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

Glimmers of Gags
We study all the others but draw some blanks which is fine, as long as we try.
Sometimes we see what I call ‘glimmers of gags’, where you catch the chance of
a gag, a wisp of a funny.
We  try  very  hard  with  REPRODUCTION,  which  appears  in  both  sides  and
covers everything from a womb to a photocopier. Could a girl be going out with
a doctor, a specialist in reproduction only to find out she’s dating the photocopier
guy? One person also used the nude/naked juxtaposition to come up with ‘I love
art, you get to see naked people without going out with them’ but we felt it had
been done before.
We  also  have  a  go  at  bashing  the  word  RENAISSANCE  against  relationships.
We  talk  about  how  in  the  Renaissance  they  found  perspective.  We  wonder  if
during the actual Renaissance many marriages changed as people started to get
their relationships in perspective (I think this is a lovely idea - we just couldn’t
get it into a gag).
The more interesting ideas have definitely come from the deliberate bashing of
one subject against another, that wouldn’t normally be juxtaposed. I set the class
homework of doing more joke-webs and we talk about how to choose topics (see
below).  I  also  hand  out  the  Ways  To  Think  About  Words  List  (again  -  most  of
them have already lost the one I gave out last week!)

---