How to Make Your Lines as Funny as Your Pages

Thoughts on Joke Writing

Today, I’m talking about jokecraft. I don’t pretend to be the best joke writer — I never did any stand up and I find monologues particularly hard to write — but I’ve picked up a few things here and there that are valuable for any kind of comedy writing.

We’re leaving behind the macro concepts of game and structure for the micro world of word choice and sentence construction. It’s nitpicky, and fussy, and you yourself are also nitpicky and fussy, you may find it kind of fun.

1. Generate Jokes the Same Way You Do Sketch Ideas

Jokes are all about managing expectations. Setups and punchlines. With one line you lead the audience to expect one thing, and with the next you subvert those expectations. But what are you setting up? And what are you twisting to? Where the hell do these jokes come from?

My approach to crafting jokes is a lot like my approach to brainstorming sketch premises. You’re looking for surprising truth, paradoxes, hypocrisy, contradictions, and patterns. But instead of building off your own experiences, you’re building off the lines you already wrote in your first draft. Boring, expository lines can become the setups to great jokes if you start looking for missing punchlines. Find a spot that looks like it’s missing a laugh and ask yourself the same questions you might when brainstorming premises: does this line suggest a pattern you can continue or subvert? Could the opposite meaning of the line also be true in a specific context? Does this line point toward a surprising truth?

If you can answer these questions, you can understand the twist at the heart of your joke. And just as understanding your game will help you sharpen the sketch as a whole, understanding the twist of a joke, will help you refine it into a perfect line.

2. Don’t Explain Your Joke

You must understand your joke, and of course you want the audience to understand it too, but you can’t just give them the explanation outright. They need to arrive at the same conclusion on their own. Trust that if you give the audience all the pieces of a puzzle, they can assemble it into a coherent picture because solving this puzzle is where so much joy in comedy comes from. If you complete the puzzle for the audience then you rob them of the experience they came for. It won’t be funny.

So leave as much of your jokes unsaid as you can. Give them only half the equation. Remember that comedy doesn’t actually live on the page, it lives in the mind of your audience.

3. Simplicity is best.

If a joke is a puzzle for your audience to solve, you need to make it the easiest puzzle in the world. Don’t give them pieces they won’t use. Don’t make the shapes too complicated. Don’t give them too many pieces. You want them to make the connection on their own… but you also want to be sure they actually make the connection. This means you want to choose the words that will aid understanding and reject those that foster confusion:

Use fewer words: ‘nuff said.
Use shorter words: “That guy ain’t so smart” is a punchier line than “That gentleman isn’t very intelligent.”
Use simpler sentences: If your lines have a lot of parentheticals (like this), or prepositional phrases in every sentence, or any kind of dependent clause, which is almost always confusing, or unnecessary, redundant, repetitive adjectives — knock that shit out. Audiences will get lost searching for meaning in complex sentences. Simple sentences are funnier sentences.

Remember these three things when you revise. You can almost always simplify the grammar and wording of a joke to make it funnier.¹

4. Keep it Tight

The more distance there is between your setup and your punchline, the less likely it is that the joke will land. Subvert expectations as quickly as you set them. The shortest possible distance between setup and punchline is “no distance.” This happens when you see a visual that subverts a simultaneous spoken line. The next shortest destance is the line following the setup. Any distance greater than that is probably too far away.

5. End the line on the “best” word

The last word in a line carries the most weight, so you should choose it carefully. The best word is usually the one that reveals the surprise. This ensures that the most powerful moment of the joke, the word that triggers a laugh, comes at the last possible moment, right before a natural pause in the dialogue.

It also makes all the laughs come at the same time. A lot of audience members will naturally wait until the end of a line to laugh. If you put your strongest word in the middle of the sentence some people will laugh immediately while others will wait. You’ll get a bunch of small, spread-out laughs instead of one immediate big one. Let your punchlines punch. End strong!

6. Pay Attention to Parallelism

Strong games are built on strong patterns. Strong jokes are built on parallel structures. Your brain naturally connects repeated words and sentence constructions, which you can use to make an unexpected juxtaposition of opposites, or to build a pattern you can then subvert. If you’re doing this, make sure your parallelism is truly parallel. Make your wording and grammar consistent.

7. Remember that the rules aren’t rules

Rules of comedy aren’t sacrosanct, and even if they were, they’re constantly changing. Even the other points in this post can probably be safely ignored under many circumstances. But I think it’s worth considering why someone would suggest that something is “a rule” in the first place.

A common one is the “rule of threes,” which says that things are funnier in threes: once to set up an action, twice to establish a pattern, and a third time to break that pattern. I think this is often true, but sometimes it’s fun to intentionally break this rule. Audiences are pretty savvy. If they’re aware of the rule of threes you might get more surprise by putting the pattern break at the second example. Or add a fourth one.

You might have also heard people mention “comedy Ks".” This is the idea that words with “K” sounds in them are funnier. I think this is absolute horse shit. Buuuuuut…

I do think some sounds are funnier in a way I can’t explain. I think the word “goose” is funnier than the word “swan.” I think the “slurp” is funnier than “drink.” “Bees” are funnier than “hornets.” A lot of this is personal, and I suspect some of it might be generational or historical. Maybe at some point “K” sounds were god damn hilarious. I don’t know. I certainly don’t think they are now, but I do think it’s worth considering whether the specific word you chose is the funniest, or if some synonymous word sounds just a little bit funnier in some inexplicable way.

8. Beware Joke-Adjacent Areas

Comedy is filled with things like rhyme, alliteration, and references to other works. These things adorn jokes like sprinkles on a cupcake. But don’t mistake the sprinkles for the main dessert. A rhyme by itself is not a joke, nor are any of the other things mentioned above. I wish this were not the case — it’s much easier to make rhymes and references than it is to make a good joke. They’re also not as much fun. Don’t settle for almost-a-joke; work for the real thing.

9. Avoid “Done” Jokes

I’m not talking about joke theft (though that’s obviously shitty); I’m talking about avoiding memes and stereotypes. If there’s an observation that has been made a million times and repeated a million more, there’s simply no reason to do it again. Memes, stereotypes, and hack jokes persist in comedy because they harness the power of repetition. “Here’s something you’ve seen before, maybe you’ll laugh when you see it again!” And some people might. But these jokes rely so much on repetition that they no longer carry surprise. Sometimes they no longer feel truthful either. They are zombie jokes, lifeless shells that still shamble along killing everything around them. Avoid them!

10. Some Jokes to Consider

For me, nothing has better jokes than classic episodes of The Simpsons. This is obviously not a sketch show, but it does have scenes that operate like standalone set pieces. The following is one of my favorites.

Look at how many jokes are jammed into these two-and-a-half minutes: verbal jokes, visual jokes, and combinations of the two. There are jokes that poke fun at hypocrisy and jokes that rely on the unsaid and the unseen. There’s a “broken” rule of threes with four items. There are jokes that lean on parallelism with words like “crazy” and “tripe.” I think every joke in this scene has its own lesson to teach about joke writing.

1. If you want to practice this, Twitter’s character limit is a great way to force yourself into brevity.