 Comedy: January 29, 2020 Issue [#9990] |
This week: Born Funny Edited by: NaNoNette  
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| Hello writers and readers of funny things, I am NaNoNette and I will be your guest editor for this issue. |
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Born Funny
What does it take to write and tell funny stories?
Some people are just naturally funny. Any story they tell makes you laugh, chuckle, or giggle.
But what about the rest of us? Are we doomed to mediocrity and boring stories where the punchline falls falt?
Only if we never try.
If you think that you would like to be funny, but it's not happening by itself, you can do the next best thing: write, get reviews, listen to the feedback, edit and revise until you get someone to laugh out loud.
It is said that the act of laughing comes from being surprised. If your joke is told in the form of a list, make the last item in your list something surprising.
Reasons to stop drinking coffee, "No jitters, no crashes, no coffee breath, that's my way to rage against the machine."
Some of the best humor can be creepy, edgy, and outrageous. So, while you could go by the formula tragedy + time = comedy, you can also flip that upside down by commenting in snarky ways about tragic events from a day before.
The Onion's writers found a way to make fun of 9/11 as early as two weeks after the tragedy. They also wrote a piece about the bombing in Manchester during a Taylor Swift concert that achieved to make me laugh. No, it's not funny when people die. No, it's especially not funny when children die. However, the job of the jester is to find a way to make reality bearable.
Twisting cliches can be funny. Imagine a rapper talking like rapper. Not funny. Now have a grandma with purple hair talk like a rapper. That can be funny.
It used to be that self-deprecating humor was a sure bet to get laughs. You could easily follow the formula to write down all the things you hate about yourself and work them into your stories for comedy effect. Unfortunately, a lot of humor of that type has now become triggering. It's no longer OK to make fun of people of a certain shape, race, or religion without being called all sorts of names that imply you're not only not funny but a very terrible person.
To make up for the disappearance of self-deprecating humor, you can at least fall back on dark emotions like jealousy, loneliness, and failure. Bad breakups can also be a source for dark emotional humor. "My boyfriend didn't sleep with one of my best friends. He slept with all of them." Most people can relate to lousy romances, so you should be able to get some comedy mileage from this one.
One surefire way to get at least some chuckles is to describe your troubles with new technology. You can go all out an describe all the weird episodes you had with a piece of tech. Or you can use it as a punch line.
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While I fall in the category of unable to write anything funny, we have some people here on the site that pretty much can't be serious.
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