The Serious Guide to Joke Writing: How To Say Something Funny About Anything pdfdrive com

Finding Your Own Set-Ups
My class are very happy that they’ve managed to find jokes from the set-ups I
gave them. So now we just need to learn how to find the set-ups ourselves! This
means learning to read in a different way. Take the gag about the Queen staring
at  the  ceiling  of  the  Sistine  Chapel.  The  newspaper  that  this  quote  came  from
probably said something like:
They toured many of the ancient treasures the city had to offer. The Queen
spent a long time staring at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel that was
painted by Michelangelo in the 15
th
century. Prince Philip commented that
it was a magnificent...
So the person who wrote the joke had to read the newspaper line by line and see
it  as  a  series  of  separate  phrases,  not  as  a  whole  sentence,  in  order  to  isolate
those words and play off them.
Similarly, the person who wrote the gag about the Californian fires probably had
to pluck the line, They had to douse the fire with whatever they could get their
hands  on,  from  the  middle  of  a  tragic  report  about  people  trying  to  save  their
homes from the ravages of fire. It might be ruthless, but if you are a joke writer
it’s  what  you  have  to  do.  I  hand  out  a  photocopied  article  from  the  newspaper
and set the next exercise.

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