Lesson 5 - Jokes and Specifics

Consistently strong joke-writing and use of comedic specifics will take your humor writing to the next level.

Mariam Chagelishvili is brilliant.

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This is lesson 5 of 8 from Alex Baia’s Forever Workshop “Humor Writers, Get in Here!”

Today we learn:

• 3 trustworthy ways to craft a piece full of solid jokes

• The specifics that make a humor piece stand out

• An easy upgrade to make your writing more interesting

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Welcome back, humorists. We’re past the half-way mark, and now that we’re actually writing headlines and drafts, that means we ARE humorists. That’s pretty cool.

Today is lesson five, and it’s a good one. We’re talking about two key elements of funny writing: joke-writing and comedic specifics.

Both of these topics are ones I’d label, “obvious in retrospect” or “obvious when you say them out loud.” And yet many, many beginning humorists run into trouble here.

Strong, consistent joke-writing, infused with great comedic specifics, will take your humor writing so far. So let’s get into it.

1. Write strong jokes

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It may seem obvious, but it’s worth stating and repeating four hundred times: A humor piece is built from atomic elements, and those atoms are jokes. A setup and a punchline. To write a good humor piece, your jokes must land. To write a great humor piece, your jokes must kick ass. They should be surprising and funny.

Read Handey’s “Job Rejection,” and you will see that every beat of the piece contains at least one strong joke. E.g., 

“You got the job! That’s probably what you were hoping this letter would say, but it doesn’t because you didn’t.”

That’s classic Handey: his jokes are economical, expressing a surprising twist in few words. In another Handey piece, “My Hydrogen Car,” here’s how he sets up the first paragraph:

Like you, I had heard the various complaints against hydrogen-powered cars. “They blow up,” said one friend. “They explode,” said another. “They shoot apart to the internal blasting,” said a foreigner friend.

That’s three strong jokes in 32 words, and that’s just the first paragraph. That’s tight humor writing.

So how do you write great jokes? Whoa boy, that’s tough to answer. Joke writing is so often done by feel and by lots of repetition and failed attempts.

But in my experience, here are three trustworthy ways to land a piece full of solid jokes: