Ideas for Comedy Writers Read online

  73. Judgement Day.

  Our hero dies and finds himself being judged before being sent to Heaven or Hell. To his surprise, the judge’s definition of what is and what is not a crime is somewhat different from his own – and everyone else’s too. You can have great fun playing around with this idea and deciding what is and what is not a crime.

  [EXAMPLE] Suppose our hero once robbed a man because he needed to buy food for his children. He thinks he might go to Hell because of that. But the judge says no: the person he robbed was wealthy and could easily spare the money, and our hero had a family to feed. It was not a crime but ‘basic survival’. He won’t be going to Hell because of that. But on the other hand, he didn’t clear his plate when he ate at a restaurant three years ago. And that was an insult to the chef – and a racist insult too, since the chef was of a different race. Our hero protests that he doesn’t remember the meal, has no idea why he didn’t finish it, and he never even met the chef. But it makes no difference. Unless he can come up with a very good reason, in the next few seconds, as to why he didn’t finish that meal, he’s going to Hell.

  74. Laughs per page.

  When you’re writing a comedy story you need to decide whether to have a small number of long set-piece gags, or lots of little gags, or a mixture. It will depend on the story, but either way you’ll want to aim for at least one or two laughs per page. Check your story when you get to the editing stage, and make sure there are laughs on every page. Add some more if necessary – even if they’re just quick one-liners or quips in the dialogue.

  75. Laughter diary.

  Keeping a laughter diary and recording what makes you laugh is a great idea. But you also need to know whether you’re laughing at the same things as everyone else. And it would also be useful to know what you find funny that others don’t, and what they find funny that you don’t. So see if you can persuade a few other people to keep laughter diaries of their own for a week or two. When you all get together a couple of weeks later you can have great fun sharing your stories and telling each other the jokes you’ve noted down. But which ones make the most people laugh – and make them laugh the longest and loudest? Make a note of the common elements from these. You’re looking for things that appeal to the maximum number of people.

  76. Lies that grow.

  Choose a lie and make it grow until it gets completely out of hand. In fact, you could start with several different lies and expand each of them as far as you possibly can, well beyond the point at which they become ridiculous and absurd.

  [EXAMPLE 1] A man tells his mother how well he’s doing at work, with one promotion after another in rapid succession until he’s chairman of the company. In truth he’s still doing the same menial job as when he first started. But he has to keep up the pretence, even if it means hiring a flashy sports car whenever he visits her. But how will he show her his massive house and yacht and private jet? He’ll think of something. And he’ll probably have to buy her something expensive (or at least rent or borrow it). Will she ever find out the truth? And if so how? What if she wants to come and stay with him? What if she thinks he should share some of his money with her, or with the rest of the family? What if she finds charities for him to support?

  [EXAMPLE 2] Our dirty fibbing hero tells his mother that his new girlfriend is a singer. As the lie continues she becomes more and more successful, with TV appearances, chart placings, gold records, global tours, awards, and so on. He probably hasn’t even got a girlfriend. So, a few months down the line, how the heck is he going to introduce his mother to this internationally famous singer who he claims he’s about to marry? And what on earth will happen if he succeeds?

  77. Ludicrous situations.

  Comedy stories often work well when you’re being serious. You aren’t telling jokes, but the situation is so ludicrous or the character is so uncomfortable that your readers find it funny. Don’t go too far though. You can easily cross the line from being funny to being sadistic, and then the laughter will stop. Think about a ludicrous situation for your story. Introduce a character who becomes increasingly uncomfortable and out of his depth. Try playing with some of the descriptions too. Make them slightly outrageous, but keep a straight face as you write or tell the story.

  78. Magical wishes.

  You can have endless fun with the idea of someone being granted a magical wish but getting more (or less) than he bargained for. An obvious example is someone wishing that everything he touched turned to gold, but then discovering that he can’t eat anything or hug anyone. For a less obvious example, consider a man who wants to enlarge his ‘manhood’. He wishes that it was as big as an elephant. He means as big as an elephant’s manhood, not an entire elephant, but unfortunately he wasn’t specific enough. So his manhood becomes so big and heavy that he can’t move. Or perhaps he asks for his manhood to be as big as some other animal’s. Little does he realise that the creature in question, although very large, is famous for having a very tiny manhood. He gets exactly what he wished for though. Think about what your character would wish for, and what he might actually get.

  79. Making fun of the Irish, Canadians, Poles …

  This is a type of joke that’s popular all over the world. The only thing that changes is the nationality of the people being make fun of. The English make fun of the Irish, Americans make fun of the Canadians, and so it continues all over the world. Just pick some sort of ability that local people have but the residents of the other nation can’t master, and there’s your joke.

  [EXAMPLE] The most popular shoes sold in Ireland (or Canada, Poland, Holland, etc) are clogs. That’s because if they try to do up shoes with laces they tie their feet together and fall flat on their faces.

  You could take this a stage further: the people there are so ugly that having flat faces would actually be an improvement. But the council kept complaining about all the cracks in the pavement.

  80. Mash-ups.

  For a fun comic sketch, how about taking a well known character and putting him in a completely different story? Or combine two stories into one, with the two sets of characters behaving exactly as they normally would, but also interacting with each other. For example, The Simpsons could go on holiday and stay at Fawlty Towers. So now we know who rearranges those letters on the hotel’s sign: Bart Simpson! What other shows and stories could you combine?

  81. Mishaps.

  Mishaps make great comedy – and the more of them you have the funnier it gets. Think of any situation, then pile mishap upon mishap and the laughs are virtually guaranteed.

  Situations where this idea would work well might include: preparing to open a new shop or exhibition, preparing to put on a play, teachers preparing to meet the parents of their students at an open evening, anyone coming up against a tight deadline that’s getting tighter by the second, a band getting ready to perform on stage, a surgical operation that’s going horribly wrong, an advertising agency preparing their pitch for a client, and so on.

  82. Modern musical sitcom.

  Fans of the 1980s BBC comedy series The Young Ones will remember it as ‘the first punk sitcom’. But how about a modern version based on today’s music? How about if everyone speaks their lines in rhyme? Perhaps it could have a continuous musical beat in the background. Bring on a singer or a band to give a performance in every episode – and think of plausible or implausible excuses for having them there. Make the show funny, outrageous and full of slapstick and great jokes. BBC3 would probably be interested in something like that, as would many independent youth-orientated TV stations around the world.

  My personal recommendation would be that the main characters should not have any connection with the music world, and not be trying to set up their own band. That would jar too much. Make them art students, medical students, trainee police officers, or something like that.

  83. Monologues.

  Standing up on stage at a comedy night doesn’t mean you have to tell jokes. You could deliver a monologue – basi
cally just tell a short but very funny story. Try writing a comic short story or monologue of about 3 minutes in length, then perform it – or get a friend to do it for you – at a local comedy night, and see how well it goes down. Make sure it’s well rehearsed and firmly committed to memory.

  If it works well then you can take it further, write some more, perform them elsewhere and to bigger audiences, and even turn your collection of monologues into a book – you could sell these at the comedy events you go to. You could also record them and put the collection onto CD or DVD, with a few samples to download or view on your website, iTunes, YouTube, and so on. Naturally, these will all mention where the full product can be purchased.

  If your monologue doesn’t work, see if you can identify where the problems are. Is it the story, or the way it was delivered? Once you’ve fixed it, find a comedy night somewhere else, and try that story again on a different audience.

  [EXAMPLE] Harry was an ordinary boy in most ways. If you didn’t count the aerial taped to his head with parcel tape, and the television screen strapped to his chest. Wherever he went he attracted a large crowd – mainly because he could get Channel 5 and nobody else in town could. Harry, you see, thought he was a Teletubby…’

  84. Movie parody scenes.

  When you’re planning a comedy story why not include some parallels and parodies of scenes from your favourite movies? They’re great fun to write, and your readers and viewers who spot them or work out the connection will love them. You could include parodies of scenes from your favourite books too.

  85. Observation.

  Rather than going to all the effort of making up jokes, you can find plenty of funny material just by looking around for it. Then all you have to do is report what happened or what you saw.

  For example, if you’re giving a stand-up performance in a town noted for its traffic jams, one-way system, unfathomable road signs, or maze of narrow roads, you only have to mention the trouble you had getting to the venue. The audience knows exactly what it’s like; they applaud, they empathise, they warm to you. (And by you I mean whoever’s on stage giving the performance. That might not actually be you if you’re behind the scenes doing the writing.)

  You can extend this part of your routine by mentioning funny things you saw on the way to the venue – interesting shop names, for example. The audience will recognise these, and recognise the humour in them (maybe for the first time). The rest of your performance should go pretty well. They’ve accepted you as one of them.

  This also works well in other kinds of comedy. You can easily incorporate these unexpected moments of humour into your story. Have your character drive along the same roads, get stuck in the same traffic jam, see the same signs, and so on. Even if the town or city is fictional, you can use real street names, shop names and traffic problems that you come across.

  Other things to look out for include the way people in particular professions behave, a machine that never works the way it’s supposed to, or the difficulties people have with a fairly simple piece of equipment – yet they can easily operate something that’s much more complicated.

  86. One step ahead.

  How about a comedy-crime story or a comedy-thriller where the villain is always one step ahead of the hero? Take the issue of weapons and self-defence for example. The villain comes at our hero with a knife; our hero is unarmed and barely escapes with his life. He vows that next time they meet he’ll have some decent protection against knives. But the next time they meet, the villain has a much bigger knife and our hero’s padding is no match for it. Again he barely escapes. And so it continues: our hero gradually increases his protection and wears more and more cumbersome clothing, then moves on to armour, armoured vehicles, tanks and so on. But the villain is always able to beat him, as he increases his weapons from knife to machete to pistol to machine gun, anti-tank gun, mortar, cruise missile, and so on. It all gets completely out of hand and hilariously over the top.

  And that’s just one aspect of their confrontation. How else might the villain outwit and outmanoeuvre our poor hero? How about their vehicles, starting with bicycle versus moped, and so on? Or qualifications: the villain’s degree in electronics versus our hero’s evening class in art or antiques or pottery. As our hero studies and obtains higher and higher qualifications, so does the villain. The villain might end up with a doctorate and perhaps become a professor and start designing brand new electronic weapons to attack our hero with. Or perhaps the villain only thinks our hero is studying too – in fact our hero might still be trying to persuade his boss to pay for more evening classes. Yet our hero will still come out on top in the end. Somehow.

  87. Opinionated.

  A character who thinks that his opinions are actual facts can be very funny – some people have very questionable opinions! See how this fellow tries to persuade his wife that they should stay at home rather than going out for the evening:

  ‘Men are better drivers than women, right, so we have to do all the driving, otherwise it wouldn’t be safe on the roads. But if we do all the driving we can’t have a drink, can we – even though we’re better at holding our drink than women. So I can’t let you drive because it isn’t safe and it wouldn’t be fair on the other drivers, and I can’t drive because I want a drink. And it’s not a proper party unless you have a drink, is it?

  ‘We could get a taxi, but they’re all driven by foreigners now and they don’t know the roads, do they? You could end up anywhere. And they don’t understand our money either. They’ll drive you two miles and charge you a month’s wages – and pull a gun on you if you don’t pay. Yeah, they all carry guns these days, you know.

  ‘We could have a party here, of course, but can you really trust these people? They call themselves your friends but they steal your stuff, drink all your best beer and ruin the carpet. And if you turn the music up to drown out the sound of all the vomiting and verbal diarrhoea, the police smash down your front door and confiscate your stereo. Honestly, love, you’re better off just going to bed.’

  88. Ordinary character in an extraordinary situation.

  Good fiction is usually about interesting characters who show a full range of emotions and overcome adversity through their own resourcefulness. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Take Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for example. An ordinary man with no resourcefulness to speak of, not much of an idea about what’s really happening, and in a permanent state of bewilderment. The very ordinary things he says and does when extraordinary things happen to him make him so funny and believable.

  You could do this yourself: put an ordinary character in an extraordinary position and just let him get on with it and cope as best he can. You could even make him hyper-ordinary, like Arthur Dent. You could have him getting caught up in a murder, a terrorist attack, a bank robbery, a car chase, a forgery case, a daring escape from prison, or getting sent back in time – or all of those things and more, all in one story. Throughout it all, he remains unchanged and true to himself. If he’s driving a getaway car and it’s time for tea, he’ll pull into the nearest service station – even if the police are chasing them. Tea comes first. Always. He’ll deal with the consequences later. Or, more likely, he’ll let the consequences deal with themselves, or let someone else deal with them, since he doesn’t really understand what they are or how he got into this situation in the first place.

  89. Pantomimes.

  If you have children at school, why not have a go at writing a pantomime for them to perform at Christmas? You could do this even if you don’t have children at school. Go along and teach a few classes about writing, and ask them to put forward some ideas for a pantomime. Work with them, and let them see your pantomime evolve as you write it. Perhaps you could go back every week or two while you’re working on it. Modify it as they suggest new ideas and tell you which bits they like and dislike.

  Pantomimes are always based on one of the well-known fairy tales, so you’ll already know the
basic storyline. But you can adapt it to suit the audience, adding local characters and references, teachers, topical news stories, and new jokes and songs.

  [ALTERNATIVE 1] See if you can find a fairy tale that that hasn’t been made into a pantomime yet. You’ll sometimes come across competitions to write a new fairy tale, so perhaps you could use one of those – though you’d need to get permission from its writer.

  [ALTERNATIVE 2] Rather than writing a pantomime for children, you could write one for adults, which could be performed locally. Again, include plenty of local characters and references.

  90. Paradoxes 1.

  Paradoxes – or vicious circles – are a great way of creating comic situations. Here’s an example: an obese woman needs to lose weight and her doctor tells her she needs surgery to reduce the size of her stomach. But she needs to lose weight before he can safely carry out the operation. That’s might not happen in real life, but it sounds plausible enough for a comedy sketch.

  Another example might be someone trying to pass a physical fitness test in the army. On the final day the instructor orders the trainees to climb a tree and rescue someone. Our character knows that if he climbs the tree he’ll get stuck and have to be rescued himself, which means he’ll fail the course. But if he refuses to climb the tree he’ll fail the course anyway.