comic situations, to know what’s actually funny and what’s not.

Stand-up Comedy

Probably nothing is better training for comedy writing than doing stand-up comedy. You’ll die onstage a million times, but you’ll get an immediate gut sense of what’s funny, and you’ll learn how to work and rework a joke for maximum laughs.

There is no real obstacle to doing stand-up, other than fear. Looks are irrelevant to comedy. Drew Carey isn’t a looker. Bill Cosby has a goofy face. Beauty may actually be an obstacle to a male comic: How many positively good-looking male comedians can you name?

You don’t have to do stand-up. Many comedy writers don’t. You may be shy. You may have no desire to get up onstage and humiliate yourself for years until you get the hang of it. You may be better at writing for other people than for yourself. If you’re a man but your best characters are all women, stand-up may not work for you, unless you look good in a skirt.

Stand-up or no, though, what all good comedy writers need is firsthand experience in what makes audiences laugh. The only way to know for sure if a joke is funny is by trying it out on an audience. Since you don’t always have an audience handy when you’re writing TV, you have to develop a general sense of what brings the funny, and how to refine a joke so that it gets funnier. Noel Coward probably practiced at his parents’ dinner parties. Doing improv in college is helpful. Being the small kid in the schoolyard is helpful, especially when you’re going to school with future criminals. Lots of comedians seem to have graduated from the “I’m funny, don’t hurt me” school of comedy.

Working on a live comedy show in any capacity will help—whether a taped TV show or live theater comedy—if you get to see how the jokes are refined from performance to performance. If nothing else, take a comedy writing workshop, and try out your material on your fellow writers.