1) Pick any one item and take it to an extreme.

"Organizing is good."

• Okay, can I alphabetize my spices? (bad example. I actually do that.)
• Uh, can I sort my vegetable drawer by size and then by color?
• How about putting the living room furniture in rainbow order?
• Where do I file the cat, under P for Pet, F for Felix domesticus, or O for Ollie (his name)?

2) Slip in some judicious puns. For example, if you're comparing shredders, you might write that you don't want to get snippy, but Brand X is really a cut above, and anyone who doesn't think so simply isn't all that sharp. (Caveat scriptor: your mileage may vary.)

3) Take a metaphor and run it off a cliff of absurdity.

"Okay, so imagine that your desk is an elephant, and you're going to eat it one bite at a time. So first you start with a foot, represented by a desk drawer. The file folders are the toes, and the tabs are the toenails. Any punched-out holes, lost post-its, orphaned notes, or faded fax cover sheets would be elephant toejam. That's probably kind of nasty-smelling, but don't worry; just crumple the whole thing up and make a toejam football out of it, and throw it into the nearest wastebasket."

posted almost 14 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Lauren Ipsum‭

2098 reputation 13 1143 397 1

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Uncyclopedia:How_To_Be_Funny_And_Not_Just_Stupid

There are some good tips in this link, even if it's slightly skewed towards the format of it's own site, but I'll summarise the main points:

Going all-out true/untrue/random is rarely funny. You need a clever blend.

Bad Example:

"Donald Trump was born in the year 548723BC to Theodore Roosevelt and a turnip"

Better Example:

"Donald Trump frequently got into trouble in kindergarten for bullying due to his habit of building walls out of Lego blocks and attempting to make Mexican classmates 'pay for it'"

Repetition

It's stupid but it works. just repeat a point intermittently in your block of text.

Misdirection

This is where you take a fairly normal block of writing and veer off into a completely different direction entirely.

Example:

"Hitler's crimes included the murder of over 6 million people, the annexation of several European countries, the incitement of hatred across millions of German people, and a moustache that should have seen him hung by the fashion police years ago"

Or:

"Playing poker against Bob was never a challenge. His face was like a book. So much so that during the last game, I hurt him by trying to turn the page."

Choice of words

Oftentimes, it's a lot better to not state things outright but to exercise your lexicon a little bit. 'I realised that Edith was stupid' isn't as good as 'It dawned on me that the question of how Edith graduated high-school may well become the next Wonder of the World.'

Repetition

It's stupid but it works. just repeat a point intermittently in your block of text.

Understatement of the century

Pretty much as it sounds. "The Holocaust was a slight inconvenience to the German Jewish population"

Reversal

"Man-spider is an incredible superpowered spider with the ability to file taxes"

Repetition

It's stupid but it works. just repeat a point intermittently in your block of text.

posted almost 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

520‭

10 reputation 0 2 2 0

I think the most important thing is to figure out what kind of humor are YOU good at.

Lauren Ipsum's and Cody Hess's suggestions are how THEY get people to laugh. Gmoore's suggestion is a good one, figure out what makes you laugh, what you think is funny, and then try to duplicate that with your own ideas.

Look at the way you create humor when interacting with other people, and try to deliver that into your writing. If your audience is known (friends, family, colleagues) you might find humor in inside jokes or shared experiences. If you are going for a broader (ie anonymous) audience you should figure out how your humor plays to strangers (people who don't know your brand of humor).

posted almost 14 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

Jack B Nimble‭

5 reputation 1 1 1 0