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.
- Think of a true story.
- Exaggerate it until it’s funnier.
- 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)
