Sterling Terrell

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You are here: Home / Potpourri / How Comedy Is A Distortion

How Comedy Is A Distortion

How Comedy Is A Distortion

This line that comedy is a distortion jumped out to me.

It stood out because I immediately knew it was true based on the way I naturally tell stories.

See, stories are funnier when they are exaggerated.

You can make nearly any story funny if you work a little with this.

Someone didn’t go to school while they were sick.

They were “making sure the flu was evenly distributed around the campus. Because they are for equal opportunity.”

A headmaster didn’t give the rules for visiting the girl’s dorms and a student asked how many times before expulsion – they asked: “How much for a season pass?”

Heck with enough practice exercising that creative muscle and that might be a good recipe for starting to write your own jokes.

  1. Think of a true story.
  2. Exaggerate it until it’s funnier.
  3. Rinse, repeat.

I had a short-lived but troublesome worry. What if writing comedy was a dead end because one day everything would have been done and we writers would just run out of stuff? I assuaged myself with my own homegrown homily: Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening.

-Steve Martin, Born Standing Up (Amazon)

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Filed Under: PotpourriTagged With: #Comedy, #Writing

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