How to Write a Joke
Jokes are the atom of humor. They are the basic building blocks, comprising a few smaller parts, that represent the fundamentals of any funny work. They are simultaneously practice and performance. If you want to get funnier, stay funny, or show how funny you can be, you will write jokes.
Listen. I promise: you have everything you need to write great jokes. The fact that you’re interested enough in the process to read more about it is all the proof you need. Jokes are utterly democratic. They are irrepressibly egalitarian. You not only can write them, you should.
Write jokes, damn you! Okay, let’s get started. First, a few terms, then some easy steps.
Know the Parts of a Joke
Jokes have three parts: the setup, the punch, and tags. The setup leads us in a direction, building tension. The punch relieves that tension, ideally in a clever way. Tags can help prolong the great moment when a joke lands.
Don’t write tags unless you know you need them and can use them. Do you know someone who tells jokes and then says stuff like, “Get it?” or “Know what I mean?” afterward? Those are tags. If you’re in a club and your jokes land, tags are essential to help you prolong that moment of success. If you’re new or just working on new jokes, leave tags off until you know your jokes land.
Setup: A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says…
Punch: Why the long face?
Tags: And I was like… whaaat!? You know? A horse! In a bar! I bet it asked to talk to the manager! Etc.
As I say, forget about tags for now. All we need is a setup and a punch, so let’s write those.
Come Up With Your Joke’s Universe
You can approach your joke from any direction. You can come up with the punch first, or the setup first, or just have a nebulous idea along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be weird if…” It doesn’t matter. Just write down what you think your joke might be about. Use as many words as you need.
Most likely, your joke at this point will look like a paragraph. Don’t self-edit during this process. Write out everything you think is related.
I know free writing like this might feel weird. I agree it would feel better if you could just write perfectly-formed jokes right off the hop. Some jokes will come to you that way. But more often than not, you’ll have to work for them. This is how you do that work.
Here’s my paragraph, based on a recent trip into the city.
“It’s weird how everyone complains that New York subways smell like pee, but there’s also nowhere in the city to go to the bathroom. Everyone knows that if you’re in New York and you stop into a place with a bathroom, whether you need to go or not you should definitely go. But what if you find yourself on Madison Avenue with $2.75 in your pocket? You can afford to get on the train to go home, but you don’t have the money to buy a coffee so you can use the bathroom. If you pay for a pay toilet, you won’t have the money to get home. What do you do? I can see how someone could get themselves into a situation where peeing in the subway is their only option.”
Hilarious? No. But it’s not cookies yet, it’s just dough. Hang in there.
Pan for Gold
Look through whatever you just wrote down for something that seems like it could be a funny idea. Trust your gut. You’re looking for something you can say in one short sentence.
In my case, I googled “public bathrooms in NYC” and I learned a few things. There are toilets at Grand Central station (they don’t count because you’d need a metro card or $2.75). A few parks have pay toilets ($0.25). And last, but far from least, according to what I read, you can ask to pee at any NYC police station.
I’ll say that again. You can ask to pee at any NYC police station.
This is what you’re looking for during this step: something that seems to you like it has a lot of comedy potential. The more you go through this process the better you’ll get at recognizing stuff that’s in your sweet spot. It’s okay if this feels awkward. Like I said, try to trust your gut.
Boil It Down
Make sure your sentence has a single idea in it. “What would it be like to be a clown who is also a single mother pushing a stroller and they also need to pee at a police station in NYC?”
This is what people mean when they say a situation has too many “moving parts.” I’m not saying you can’t make that situation funny, but simple is good. Think of it like the gym. You don’t have to use all the equipment at once. Sure, you’ll see people on the treadmill, wrapped in resistance bands, holding a dumbbell in either hand. It’s not advised.
If you need any help during this process, come join us on our Discord (https://discord.gg/39y7sME). It might take a minute to get a reply, but someone will try to help you out.
Come up with the twist
Now that you have your sentence boiled down, let’s think of some twists that could match it. Note that your boiled down sentence does not have to be your finished setup. We’re going to do a final polish step later.
Here’s my sentence: You can ask to pee at any NYC police station.
So what are some potential twists that could match that idea? Ideally we’d like to have a punch that reveals something about the setup, like in this Rodney Dangerfield joke.
“When I was a kid my parents moved around a lot. But I always found them.”
See how “But I always found them,” reveals something we didn’t know about the setup? Rodney’s parents were leaving him. We want a reveal like that. It does not have to be true. You can use artistic license here to become anyone you want to be for the purposes of the joke.
So, with that in mind, here are some twists:
- Maybe I’m being arrested
- Maybe I’m in jail already
- Maybe it’s not the police station
Make your Setup and Punch Match
Now I have a couple of ideas where this joke can go, it’s time to write some matching setups and punches. As you get better at this you’ll probably just do this in your mind but it doesn’t hurt to write it down.
Here are some possible jokes using the above twists:
- I found out you can ask to use the toilet in any NYC police station but there are some times when they can say no. Like, after you’ve been caught peeing in the subway.
- The cops are supposed to let you use their bathroom if you ask nicely. I tried it but they kept saying I had to use the one in my cell.
- I was drunk one night in NYC and I had to go, so I worked up the courage to ask a cop if I could pee in the police station. He said I had to pay money. I said, “That’s bribery!” and he said, “This is a yarn shop.”
Polish Your Joke
Now we can take stock of what we’ve got and do some evaluation. I think the first joke above is probably my favorite. The second one feels too off-the-shelf to me, and the last one feels kinda already-done.
This process can take a long time. It helps to say your jokes to friends, to other comics, then try them on stage.
You want to eliminate every word that isn’t doing work to polish your joke, but also raise the stakes as high as they can be.
So for polishing, maybe we can remove these words in bold.
“I found out you can ask to use the toilet in any NYC police station but there are some times when they can say no. Like, after you’ve been caught peeing in the subway.”
We can also change some words out so we get:
“You can ask to use the toilet in any NYC police station but sometimes they can say no. Like, as you’re being caught peeing in the subway”
Personally, I love this part. To me, whittling my jokes down to only their most essential bits feels terribly poetic. But you have to balance perfect word economy against the desire to raise stakes.
If possible, edit your joke to make the consequences high. Maybe in this joke I had to pee super bad for some reason. Or I was in a big hurry on the way to a job interview. Or I was being chased by a murderer. Whatever the case, if there are no stakes, when the punch comes to release the tension you’ve built it won’t land as hard.
Here’s the joke we’ve been working on with lower stakes but better word economy:
You can ask to use the toilet in any NYC police station. I thought about that once while peeing in the subway.
This isn’t a joke I would normally do because I don’t personally like jokes where I get away with doing something. But I have to say, the fact that the joke is a lot shorter is appealing.
At this point, the joke is ready to be tried on stage, with friends, or workshopped with other comics. As I said above, if you’d like to workshop jokes or you have any questions about the above you can always find us on Discord.
Now write five jokes every day and never, ever give up.
