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

Tuesday PM (15 mins)
I  lock  myself  in  the  bedroom  and  go  through  everything  I’ve  got,  saying  the
lines out loud to an imaginary audience of building site managers
xxxiii
. I have to
tweak  some  of  them  to  get  the  words  to  flow  and  I  am  tempted  to  abandon  a
couple of them altogether!
Wednesday AM (1 hour)
I decide the final thing is to do a joke-web on ‘relationships’ to collide against
the  previous  joke-web  on  ‘building  regulations’.  The  comedienne  does  a  lot  of
relationship stuff and she’s got to segue this stuff in with her act.
It’s  another  sunny  day  so  I  sit  in  the  garden  and  do  a  joke-web  about
relationships. It’s interesting the way the mind works because knowing that I’m
going  to  collide  my  ‘relationships’  joke-web  against  ‘building  regulations’,  my
mind starts to include things in advance. So when I write ‘love songs’ I come up
with  the  Oasis  song  Wonderwall  which  naturally  links  to  buildings.  This  is
obviously  not  a  fluke  –  I  love  the  way  joke  writing  brains  work.  I  wonder
whether building site managers find this song romantic?
While  I  am  sitting  there  my  partner  comes  out.  I  say  I  am  colliding  building

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regulations against relationships. He thinks for a while and comes up with...
A building project is like a wife... She always costs more than the original
estimate.
I’m not sure my client will like it, but when I read it to her later that’s the joke
she likes most – always happens!
I ‘Hadron Joke Collide’ my subjects and come up with...
Being in a relationship is like being a house builder...
You have annoying laws...
I have annoying in-laws!
It’s weak, I know, I’m just trying to show the process here!
I phone the comic up and she likes the pigs stuff and the joke my partner wrote. I
tell her I’ve got one more method of joke writing to run it through - Stream-of-
Consciousness. Although, I tell her that’s ideally something she has an opinion
on as I’m not sure how strongly I feel about building regulations. She says she
can’t learn anymore anyway so not to bother.
I have a lovely break. Then, even though I thought I had switched my brain off,
my  background  processor  went  on  running,  and,  in  the  middle  of  the  night,  I
thought of the joke.
You’ve got to educate them young. My kid plays with Lego in the lounge,
every now and then I run in and shout, ‘you can’t build there you haven’t
got planning permission!’
Which is a bit like the God creating the universe one, but I don’t know if she’s
using the God one so I send it off. My work is done!
Adding  it  up  I’ve  spent  four  and  a  half  hours  on  a  difficult  subject.  I’ve  used
three  different  joke  writing  methods  and  got  12  –  15  ideas.  Not  all  of  them
worked out but they might have done if I had more time!

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Summary
If I can write jokes on house building regulations – then you can write jokes on,
well, anything...

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