Comedy Masterclasses

How to Write Comedy (Badly)

A quick course in being stupid

A friend of mine recently asked me how I wrote comedy considering I’m such a miserable bastard.

It was a good question. And he was right — I’m pretty miserable. Some have even called me morose.

Morose is a particularly horrid word in the English language, meaning

Sullen and ill-tempered

Sullen is also a terrible word, meaning

Bad-tempered and sulky

If you want to insult someone, MOROSE and SULLEN work pretty well. Add in BASTARD and you’re off to a flyer.

That’s the smiley face for Morose. This is the smiley face for Sullen.

This is the smiley face for: I hope you die soon!

So am I being funny? Or am I just basing this entire piece on free icons I’ve found on the internet?

A bit of both. Because being funny doesn’t involve being clever. It involves being silly. In short, you need to become a child again. This is very difficult as from about the age of 12 we are told that we should GROW UP! So that by the time we reach 18, we are ‘fully-rounded’ human beings.

I’ve always rejected this idea, and continue to be as immature as possible. I may appear morose. But I’m not. I just appear that way because I’m pissed off with the world, but not at my fellow human beings. Who I’m always grateful to meet as long as they don’t think Trump is a nice fellow, and that Hitler didn’t really mean what he did.

I recently lost my father, and at the funeral made the rest of my family laugh, which was a feat in itself. The whole funeral parlour was in tears as I recanted my father’s many drunken exploits and insane hiking trips in winter armed with only a can of beer and half a biscuit.

I even expected him to push the coffin lid off and laugh along with me. Like this:

That would have been funny. And I’m determined to get as many silly icons into this piece as possible to prove that comedy can be created from the most mundane things. Even a half-eaten apple in the corner of a room.

The image above looks like the logo of a certain computer manufacturer, but it isn’t, it’s a half-eaten apple in the corner of a room. If it was the Apple logo, it’d have Steve Jobs’ head sticking out of it to prove he isn’t dead and is very much alive buried deep within the circuitry of one of his very expensive computers.

In short, the options for comedy are endless, because everything is funny, even if the subject matter is deeply serious.

Take Schindler’s List for example. One of the joys of the movie is that Steven Spielberg managed to inject humour into it despite the harrowing narrative. Perhaps reflecting that even in humanity’s darkest hours, laughter is sometimes all we have.

Of course, Schindler’s List is no comedy — far from it — but neither is a funeral. Yet it would have been impossible for me to stand up at my father’s funeral without making a joke.

Indeed, if I had done that, he would have almost certainly cracked open his coffin, stepped out, walked over to the pulpit, and read the sermon himself — with jokes.

Thanks for reading, for more deathly comedy check out,

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