I tried to make the punchline as close to the setup as I could. And I thought that was the perfect thing. If I could make the setup and the punchline identical to each other, I would create a different kind of joke.
Incongruity is the mainspring of laughter.
Unintentional comedy is comedy just the same.
I try to write 'and it's all very funny' after each scene description so that the reader can imagine the movie in their head.
Someone who makes you laugh is a comedian. Someone who makes you think and then laugh is a humorist.
I've always been a fan of physical comedy. It kind of hits you in a different way; it bypasses the intellect and hits you in the gut.
I am always a great fan of keeping things on an eye level for comedy because it plays better.
The tendency in comedy is to have a character who's stupid get more stupid, because you're trying to top yourself and not just repeat.
Soon I learned that the worse the puns and jokes, the funnier they could be, if you knew how to deliver them.
I think I write funny songs that make people kind of, like, stop what they're doing and be like, 'What did you say?' And then it makes them laugh a little bit.
I tend to work on the principle that much humour relies on cognitive dissonance - on the foreground not matching the background, on the protagonist's response to a situation being inappropriate, and so on.
You're trying to make someone wet their pants and you're trying to make somebody crap in their pants. That's the motivation of a comic. Who else has that power?
Nothing translates worse than comedy into the printed word.
All those zany comedies have instilled a sense of pace in me.
The key is just to ignore the pain, because physical comedy only works if you see someone get hurt and they aren't actually hurt. If someone gets hit in the face with a bat, falls down, and gets back up, it's funny. If they stay down and their jaw is wired shut in the next scene, it's really tragic and weird. You have to pretend it doesn't hurt.
In comedy writing, a sitcom plot is basically the same thing: What's the worst thing that could happen? But you're playing it for comic effect. It's a similar muscle being used with Black Mirror.
What happens, I think, is especially for comic effect you find something about yourself that you don't like. You exaggerate it, and it's funny.
That's why 'Gangnam Style' works. If someone handsome uses that phrase it's just awkward. But if someone like me uses it, it's funny.
If a man wants to set up as an innkeeper and he does not succeed, it is not comic. If, on the contrary, a girl asks to be allowed to set up as a prostitute and she fails, as sometimes happens, it is comic.
So that's why one of my rules of parody writing is that it's gotta be funny regardless of whether you know the source material. It has to work on its own merit.
Trouble is, some accents lend themselves to comedy.
It never really occurs to me that I'm doing cringe comedy. It's something that people tell me afterwards, and I say, 'Again? Really? I never set out with that intention.'
Micro humor is a joke that's contained in the writing: it's a punch line, it's a turn of phrase, it's something that you can see on the page, and no matter who's saying it, it is, in and of itself, a funny line.
I'd have to do unannounced gigs because your fans will laugh at everything because they know what you do already. What you really want is a neutral audience that isn't too harsh - a good comedy crowd - but that don't know necessarily what you're doing.
I remember once having to stop performing when I thought an elderly man a few rows back from the front was actually going to die because he was laughing so hard.
