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

Honing Jokes For Sitcoms and Sketches
Sitcoms  and  some  sketches  really  do  rely  on  the  strength  of  the  characters  for
humour. If the audience get the character they are more likely to get the jokes. If
you’re  not  sure  about  this  then  re-visit  the  sitcom  Frasier.  Many  of  the  ‘laugh
lines’ simply aren’t jokes at all unless they have his snobbishness behind them -
it’s quite inspiring. You can, however, still write the jokes first and attribute them
after.
One  of  my  students  did  a  joke-web  about  holidays  because  he  wanted  the
characters in his sitcom to d iscuss where they went for theirs. He did a joke-web
on whale watching holidays and ended up writing about the Japanese resumption
of whaling and juxtaposed the two.
The way he could use this joke idea depends upon the characters in his sitcom.
Say he had a character who was a bit tight with money:
‘What do you mean I never do anything for you?
I took you on that whale watching holiday.’
‘Whale Watching? We were the lookout on a Japanese Whaling ship. Every
time I spotted a whale they harpooned it!’
Conversely  a  weak  and  pathetic  sitcom  character  might  end  up  on  a  Japanese
whaling  ship  instead  of  a  whale  watching  holiday  and  be  too  polite  to  say
anything...
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘I didn’t like to offend them.’
‘They caught 26 whales.’
‘Yes, I was a strangely good spotter.’
In sitcoms and sketches you can even try getting characters to act out the joke. A
character  could  end  up  sitting  on  a  Japanese  whaling  ship  in  the  lookout  chair
staring sadly out to sea.
So  when  you  are  adding  jokes  to  sitcoms  and  sketches  think,  ‘How  would  this
character react to this?’ ‘Now what about that character?’ and build your scene.
If a character has no attitude to whale slaughter then make that their trait. Why
don’t they care? Are they too interested in nail polish or computer games? If you
don’t know the answer then work on it until you do.
Plus you can still use the normal honing rules like The Rule of Three (where you
can attribute the lines to different characters) and add specific details to help you

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fit the joke neatly round your characters. Great characters and great jokes make a
brilliant sitcom.

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