How to Write Comedy In My Humble Opinion

To laugh, one of lifes great pleasures. Not only that, but it has
been proved to be scientifically good for you. So how do you go about
igniting that irrepressable flame in someone else? You could a) dress
up like a clown and fall over comically in the streets b) glue a pound
coin to the floor and supress your laughter comically from a distance
or c) you could write comedy. The main fault with a) and b) is that
other people are likely to find you sad and lonely. The great thing
about c) is that people will never know who you are, so they don't know
that you've got nothing better to do, because nobody gives credit to us
dear writers. If you'd like to try a) or b), then go and get yourself a
flower that squirts water, big red shoes, a pound coin and a tube of
superglue. For the rest of us with lives, I'll examine c).
Writing comedy is not easy. If you've already fallen asleep at this
stage of the tutorial, you probably won't have the attention span
needed to write comedy. I write comedy books, but I also write sit-com.
I find writing a book (where you can use the invaluable tool of a
narrative) much easier to write. In this tutorial, I will show you some
passages from one of my books, entitled The Place. To give you some
background info, The Place is a universe, and The Plase (a planet who
couldn't get the rights to the real name) is where the action takes
place. I will also share with you some of Terry Pratchett's Discworld,
a fine example of how to write comedy.
Comedy novels use gags in three different ways:
1) Narrative
2) Character driven gags
3) Throw away gags.

The narrative is an essential part of comedy writing in books. Without
it, your book would be a screenplay with no stage directions. It is
your voice. Your authoritive view on the way the world works. You can
open up the brains of your characters, and tell the reader what they're
really thinking. It is a way of telling the jokes that either you think
of, or that your characters think of, but would be too inappropriate to
say in front of other characters. A good first example of this is from
Terry Pratchett's The Fifth Elephant.
'Colon followed the huge man around the corner. Fred usually liked
All's company because, next to All, he was very skinny indeed. All
Jolson was a man who'd show up on an atlas and change the orbit of
small planets. He combined in one body - and there was plenty of room
left over - Ankh-Morpork's best chef and it's keenest eater. Sergeant
Colon couldn't remember what the man's real first name had been; he'd
picked up the nickname by general acclaim, since no-one seeing him in
the street for the first time could believe that it was all
Jolson.'
This is a perfect example of how a narrative can give you an extra
comical dimension to your story. Colon couldn't say what he thought of
how fat All was, but the narrative could easily say it. It gives us a
3rd dimension. Without it, we'd only know what Colon said to All, which
wouldn't be anything, because he wouldn't want to offend him. But with
it, we know all about All's background, and what Colon thought about
him. Also, note a good tip - when making bizarre comments, ' show up on
an atlas and change the orbit of small planets' that the usage of the
word 'small' in there really makes it so much funnier. Because it makes
it seem more likely, we find it funnier. It may seem obvious, but time
and again, we'll see how much difference just adding a small word can
make to an overall comic sentence.

Character driven gags make up a huge chunk of the overall comic novel.
Who's ever heard of a funny novel with straight and boring characters?
An excellent example of this is the Discworld's CMOT Dibbler. He's a
salesman, and his main export are sausages-inna-bun. His character is
funny because we all know how annoying salesman can be. We understand
his jokes, and we find that the character is a gag in himself. CMOT by
the way, is Cut-My-Own-Throat. Characters have to have certain traits
that make them amusing. Neville Longbottom from The Harry Potter
series, for example. His amusing trait is that he forgets everything,
and he bumbles through life making as many mistakes as is humanly
possible without already being dead.
Here is an extract from 'The Place'. By me. This extract is the
introduction of a character called Bob Bobbins, who is, as you'll
gather, a rather enthusiastic drunk.
' Later on that night, on the other side of town, one man's drunken
stupidity continued unabated.
" And then...I says to 'im, I says Daryl, yourrr standing in myy
popcorn." This relatively sane comment quickly became insane, as it was
directed at a lampost.
Bob Bobbins wasn't technically stupid. Alright, he thought IQ was a
home-shopping channel, but compared to many of the customers at the
'Lot's o' Beer' pub, he was highly intellectual. In many ways, he was
the biggest enigma never to have been tried to have been solved. After
getting into a nasty scuffle with a particularly cheeky young Post-Box,
he swaggered home. Swaggering was something Bob was good at, and would
have been renowned for if anyone cared. He could make it look decidedly
drunk, whilst making it look like an art-form at the same time. With
the amount of times he had returned home from the'Lot's o' Beer' pub on
the wrong side of sober, he'd had lots of practise. He somehow managed
to open his front door, crawl up the stairs, and fall into bed in a
record time of twenty minutes, and fifty-four seconds. And he
slept.'
I'm not going to say that this extract is funny, I'll let you decide
that, as it would sound rather too much like I was blowing my own
trumpet. But if you find it so, it is a good way of introducing a
character. You don't have to tell the reader everything - you can let
other things come out during the course of the book. In the first
piece, just let out the essentials - He's always drunk, He may be
stupid, but he's not clever, and he is some what of an enigma. This
will whet the appetite of the reader, and hook them to read more.

And finally, Throw away gags. These are said by your characters, but
don't really give anything away about character development or plot,
but add to the ambience of a 'fuuny book'. They'll also please the
reader a treat. I won't give you an example, as you probably already
have a good idea of what a joke is. But don't use a joke like '
Knock-knock. Who's there? Cows go. Cows go who? No, cows go moo.' These
will only add to the groan ambience, and is liabel to make your reader
want to hurt you with a big brick. And besides, you'd be getting back
into sticky pound territory...