HOW TO BE FUNNY : SIX ESSENTIAL TIPS

So What Are The Six Steps To Being Funny?

Mel Helitzer’s Comedy Writing Secrets is commonly used as a textbook in college courses on comedy writing.

What does it say is the best method for how to be funny? Helitzer explains the “THREES” formula.

It’s an acronym for the six essential elements that are found in everything from good one-liners, to funny anecdotes to full comedy sets:

1. Target
2. Hostility
3. Realism
4. Exaggeration
5. Emotion
6. Surprise

Here’s a breakdown:

1) Target

Via Comedy Writing Secrets:

Humor is criticism cloaked as entertainment and directed at a specific target… A humor target can be almost anything or anybody, but you need to be sure you’ve focused on the right target for your particular audience… Humor is an attempt to challenge the status quo, but targeting must reaffirm the audience’s hostilities and prejudices…Successful humorists select targets with universal appeal.

Louis CK’s target here is his doctor. (Note — All videos are NSFW):

2) Hostility

Via Comedy Writing Secrets:

Humor is a powerful antidote to many of the hostile feelings in our daily lives. All of us have hostility toward some target… Comedy is cruel…some common sources of hostility (and therefore humor): authority, sex, money, family, angst, technology, and group differences.

Lewis Black, the king of comic hostility, unleashes a torrent of anger regarding the milk section of the supermarket (around 3 mins 16 seconds in):

3) Realism

Via Comedy Writing Secrets:

“Most good jokes state a bitter truth,” said scriptwriter Larry Gelbart. Without some fundamental basis of truth, there’s little with which the audience can associate.

Louis CK is quite harsh — but hysterical — when talking about his daughter (1min 29 seconds in.)

But it works because it contains elements any parent can relate to:

4) Exaggeration

Via Comedy Writing Secrets:

How does realism relate to exaggeration? As we accept poetic license, let’s accept a humor license that grants permission to expand on realistic themes with soaring imagination and unabashed metaphors…

Eddie Izzard explains World War 2. For many, history can be dry but he exaggerates and dramatizes key moments to lighten the subject matter:

5) Emotion

Via Comedy Writing Secrets:

There must be a buildup of anticipation in the audience. This is really nothing more than the writer’s skill in using emotion to produce tension and anxiety. It’s a trick. Think of hostility as an inflated balloon. When you create tension in your audience, you are effectively adding more and more air to that balloon, building the audience’s anticipation over when the balloon will burst.

Watch how Chris Rock leverages emotion to engage his audience:

6) Surprise

Via Comedy Writing Secrets:

…surprise (is) one of the primary reasons why people laugh. It’s no wonder then that it’s also one of the primary building blocks for a successful joke… “Comedy is mentally pulling the rug out from under each person in your audience,” wrote Gene Perret. “But first, you have to get them to stand on it. You have to fool them, because if they see you preparing to tug on the rug, they’ll move.”

UCLA film school professor Howard Suber says surprise is the key to all storytelling.

Jerry Stahl tells the story of how he managed to break his addiction to heroin… by switching to crack: