The document provides tips for how to be funny and find your comedic voice, including making yourself laugh, finding people with a similar sense of humor, keeping humor relatable, and using devices like hyperbole, understatement, puns, dialogue, absurdity, repetition, and physical humor. It encourages the reader to think about what makes them laugh and gives examples from TV shows like Friends and Seinfeld to illustrate how these humor techniques work.

1. Heather Davis
www.Minivan-Momma.com
Minivan.Momma.2@gmail.com
www.slideshare.net/MinivanMomma2

2. Make yourself laugh first
What’s the funniest movie you’ve ever seen?
What’s the funniest TV show?
What’s the funniest book?
Comic?
Person?
Joke?

3. Find your tribe
When you know what makes you laugh, you’ll know
how to be funny
People who like your writing style will also like your
humor if you’re true to yourself

4. Funny is relatable
A realistic hook
Easily imagined
Friends & Seinfeld were popular & successful
because of this … Keep this point in mind—we’ll
come back to it.

5. How does funny work?
Try these devices to find your funny

6. Hyperbole:
a huge exaggeration

7. Hyperbole
Rachel and Ross have accidently locked baby Emma in the
apartment. Rachel is lamenting the fact that they are locked
outside.
“You haven’t cooked since 1996.”
“You left the water running, window open, the baby and bird
are locked in a desperate fight in the middle of the whirlpool,”
says Ross. Rachel responds, “Boy are you going to be sorry
if that really happens.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jScRgUSc8UA

8. Understatement:
making a point smaller or more trivial than it is

9. Understatement
Describe a messy car with an understatement

10. Pun:
Play on words

11. Puns by Steven Wright
My girlfriend asked me if I slept good. I told her I made a
few mistakes.
I bought some batteries. They were not included.
It’s wrong that only one company makes the game
Monopoly.
I intend to live forever. So far, so good.
Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while, I was a suspect.

12. Dialogue:
Conversation between one or more characters

13. Dialogue—finish this!

14. Absurdity:
being wildly unreasonable

15. Absurdity
Chicken Boobs in Subway…
http://www.minivan-momma.com/2011/01/eating-fresh-
or-getting-fresh.html

16. Repetition:
reoccurrence
Soup Nazi in Seinfeld.
Say it with me:
NO SOUP FOR YOU!

17. Physical Humor:
clownish exploitation of movement

18. Physical Humor – Describe
one
Kramer from Seinfeld Ross from Friends