Comedy Writing Secrets Flashcards
What is the most important thing a sense of humour indicates?
Leadership
What do frowns indicate to others?
Fear and paranoia
What is the very first goal if you want to develop a sense of humour?
To become uninhibited
What is a great exercise to practice to uninhibit yourself?
What if..
What is the dynamic between a laughing ape and one that doesn’t laugh?
The laughing one is submissive.
In a social power equation, what position does the person laughing hold wrt the person making them laugh?
Lower on the pole.
What happens when you’re making people laugh?
You’re controlling them. You’re MAKING them laugh. You’re in charge.
What are the 3 Rs you get when you’re humorous?
Respect, Remembrance and Reward
How do you get remembrance with humour?
People remember your message, what you’re teaching, and YOU, if you use humour well.
What is the comedy triangle?
Material - Audience - Performer
In what way does comedy relate the audience to the performer?
You both have the same goal. You’re on the same team. You want them to laugh, they want to laugh! You both reach the goal together.
What are the subjects the audience is most interested in?
Themselves! They want you to talk about observations of THEIR own interest.
What do the audience NOT care about?
They don’t want to know about you, your friends, your pets, your bar buddies.
As a peformer, how much time do you have to win the audience over?
30 seconds.
What does the audience do within the first 30 seconds of you talking?
The decide just how comfortable they feel with your comedic persona.
What do you do with your obviously imperfect physical characteristics?
Target them. Take advantage of them rather than fight them. “I’m a bald red headed cunt”
What is the single most important aspect that will make your material evolve to its highest level?
Dedication. Learning is easy, but dedication is very very very hard.
How do you stay dedicated to your material?
You stay switched on all day. Keep noting down different things that make you laugh. Tag them by topics.
Once you dedicate yourself to humour, what is a daily consistent exercise you have to take up?
Keep looking for new material to use as building blocks for your humour writing
What can you use as material for building blocks for your humour writing?
ANYthing that you find funny in -
- News
- Internet reading
- Everyday events
- Ideas
- Observations
Key criteria for daily humour building blocks
- NO censorship
- NOT intended to be funny
- Serve as STARTING POINTS for writing humour
List the reasons why we laugh
- Surprise
- Superiority
- Instinct
- Incongruity
- Release
- When we solve a puzzle
- to Regress
What is the core tenet of the structure of something tha creates surprise?
Get the audience to assume the ending, and then derail them.
What are 2 basic techniques to create surprise?
- Misdirection
- Incongruity
How would you describe misdirection in simple words?
You know the facts, and the audience doesn’t.
How would you describe incongruity in simple words?
The audience know the facts, and a character in your story, doesn’t.
What do we mean when we say, people laugh when they’re surprised?
When we intentionally embarrass people, they laugh to cover their embarrassment
How can we create embarrassment in the audience?
By tricking them
How do we trick the audience so that they’re embarrassed, and then laugh?
By misdirection or incongruity
What are the various targets you can… target to generate feelings of superiority in the audience?
- Inferiors
- Superiors
- Those we fear
- Others who’ve recently accomplished something
- The “outs” to your “ins”
What parts of our inferiors can we target to generate feelings of superiority in the audience?
- Intelligence
- Social standing
- Physical and mental infirmities
Why does targeting superiors make us feel superiority?
We disgorge our feelings of inferiority by equalizing those superior to us
In what WAY do we equalize those superior to us?
By ruthlessly publicizing and mocking EVERY shortcoming
Who would you define as “those superior to you”?
People who are -
- in positions of authority
- richer
- more famous
- physically stronger
- more admired
If your audience is itself filled with “superior” people, how do you use the concept of “superiority” to make them laugh?
By relieving their insecurity abut how long they’ll keep their superiority.
Eg. “i could take over canada in 2 days”
How would you classify those you fear?
- Individually - more authoritative figures
- As a group - groups that don’t conform to our social, religious, national and sexual mores
How does Freud define comedy?
As the weapon of the “ins” against the “outs”
How is comedy used to maintain the status quo?
Comedy is used to ridicule deviant social behaviour, so that the majority is reassured that their way of life is proper.
When targeting superiors, why do we feel good and laugh?
You discover their blemishes, and understand that you are NOT in the same predicament as them
