Books On Comedy

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Matt Willard

Matt Willard

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I own The Comic Toolbox and The Comedy Bible, but The New Comedy Writing Step by Step is the best comedy writing book I own. It's by Gene Perret, who's written for Phyllis Diller and Bob Hope, done work on the Carol Burnett show, and other stuff. It's a fantastic resource on the art of crafting jokes and monologues, and I highly recommend it. Get Toolbox and Bible too, but if you can only get one, New Comedy Writing Step by Step is the way to go.
 

iforgot120

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I actually believe you can learn how to be funny in a way. There's no way to learn how to improvise completely new material; that comes from your ability to make quick connections and you can't really learn that. You can, however, learn existing templates for jokes and start basing jokes off of those templates. I have this whole complex theory on it that's not really worth explaining because it doesn't mean too much but I like knowing that I have a theory on something
 
shawkins

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I think there's different media specialties as well. Rita Rudner is pretty funny (to me, anyway) when she does stand up, but her book didn't do much for me.

Pretty much any Dave Barry paragraph kills me, but I saw him on Letterman once and...meh.
 
JanDarby

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I'm not sure how helpful it would be for stand-up, per se, but for humor theory (especially if you want to appeal to women's sense of humor), there's Regina Barreca's They Used to Call me Snow White ... But I Drifted. The subtitle is "Women's Strategic Use of Humor."

JD
 
Ken

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... having no substantial amount of familarity with the subject, I couldn't say for sure whether one necessarily needs natural knack to be a humorist. Clearly, though, there is one requisite for the career path which is absolutely essential, or my name ain't Samuel, or Jimmy neither. To be a gagster one has got to be a bit screwy in teh head ;-)
 
Ken

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... same here, Matt.
I also shout lines at my TV, which has been broken for several years :X
 
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