Episode 33 | How to Write a Joke

It's the How to Write Funny podcast. This is Scott Tickers. On this episode, no guest. I'm just going to talk about how to write a joke. How do you write funny? Literally.

This is a mystery to a lot of people who are new to comedy and don't know where to get ideas, don't know how to come up with funny stuff. So I'm going to go way back to the bare bones fundamentals. On the last solo episode of the podcast, I talked about three fundamentals of comedy writing. Those are fundamental, but what I'm talking about here is probably even more fundamental. This is how you compose something that's funny.

A lot of people wonder, well, how do you come up with ideas? How do you generate jokes out of nothing? This is how. This is exactly the process for generating jokes out of nothing. What I want to stress here is that this is not magic. It's a craft. And anyone can learn it. Anyone can get good at it. The reason why some people, professional comedians, for example, seem to be able to just craft funny things off the top of their head instantly and be super funny is not because they're...

any smarter than the rest of us. They're not any more of a genius than the rest of us, necessarily. They've just done it a lot. They've gone through this process, which I'm going to walk through in this episode. which we're going to do very slowly. And sometimes when I write, I do it very slowly. But other times I can have a funny thing come to me pretty quickly because I've also been doing it for a long time. But we can all probably say that at some point or other in our lives, we've...

said or done something or written something that was really funny in the moment. And either we got lucky or the stars aligned. But what happened was we took this long process of how you compose something funny. And we condensed it. So professional comedians, people who are super funny, who are so impressive at how quick their minds are, have just had more practice. And they've internalized the process.

It's instinctual for them now. Now, that being said, they're not going to do it in 100% of the cases. Sometimes they're going to say something that they think is funny. They go through the process really quickly in their mind. And it comes out and it fails with the audience. They might try this on stage when they're doing some improv or they're doing some crowd work or they're trying out new material and it won't work. So a big part of the process, and this comes at the end.

is testing it. So you go through this process where you try to come up with something funny and you do your best to go through the best practices. But at the end, you have to test it because if audiences don't find it funny, it doesn't work.

So if you want a shortcut to this, you can go to how to write funny dot com slash joke. And you can get the joke writing cheat sheet that I put together that condenses this whole process into one sheet. that you can print out and fill out anytime you want to write a joke, or you can just use it as a PDF and enter the information in the document. Again, that's howtorightfunny.com slash joke.

And if you want a deeper drill down on how to write a joke with all the details that you would need, then you need to get my book, How to Write Funny, which explains the whole process in great detail with all sorts of other... tips for maximizing the laugh potential of any joke that you write. How to Write Funny is available on Amazon. It's in Kindle, paperback, and audiobook. Very reasonably priced.

So here's the process. I'm going to go through it with a random example that I have not written or thought up beforehand. I'm just going to do it off the cuff and you'll see that A big part of the process is not very funny. The process of creating humor and crafting it is not a particularly laugh-filled process. It's very intellectual.

It happens in your mind where you put all these pieces together. And then when it comes out, hopefully it's funny. Hopefully it makes people laugh. That's when the laugh part comes. The construction part, the craft part. is just kind of boring craft but if you want to get good at it this is the process that you need to practice so the first thing you need is something to say you need an opinion

What is your opinion about any given subject? So to start, I'm going to just come up with an opinion. What do I think? What am I feeling right now? Let's see the weather. is too cold right now for April. That's an opinion I have. Our politics has gotten insane. That's another opinion I have. Do I have an opinion about anything that's not a current event, just like the state of being a person? I always try to focus on an opinion that's universal and not one that's localized or...

ephemeral that's going to disappear tomorrow. It's going to be irrelevant. I think the best jokes are going to be based on an opinion about human nature or society or something like that. So what's my opinion about that? What do I think about human society? I think we're all dumb apes trying to act like we're smart. I think we forget how much we stand on the shoulders of others before us. People who came up with ideas first and wrote them down.

And then we learned those things. What are some other opinions I have about being a person? Sometimes we have anxiety. Sometimes we feel like we're not good enough. Like just the last couple of days, I've just sort of felt like bleh. Like haven't felt like I've been at my best. Haven't felt super confident. So what's my opinion about that? The trick is you want to get at the opinion.

So it's good to search your soul, look at your emotions, look at things around you. One opinion I would grab from that is, so if I'm not feeling confident or if I'm not feeling particularly inspired or... just kind of blue, the opinion might be, well, why do I deserve that? Why am I in that position? Maybe my opinion is, I'm annoying to be around. I'm not nice enough to people. I'm too selfish. Let's go with that. I'm too selfish. Or I guess if we want to extrapolate that, humans are selfish.

That's my opinion, and that's a universal opinion because everybody feels selfish sometimes. People can relate to that. And it's self-depreciating, which is always good if you're doing first-person humor, like with the pronoun I. So that's the opinion I've chosen. It can be any opinion, any opinion you have about anything. But the qualifiers are, number one, try to make it universal so everyone can relate to it.

Number two, try to make sure it's not a local or small or in joke that only a certain collection of people are going to understand the reference. So it should be broad. and somewhat evergreen as well. So it's not about the current weather, which I went through and kind of rejected, or a current event that people are going to forget about.

a matter of you know the next 24-hour news cycle so now what we do now that we have our opinion we're going to make that the subtext of a joke now before i get any further I want to define what I mean by joke. In the modern comedy world a joke is any short phrase or collection of words that elicits a laugh. That's a joke. In the old days, a joke was like a little story where you'd say,

Did you hear the one about the three rabbis who walk into a bar? And then there might be more to the story, and then there's going to be a punchline at the end. That's a very old school, hokey, quote unquote, joke. That, you know, those things still go around, but in professional comedy work, that's not really considered a joke. That's a very amateur level, little mini story, little vignette.

that might elicit a laugh. But in professional circles, in the comedy industry, a joke is literally just any collection of words that elicits a laugh. The shorter the phrase or the amount of words, the better. because that means it's super tight and super efficient. And being able to elicit laughs with fewer words is kind of a high calling in comedy. It means you're doing really high-level work.

But if you're talking about like a monologue joke on a late night talk show, often that's just that, a collection of phrases that gets people to laugh. It can be a sentence or what it is most often in those cases. is a setup and a punchline. But sometimes the setup is just the first clause of the sentence. So it might be, did you hear today that the president did X, Y, and Z? Comma. Then you say the punchline's something funny.

A tweet can be a joke. A little offhanded comment that you make in person can be a joke. So we're not here constructing stories. We're not here constructing scenarios about... three rabbis walking into a bar or whatever. And we're definitely not constructing puns, which are also sometimes something people confuse for jokes. A pun can be funny, can be a part of a joke. But a joke is not just a pun. In fact, most of the time, puns aren't funny because there's no subtext. People who tell...

strictly pun-based jokes are just trying to amuse people with the fact that a word has two meanings, which is just not very astute or very interesting or very intelligent. That said, puns are part of wordplay.

which is one of the 11 funny filters. And that's the next step. Now that we have our opinion, we need to filter that opinion through one of 11 funny filters. So humor comes in 11 different forms. There's only 11. And for a joke to be professional caliber funny, it has to use one or more of these 11 funny filters. Now it can combine them. So you could have potentially.

an almost infinite number almost infinite i don't know how many uh possible combinations of funny filters you could have with 11 but it's a lot so we're going to go through each one of the 11 and we're going to filter this subtext that i have this opinion through each one and see what comes out of it ideally what's going to happen is we're going to have have 11 different collections of words that

hopefully are funny. And by using the funny filters, we're forcing this opinion to be expressed in a comedic way. And then from that list of 11, we're going to find... you know one or two that are pretty good or okay and we're going to finesse them to try to make them into a good funny line and i'll tweet the line out when i'm done and see what happens see what kind of reaction i get but this is the process

This is the process that goes through a comedy writer or a comedy performer's mind when they're constructing a joke for the first time. They tap an opinion, and then they filter it through one of these 11 funny filters, one or more. And again, if they've done this a lot, it's instinctive for them. They don't necessarily have to do it consciously. It just really quickly goes through this little machine process where the opinion goes through one or more of the funny filters.

comes out the other end as a joke. They try the joke. They get a reaction. That's it. That's the process. And a lot of these aren't going to be funny because part of the process of crafting a joke is... you have to create volume you have to create an enormous quantity of attempted humor in order to sift through it after and find the gems so part of the process is

being comfortable with coming up with things that maybe aren't going to be that funny at first, when you first say them. So, continuing this incredibly slowed down version of the process, my opinion is, I'm selfish. We'll use the first funny filter on that, which is irony. These are in no particular order. I'm just going to use ones that are a little easier to work with first. So we use irony. I am selfish.

A way to state that ironically, in other words, having it be the opposite of the intended meaning, would be to say that I am a completely selfless person. We can heighten that. We can heighten the contrast in that by saying, I am so selfless that I'm going to kill myself. Or I am the most selfless person who ever lived. Now that gives me an idea to compound the irony and say something like, I am the most selfless person that ever lived. Aren't I awesome? Or I deserve an award.

for being the most selfless person ever. So that's irony. Now we move on to the second funny filter, which is character. So to use character, you... Either invent a fictional character or adopt a real-life character, or use the character of the writer if it's in first person or the performer. And then you need to show that character acting on their traits in order to communicate the subtext.

So we've got a character inherent in this subtext already, I am selfish. So how do we create a character out of it? Well, you could have a selfish person. acting selfishly. So maybe you could make a character archetype out of that. And you could have that character doing things. You could ascribe that character to someone well-known, a celebrity, a politician.

And you could have them acting in a super selfish way. Example. Let's take Jeff Bezos. Richest man in the world. He has like $150 billion. And he's never offered me any of that money. That's selfish. So I could finesse that. I could make that into a short joke. And I can see spinning that out into a bit or a short comedy piece. Jeff Bezos, you need to stop being so selfish. And then make it all about me and about how I want his money, which...

communicates the subtext that I am selfish. Moving on to the next funny filter, reference. So to use reference, you just have to point out an everyday occurrence that just about anyone can relate to. So now I need to think of an everyday occurrence that I can somehow connect with being selfish. So a guy just came into my apartment to fix my stove.

and he wore too much cologne, and he stank, and it bothered me. Is there something selfish about that? Like, maybe even just the idea of wearing cologne. How selfish is that, that people... put this awful stinking stuff on their body and then everyone around them has to smell it. That's selfish. We ideally want to get the idea of being selfish in...

the subtext, so it's not actually stated overtly. That's how jokes work. The point needs to be unset. It needs to be communicated only subtextually. So you might say something like... and change the situation. So now I'm not in my apartment anymore. Maybe I'm on mass transit. So I really appreciate the consideration of this person next to me on the bus.

for wearing enough cologne for both of us so making a joke about that person being selfish thinking only of their own scent and not caring how other people might perceive their scent Or you could state it as a fact and not a scenario. You could just say, people who wear too much cologne are inconsiderate because they're seducing me against my will. Because they're seducing me against my will.

with their captivating scent. So there I'm adding new subtext. The subtext is, I don't like cologne. I don't like how it smells. And using irony to... illustrate that point by pointing out the opposite. Does my original subtext come in there somehow? That people are selfish? A little bit.

But as we're in this sort of improvisational stage where we're just trying different funny filters with our subtext, sometimes you're going to veer from the opinion. And that's fine. It happens. We're just spitballing here. And the point is to end up with... 11 lines that could be funny that are workable. So next we move on to shock. The shock funny filter is any kind of drugs, sex, violence, swearing.

anything that's mildly shocking this is usually pretty easy now you can do shock humor without going blue blue is what they call comedy that is really shocking and offensive and uses a lot of are an x-rated language or concepts but you can use shock and pg humor or uh corporate humor or just like mainstream humor by just throwing in a little bit of a touchy subject or, you know, slightly bit of a maybe a racy language. And so let's try that. So I'm selfish.

What's a shocking way to say that you're selfish? You could say other people only think of themselves, the selfish pricks. prick is an incredibly mild form of shock. And that would be great. That'd be fine for a kind of mainstream or corporate or family audience or whatever.

And it points out some irony as well. So we're throwing in a little irony. It's almost impossible to home in on just one funny filter. You're almost always going to have two or three sneak in some way or other. But let's try this again. something shocking about being selfish. I'm tired of all the selfish people around me not doing exactly what I want. Okay, so there's more irony.

we didn't get any shock in that one if you wanted to put a little shock in it and this honestly really works to amp up the laugh meter on any line it's just throwing a little swear so you could say I'm tired of all these selfish fucking assholes who aren't doing exactly what I ask. Or who aren't bending to my will. Or who aren't giving in to my every whim. So...

That's an irony-filled shock joke that has the subtext, I'm selfish. Now, some of this is maybe only going to work for me. Because I came up with this opinion, so it's my opinion. And the jokes are being filtered through my brain. So when they come out, they're going to elucidate my comic persona. So I have not done standup very long at all. I've been writing for decades and I've usually hid behind other brands or personas. So I'm just now discovering what my persona is and I'm noticing.

that my persona is very much sort of this full of himself, maybe somewhat cruel person. And that's, again, that's just me. That's my... maybe, my comic persona being formed. Everybody else is going to have something different, and it's going to depend on kind of the general vibe that you give off or the general look that you have.

You know, I'm like a bald guy and people tell me that I come off kind of intense and I don't laugh or smile a lot. So those things all dovetail nicely into a persona of somebody who's kind of. mean, sort of a hard ass, being unforgiving of other people. So these jokes may work for my persona, but they may not work for someone else's.

And I wouldn't recommend you try these at all. This is just all for demonstration. We're just going through this process to see how it works. The next funny filter is hyperbole. So hyperbole is... exaggeration so grandiose and so absurd that it goes beyond reality. This is when you say something like, I am so selfish that and then insert some really outrageous exaggeration that is impossible. So what's an impossible level of selfishness that I could have? I could be so selfish that...

I want to be the only person on the earth. I'm so selfish that I don't even care about being selfish. I'm so selfish that I don't recognize other people's right to exist. So I'm barking up a very direct tree here, and I'm wondering if re-inserting irony again. Or reinserting any other funny filter could help make this funnier. With irony, then I would be saying, I'm so selfless. So that's going to communicate.

my subtext so much better i can already feel it because already that's kind of an absurd thing for somebody it's a selfish thing for somebody to say i am so selfless and then what would the joke be That I would give a child all my money if he were me having gone through a time machine. Or... I would give a charity all my money so long as it's the Scott Dickers Foundation. Okay, so that communicates my subtext and it uses...

It also uses reference because it's a reference to the Trump Foundation. That's pretty good for hyperbole. We could be here all day trying to come up with a really good impossible level of exaggeration. It's hard. It's really hard to come up with hyperboles. But we'll try one more. And I'm going to stick with irony. I'm so selfless. I would lay down my life.

If they paid me enough. I'm so selfless. Or maybe we don't even have to state the opposite of selfishness to use irony. We can use an analogy. We haven't gotten to that one yet, but just go with me on this. I am doing my part. I'm proud of the fact that I'm doing my part. By adding proud, I heightened the contrast there a little bit, which is just a little tool you can use to increase the irony in any joke.

I'm proud that I'm doing my part to mitigate the effects of climate change to save future generations. I'm recycling my tinfoil cheeseburger wrapper. I'm recycling my... gas station receipts. So a little bit of reference there, a lot of irony with the heightened contrast, and clearly I'm not being

I'm being selfish. So a couple of different layers of irony with the heightened contrast between the saving the earth versus a gas station receipt. There's a lack of awareness there where I'm clearly using. fossil fuels because I have a gas station receipt. So we've got a couple layers of irony and a reference, but is it hyperbole? Did we exaggerate to beyond the point of logic?

Not really. We're still sort of hovering around hyperbole. Going to try one more to see if we can reach the point of impossibility. So going with the gas station again, I could say... I'm doing my part to save the world from climate change. I believe we need to leave the fossil fuels in the ground. That's why when I go to a gas station, I just turn on the pump and let it drain into the ground. Okay, so that's stupid. So we've got the dummy character archetype at work. We've got irony.

because we're doing the opposite of saving the earth by just dumping gas into the ground. And we've got hyperbole because it's impossible that that could possibly get all the fossil fuels back into the ground. Okay. Spent a lot of time on hyperbole. That is a tough one. To come up with impossible exaggeration is really hard. But it helped us to add in some of the other funny filters, as you can see.

Number six, funny filter is parody. With parody, we ape another format of information or entertainment to get our point across. To communicate the subtext, I am selfish. We can parody a Broadway musical. You should come to my one-man show, I Am Not Selfish. That's okay. That's short. It has irony. It has parody. We're parodying a theatrical presentation. And we're communicating our subtext. All right, that one was surprisingly easy. So now...

We move on to number seven, wordplay. Wordplay is always tricky because when you just use puns or simple wordplay, jokes can come off as really hokey and it's really tough to communicate subtext. Wordplay is similar to shock in that you really want to use it with good subtext. So our subtext is okay. For this one, we might want to elevate it to, you know, human beings in general are a selfish species.

and see if we can come up with some wordplay. So what I would start to do to come up with a wordplay joke for this is list a bunch of words that I would associate with humans being selfish. So, humans... use up all their natural resources. They hoard national resources. Maybe there's a wordplay in the word hoard.

I mean, the only word I can think of that's similar to that off the top of my head is whore. It doesn't really have a past tense, but there might be something in that. This is a hard thing to do verbally. This is the sort of thing I would definitely be easier... with writing down because then you can make a list of words you can look at them you can see what kind of letters they use and you can see if they match up with a word that's related to your subtext

But coming up with a word that's unrelated to your subtext might allow you to make a connection and see if you can find a way to make that funny. There's other types of wordplay you can use, though, besides puns. You can use double entendre. You can use funny sounding words. You can use made up words. You can use word repetition. You could say, I'm the most selfless person in the world. I'm.

so selfless that even the most selfless person is less selfless than me. Okay, that doesn't really work. Selfless is just not a funny word. What are words that are similar to the word selfish? Shelf life. So human beings have a short shelf life because they're selfish. There might be something in there. Human selfishness leads to short human shelf lifeness. Oof, that's very clunky. But it counts. We've got 11, so...

Funny filter number eight, analogy. Now to use analogy, which we already did in one of our hyperbole jokes, but we're going to try to do a dedicated analogy joke here. We need to compare two disparate things and then map. the tropes, phrases, and common themes of one onto the other without referencing the first. That's how analogy works. So what's an analogy for...

human beings being selfish. I'm going to stick to the broader subtext here of the entire human race and not just me. What's an analogy for that? Well, I can't help but think of that great scene in The Matrix. when Agent Smith created an analogy saying that the human race was a virus. And he found all these comparisons to show how the human race...

consumes its resources and then moves on to another area and consumes those resources, much like a virus does to its host. So that's a common analogy that you see in... hardcore Earth-first environmentalist thinking. And it might be a little bit too well-worn to work for a joke. But there might be a way in there. You could say...

We're looking for a cure for cancer. The earth is looking for a cure for human. You might be able to work in a wordplay there, too, if you can come up with a word that... sounds like cancer or virus, but means human. Again, I'd want to write down a list of the words and compare, and then I would have a joke something like...

Or this could be a cartoon, too, like the Earth shows up at the doctor and says, I've got a bad case of the humans, or I've got a bad case of civilization. Now there's a word I could... sink my teeth into because there's probably some kind of disease that sounds like civilization and then you could maybe combine the words and the earth could be saying something like uh doctor can i get some

medication for my yeah what's nothing's jumping to mind a word for an ailment or a disease that sounds like civilization or humans or human infestation But there's got to be something. Eczema, cancer. Unless you want to get too shocking, you don't want to use anything too touchy, like... AIDS or breast cancer or any kind of disease that historically has targeted an oppressed minority, that would not be good. Then you're afflicting the afflicted.

which violates one of the rules of satire, which is you need to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, otherwise nobody's laughing at the joke because it's perceived as too mean. So, I feel like we're on to something here.

The earth goes into the doctor. Vox populi is so similar to pox. There's something in there. You could just say the earth is experiencing all these... heightened hurricanes and wildfires and other effects of climate change that's like now if you're doing a stand-up bit you do analogy a little bit differently you use it more like simile so you would say like

And you would say it's like, that's just like you going into the doctor with an itch. And all these hurricanes and these extreme weather events, release of methane. From the poles, the melting ice caps, that's just the Earth's itch. And all these hurricanes and extreme weather events like wildfires are just the Earth applying a cream.

Okay, so that's an analogy. Number nine is madcap. This is where we get silly and we try to think of a wacky physical or non sequitur type of reference. to communicate our subtext and here again we want strong subtext with madcap otherwise it's just silliness for silliness's sake which is probably going to entertain a lot of really young kids but it's going to seem pretty empty for

any older joke consumer. So what's something wacky and funny and silly that you could use to communicate I am selfish? Well, you could fall. You could get bonked on the head. You could do something stupid to yourself to mitigate. your selfishness. So if you're performing, doing stand-up, you could say, people think I'm selfish. People say I'm selfish. I don't see it. The other day, I fell down the escalator.

And I took like 30 people with me. You know, I got them down faster. Okay, so that's illustrating the subtext of I am selfish, throwing in a lot of physical humor, because you're seeing a lot of people get... toss down an escalator. Not the funniest thing I've ever come up with, but we're just going through the motions here. This is how you do it. You just go through each one and you try to come up with something that at least satisfies the requirements of that funny filter.

Then you go through later and assess them. Number 10, misplaced focus. Here, we want to misdirect the audience by focusing on something other than the subtext, but in a way that makes them think of the subtext. So some of our other jokes have had this kind of misdirection, but here we're going to try to do it more directly. So you could say something like, I'm a wonderful person.

care for those people around me as long as they're paying me. And I contribute to my local community, which is a wonderful way for me to feel. a tax write-off, which is a wonderful way that just gives me this warm feeling of tax write-off is what it makes me feel. So... You could go through maybe a list of two or three things that you do. And by you, I mean me. In this case, I could just go through a bunch of things that I do.

that I think are nice and kind and good or decent, just like how I get along in the world. But each one in turn is clearly me acting really selfish, but I'm not mentioning my selfishness. I'm avoiding the topic. by talking about all these other things that then make the audience add two and two and say, oh, I get it, he's selfish. And just by misplacing the focus like that, it makes people laugh at the subtext that you're trying to communicate.

I mean, when it works. This joke may not work. It hasn't been tested. The final funny filter is metahumor. This is where we make fun of the idea of humor, or make fun of other humor.

And it works best when the subtext that we're expressing has something to do with humor. When it doesn't, you can just throw it in in kind of a general way. A really... accessible form of metahumor is somebody laughing at their own jokes or finding a joke funny or finding a joke not funny you're commenting on the idea of humor when you do that so

Just the idea that I'm trying to come up with a joke about how selfish I am. There's a joke right there. I could say I tried to come up with a joke about how selfish I am, but I couldn't think of anything. There's a way to finesse that. What I mean is, what I want to try to say is I couldn't think of anything because I'm so selfish that I don't even realize how selfish I am.

So how would you phrase that? Somebody made a joke at my expense the other day. They were trying to say I was selfish. I didn't think it was funny. Or you could add shock and say somebody made a joke the other day about how selfish and humorless I am and they were cracking up. My response was I killed them. So that communicates that I'm selfish and also that I'm humorless. We're adding more subtext. And it adds shock because it introduces the concept of...

killing someone for telling a joke. So metahumor, shock, and obviously a little bit of character since I'm being an incredibly selfish person and I'm showing myself acting on that trait. Okay, so...

I didn't write any of this down. I just was speaking off the cuff. So I'm not going to go through the next and final stage of the process, which would be to go through each of those. 11. I probably have more than 11 because I think I came up with two or three jokes for some of these funny filters. So I may have as many as 20 to 25 different jokes here. Joke attempts.

And what I would next want to do is I'd want to go through and read them all and see which ones I liked, see which ones still struck me as kind of funny after forgetting about them for a little while. And then I'd want to test them. So after I listen to this, I'm going to pick one, the one that I think is the most workable, and I'm going to tweet it just to see if anybody likes it or if it gets retweeted or whatever.

Twitter has very low engagement. I don't have a huge amount of followers, but I have some. I have like between four and five thousand. And when I get a tweet, if I tweet out a joke and it gets, you know, a handful of likes. I know it's doing pretty well. And I've heard friends of mine who have like a million Twitter followers, they might get 5,000 likes on a joke that they would tweet out. That's considered pretty good.

For a lot of Twitter accounts that have a million followers. So what is that? That's not even 1%. 1% of a million is, what, 10% or 10,000? Yeah, that's like 1%. So for me, 1% would be like 40, 40 likes. So if I got 40 likes on a joke on Twitter, I would consider that to be an astounding success. So...

You know, at most, on average for me, if I do a joke and I put it out there and I feel like it gets a good response, I'm getting maybe between 10 and 20 likes. But most of the jokes, they don't do that well because it's a volume game. game of quantity. So most of the stuff I'll put out might get less than 10. And, you know, could that work in front of an audience? Maybe. Could it work as the headline for a story? Maybe.

But I definitely know a joke is not working if I tweet it and I only get two likes. I can definitely say that that's not a winner. So that's one way that I test. If you're a stand-up, you can obviously test things on an open mic night. You can test stuff with friends. There's so many different ways to test jokes. But that's the next important step in the process.

And if it works, if people laugh, then you have successfully written a joke. The more you do it, the quicker you get at it, the more astute you are, the quicker your wits. And... If you do it long enough, practice enough, pretty soon you're going to be able to do it so quickly that people are going to say, well, he's a genius because he just comes up with this stuff off the top of his head.

But you know the inner workings. You know that you're coming up with an opinion and then you're filtering it through a funny filter and then you're vetting it and you're doing that a lot. So you're producing an enormous quantity that allows you to. seem as though you have an enormous quality, when really, you're just producing a lot more. Again, if you want a cheat sheet so you can do this on your own without having to memorize all these funny filters,

Just go to howtorightfunny.com slash joke and download your free cheat sheet so you can do this as many times as you want. And if you want to drill down even more, you can get the How to Write Funny book. which is available on Amazon. Thanks so much for listening. This is Scott Dickers signing off. Talk to you next time.