Originally published in the May 2004 issue of Writer’s Digest magazine

Funny Bones

Don’t wait for hilarious ideas to strike you. Start with a basic structure and let the humor reveal itself.

by Tim Bete

Many romance stories use the same format over and over again—boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl back. It’s produced hundreds of books and movies that share the same structure but have different story lines. The same holds true for humor writing.

There are three basic parts to a humor piece: the topic, the format and the individual jokes. Many writers move straight from the topic (say, Valentine's Day gifts) to individual jokes (e.g., I bought my wife a vacuum cleaner for Valentine's Day. She said it sucked) without considering the format. This often results in a list of jokes that work better as a stand-up routine than as a coherent, printed piece. Formats provide a starting point and framework that tie the topic and jokes together. The format is the skeleton of the piece. It’s up to the writer to put the meat on it.

You’ve heard dozens of jokes that begin with, “Three writers walk into a bar,” and end with, “And the third writer looks at the bartender and says ….” Standard formats like this work for jokes without diminishing their humor. Recognizing and using them allows you to sit down and write funny material whenever you want—not just when an idea hits you. Formats provide ready-to-use concepts, so you can produce material faster and funnier—and sell more pieces.

The diary format

The diary format provides a chronological structure (e.g., day one, day two) that escalates in exaggeration from the first entry to the last.

One of the best examples of this format is syndicated humor columnist and New York Times bestselling author Bruce Cameron’s "Chili Judge" piece. The piece gets its chronological structure from the sequence of entries in a chili contest, beginning with the mildest and escalating to the hottest. Each entry includes comments from two judges (“A mediocre chili with too much reliance on canned peppers”) plus Cameron (“You could put a hand grenade in my mouth and pull the pin and I wouldn't feel it.”)

I used the diary format to write, "No Rest for the Weary," which I sold to several regional parenting magazines. My piece described the first five sleepless days and nights with a new baby in our house and escalated from "Day 1: Yawning" to "Day 5: Comatose."

The advice format

The advice format parodies the "Dear Abby" style, using a Q&A structure in which both the question and answer are made up by the writer.

Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist Dave Barry uses an advice format for his "Ask Mister Language Person" pieces, in which he provides "the grammar, punctuation and vocabulary skills you need to verbally crush your opponents like seedless grapes under a hammer." 

Humorist Elizabeth Hanes created the persona Savannah Lawless for her

"Savannah Says" column, which dispenses "romance advice no one should actually take!"

Other common humor formats include the how-to (or how-not-to) piece, the parody interview and the quiz format. Finding new formats is a matter of reading other writers’ work. The key is to keep the structure of the piece in mind—you’re not looking for individual jokes. Identifying the purpose of each paragraph often provides clues to how a format works. For example, the diary format usually uses a separate paragraph for each entry.

One of the best places to find new formats is by reading non-humorous writing with an eye to how the format could be used for humor. For example, the Dear Abby newspaper column isn't funny—at least not on purpose—but its advice format works well for humor.

Grist for the format mill

When you use formats as a starting point for humor writing, you can begin with a broad topic and quickly come up with many directions to take it. We can run our Valentine's Day gift topic, for example, through each of the five formats mentioned above.

Diary format: an escalation of five years' Valentine's Day gifts that gets progressively worse.

Advice format: Common Valentine's Day questions, such as, "Which gift will tell my wife I love her, a power drill or table saw?”

How-not-to format: Ten steps to finding the worst Valentine's Day present; how I managed to forget Valentine’s Day three years in a row.

Parody interview format: An interview with the man who holds the Guinness record for buying the worst Valentine’s Day gifts.

Quiz format: Will you be in the doghouse? How to tell if your spouse will hate the gift you picked out.

The process of running a topic through different formats may provide the concept to write an entire piece. Just as often, however, reviewing possible formats leads to an idea that doesn’t fit neatly within any one of them or creates a new format altogether. The more formats you discover, the easier it is to write your next piece. Either way, you’ve begun to write and didn’t need to wait for an idea to hit you. And that’s the key to earning more money.

Tim Bete is the director of the University of Dayton's Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop. His humor has been published in the Christian Science Monitor and more than a dozen parenting magazines. His first book, In The Beginning...There Were No Diapers, will be published in April 2005.

Successful Habits

of Humor Writers

A recent survey conducted by the University of Dayton's Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop found that humor writers who earned more than $5,000 last year were more likely to sit down and write until a humorous idea came to mind, while those who earned less than $500 were more likely to wait for a funny idea to hit them.  The survey also showed that the biggest challenge for high-earning humor writers was finding the overall concept for a piece—not writing individual jokes.

The moral: Write whether you’re feeling inspired or not. Eventually, the right concept will come to you, and you can laugh your way to the bank.