Be a Comedian: Advice About Nonsense and Opposites

The truth is usually funnier than nonsense. The funniest pages are those closest to the truth.

• Example: “Erik Estrada was born in 480182525234 BC to Chuck Norris and Oprah for the sole purpose of fucking up humanity.”

Stupid. Although possibly funny within the somewhat dry context of the page, without that contrast it lacks any kind of humor.

• Example: “Erik Estrada is an American television actor, known for a successful career in the California Highway Patrol following his retirement from the television, or ‘prostitution’ industry.”

Funnier because it’s closer to the truth. “CHiPS” was a real TV show. Blending fact with fiction, or blurring that line makes for better comedy. This is not a particularly hilarious line, but you get the idea.

Perhaps two-thirds of the articles are random nonsense. Little to nothing distinguishes them. Patent nonsense can be hilarious. It may get a laugh the first time, but it quickly gets dull. If someone types in “Frodo Baggins”, the article should have more to do with Frodo Baggins than if they typed in “Dinosaur“. They want to read a humorous slant on Frodo Baggins, not an article on a Dutch mink farmer with laser-beam eyes.

A longer, but still clever, article is better than spamming the index full of thousands of small one liners about giraffes and bathtubs. 

Keep this all in mind when you write an article, and things will be good.

• If all else fails, follow rule three, unless that also fails. Then you should stop writing and become a politician.

Some basic techniques of humor writing

• Repetition. This one is stupid, but it works. Say something over and over, and then repeat it, and then say it some more. Two or three times. Example: In his spare time, young Luke Skywalker enjoyed driving his land speeder, whining, shooting womp-rats, cruising for chicks in Mos Eisley, whining, nerf-herding, and whining. Sometimes, driving a joke into the ground makes it funnier. Other times, it just makes the joke dead, so please be careful, cautious, and vigilant if you decide to use this technique. And also be careful.

• Misdirection. A little more sophisticated and “witty” than repetition. Appears to go one direction with your writing, but ends up in a completely different place. For instance: Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. – Groucho Marx. If your readers see where you’re going with your joke, it won’t be as funny, but if they don’t see what’s coming, you can probably sift through their wallet before the paramedics arrive.

• Escalation: The key to the absurd style, but all around a good technique. Start out reasonable and sensible, then become increasingly extreme, irrational, and absurd. Example: Among the monastic sins listed by Saint Anselm are sodomy, bestiality, masturbation, dry-humping pillows, wearing clean underwear, touching oneself below the neck, heavy breathing, and approaching closer than 40 furlongs to a female of any mammalian species. Starting out absurd and staying that way is rarely funny. Absurdity can be funny, but it helps to work up to it from a serious, or at least, less-absurd starting point. This is true whether you’re dealing with a single sentence, a whole article, or putting live moray eels down your pants.
• Being Self-referential. Again, sort of an obvious technique but it can be funny. “Repetition” repeats, “Misdirection” veers off into Australia, “Escalation” escalates. See this article’s section on Being Self Referential.
• Understatement. For instance, “many people would say that the Holocaust was not a good thing”. Writing “OMG this kid in my class Joe Shmoe is so stupid!” is not as funny as taking a more understated approach such as “Joe Shmoe is not quite as intelligent as a mildly retarded woodchuck suffering from late-stage syphilis.” Not that you’re allowed to write about your classmates, though. An example is Coruscant, a “slightly overpopulated planet”. Not that the article is good, though.

• Reversal. Example: Local cancer loses battle with woman. Other example: Work is the curse of the drinking classes. – Oscar Wilde.

• Circularity. For an example, see Being Circular.

• Being Circular. For an example, see Circularity. (again, this is a dumb but effective technique, if it isn’t overused).

• Be silly about serious things. Examples include Segregation or Axis of Evil Hot Dog Eating Competition. This mostly goes along with the misdirection rule. If your article is going to be about a serious topic, write it from a loony perspective. An article on “Axis of Evil” sounds like it would have to do with current/historical events, but throwing a hot dog eating competition into the mix isn’t something you might expect.

• Be serious about silly things. Examples include Handgun and The GI Joe-Transformers War. Pretty much the opposite of the previous one. Folding your hand into a gun shape, pointing it, and going “bang bang!” isn’t something you’d expect to have a grave perspective, but it can really add to the humour of the article, especially when you step back and realize “wait a minute, they’re talking about robot Nazis! That’s completely ridiculous!” We don’t recommend you write an article on robot Nazis, however.

• The Straight Man. A common beginner’s mistake is to be ridiculous the whole way through. However, being serious is a vital part of being frivolous. They’re yin and yang, opposites that need each other. In a comic routine, this role is served by the ‘straight man’. Marge Simpson’s seriousness throws Homer’s idiocy into sharp relief; Graham Chapman plays his King Arthur completely deadpan, making the rest of Monty Python and the Holy Grail that much more absurd by comparison. Generally speaking, you’ll need some sections of your writing to serve as the “straight man”. These are all the non-joke things: the background information, facts or factual sounding statements, the stuff that builds up to and supports the jokes, the punchlines, the non-sequiturs and the bizarre twists, making them sound that much more brain damaged by comparison. If your goal is to sound like a lunatic, it helps to have a sane man in the room. Examples include Hiroshima and Fire hydrant.
• Write in a Consistent Style. Some articles read as if they’re been written by a college professor, many sound like they’re written by a mentally challenged 13-year-old, and most of the… well, it’s not entirely clear that these were written by something with opposable thumbs and no fingers. However it usually works best to write a single article in a single style. That is, you would read it and assume a single person wrote it. It should not read like paragraph 1 is the work of a five year old girl, paragraph 2 is the work of a crotchety old man, and paragraph 3 resulted from a collaboration by an epileptic goat, a squid with Alzheimer’s, and an emo kid. There are exceptions (say, writing on multiple personality disorder) but quality articles usually follow this rule. Even AAAAAAAAA! which lacks sentences, rudiments of grammar, words, and 25 of the 26 letters of the alphabet, follows this rule.
• State the Obvious– This rule can sometimes be hilarious, especially when the reader isn’t expecting it. Other times, it can just leave them with a soiled feeling when the joke falls flat. A good example is a picture of a gay rights protestor holding up a sign that says “Homosexuals are Gay“. See? You wouldn’t expect to see that. Use it sparingly; an entire article of obvious statements will just come across as kind of stupid.

Spend a Little Bit of Time

• If you spent ten seconds writing it, perhaps ten people will like it. If you spent ten minutes, you might have hundreds. Even though we’re full of lies and bullshit, the amount of work necessary to write a funny article may be on par with Wikipedia. The quality of our articles varies, but as a parody, it doesn’t mean our quality standard should drop, just that our content is different.
• Moreover, simple, unadorned lists are rarely funny. You know the type: “List of people who can’t spell” or “List of stupid things.” Sometimes simple lists can be useful in launching a broader idea, as in US Presidents, but trying to be funny by listing “people who Oscar Wilde hates” isn’t, well, funny. Or useful. If you must make a list, don’t make it a quickie; at least spend some time fleshing it out, like in Worst 100 Movies of All Time. Finally, make sure that most of the article’s content is not a list unless “List” is in the title. A ratio of about 95% content to 5% list might be acceptable.
• Research. A good chunk of stuff on here is random, and random can be funny. But the truly great articles require a bit of research. In order to effectively parody or satirize a subject, do some research on the real thing first, and your jokes will be better and actually make sense.
• Delete, delete, delete. More writing is more funny, right? Not necessarily. There’s a reason why it’s possible to make a living as an editor, a person whose job is mainly to delete prose and throw manuscripts in the trash: most writing is bad. Good writers understand this, and spend as much time mercilessly hacking their work apart as they do creating it in the first place, even throwing away completed novels to start from scratch. The ability to look at your own work, ask, “does this suck?” and answer honestly is one of the major differences between the pros and amateurs. Writing is as much about destruction as creation, so spend at least as much time editing as writing. Another way to think about it: writing is like cooking, it’s as much about what you leave out as what you put in. When cooking a soup, you do everything possible not to put crap into it, shouldn’t you do the same when you write?
• Revise, revise, revise. Maybe you misspelled a word, perhaps you thought of a clever joke, or you photoshopped a JPEG image to ice that cake. To create a really polished piece of work, you have to revisit it and smooth off all the imperfections. True, some people can hammer out a perfect first draft, but most people can’t. Even Shakespeare devoted time to revising and polishing his plays.

The “@#$%^&*” Rule: Being Crass or Tasteless Doesn’t Automatically Make Everything Funny

• There’s no reason to swear like a US Marine Drill Instructor or make tasteless references every other sentence. In many lame formula jokes, crassness and/or profanity are/is the “punchline.” It’s usually not funny, especially if you’re hung over the next day and looking over your article. Only in very few, very rare situations is crassness what makes a funny joke funny (like ‘fucking Johnny Borrell‘, because he acts like that. The rest of the article is pretty dire though). Please don’t use it as your primary source of humor. This includes those regurgitated dead baby jokes, as well as jokes about regurgitated, dead babies. Come up with something original, or at least put it in an original manner, rather than rely on shock factor as a fucking crutch.

Outright sarcasm is Not a Replacement for Humor

Clearly stating what is either right or obvious in a sarcastic manner comes off less as funny, and more as politically resentful or bitter. Take, for example

• Example: America had some goodwill in the world. Who would want that? After all, you can’t take goodwill to the bank. (Or can you?)

Bad. Sounds more like someone is annoyed with foreign policy and is letting it out here. It has all the subtlety of an amped marching band, and seeks to hammer the point in sarcastically, rather than ease it in with humor. Such text is overtly political and serves no purpose than to vindicate one side and irritate the other, seeming as if the author is upset or otherwise disenfranchised. It’s blunt and relatively humorless, and while editorializing can be funny, this passage only ends up killing the humor of the rest of the article.

• Example: The Crusades were a series of military campaigns first initated in the 11th through 13th centuries by King George I of Texas, (the burning Bush of Moses fame) and continued by his heir George II. Intended to subjugate the Muslim people of the Middle East and brand the holy mark of W upon their foreheads, it also allowed America to cast aside any concern it had for goodwill and credibility and march Don Quixote-like into Baghdad with trumpets blaring and red, white and blue flags flying. God bless America!

Good. Why? Because it’s certainly more lighthearted, and definitely more subtle. It’s not explicitly political or sarcastic, qualifying more as satire. While not laugh-a-minute, it certainly doesn’t sound like someone’s angry or frustrated. This seems like it was typed by Someone Who Was Trying To Be Silly. It also sounds more official and professional, and it’s closer to truth without actually being truth.

• Basically, blunt, straight sarcasm is not humorous, especially when other people do it better as satire.

How to get inspired…

• Everything is like an orange, and funny is the juice. Don’t look for something funny. Look for the funny in some thing. Even the chair you are sitting on is funny. If you squeeze your chair, the funny will run out like jelly. Go on, squeeze your chair and I will squeeze mine. Mmmmmmmmmm….. Well, that certainly made me feel better.

Don’t panic. I am both an expert and a doctor.So – what’s funny about a chair? Look for an angle and you’ve got a way in:

• Recognition: The primary function of the office chair is to allow people to roll about looking for Post-IT notes without actually having to stand up.

• Situation: An analysis of the chair through the medium of Merchant Ivory films.

• History: With the invention of the chair, large round rocks fell out of demand.

• Lexicography: The chairman of the board counted all the chairs and then put them on the board. The mayor applauded.

• Anthropomorphism: One day I sat down in my favourite chair. And suddenly the chair spoke to me. “”Hey you!” the chair protested, “I’m fed up of seeing your bottom all the time. Stop being so rude.”

…and so forth. So – lesson 1: Don’t look for something funny, because everything is funny. Just look for the funny.

• Identify something that’s stupid in life, but that people accept and take for granted without questioning it. There must be something that’s crossed your mind and made you think, “Why the hell do we do this? Whose idea was it?” Point out, by example, how ridiculous it is. People like to laugh at themselves.
• Relate commonly misunderstood ideas, old wives tales, conspiracy theories, prejudices, and other misinformation as the absolute truth, and back up this misinformation using other “facts” (true ones, or ones that are misunderstandings themselves).
• News. If you see something happening in the news that makes you go “WTF?” then it’s probably worth an article or UnNews piece.
• Straight out parodies of people and characters aren’t as good as parodies of how people would do things. Ask yourself: “how would this person handle this situation?” Examples would include Ernest Hemingway’s Cookery Corner, a set of IKEA instructions written by James Joyce, a Guide to Acting by William Shatner, or a Guide to Leadership and Management by Darth Vader.
• Pick your targets. Some people are just asking to be taken down a notch. The rich, the powerful and the famous. People who are liars, hypocrites, arrogant or jerks are also perfect targets for satire. Generally speaking, people who are helpless aren’t. Making fun of cancer patients is hard. Let me tell you, I’ve tried and the cancer ward was not amused. Nice people are also poor targets; Mother Teresa doesn’t lend herself to parody.
• Look at some classics. For TV/Movies, I’d recommend Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Marx Brother’s Duck Soup, The Kids in the Hall, (old) Saturday Night Live, The Upright Citizens Brigade, Mr. Show, and the Simpsons/Futurama. For prose, I’d recommend Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, Woody Allen’s Getting Even, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and sequels.