Fine-Tuning Your Funny Muscle: How to Practice Creating Laughs Like a Pro

Funny Muscle, Book 2

By: Mike Lukas

Narrated by: Mike Lukas

When a joke flops…It hurts. Nothing beats getting big, genuine laughs from a room full of people. But when a joke doesn’t land, your confidence takes a hit, and it feels like you’ve let everybody down. Figuring out why a joke didn't work and trying again is what makes you funnier. You could try grinding it out on your own, hoping you’ll get lucky. Or you could get serious about your humor.

With a career spanning a quarter of a century, veteran comedian and comedy coach Mike Lukas (Tonight Show, Comedy Central, Second City, CBS Radio) strips comedy down to the bone. Here in Fine-Tuning Your Funny Muscle (book two of the Funny Muscle series), Mike dives deeper into all those joke-writing concepts from book one and fine-tunes them for you, one by one.

First up, Mike talks more about discovering your own Comedy Lens and how having one can keep you from becoming a generic “Corner Quipper.” He gives you some above-the-net suggestions for how to clarify your own lens as well as provides examples of some famous Comedy Lenses you may have heard of to help guide you.

Then Lukas dives deeper into the humor blueprint. Meaning, he slow-walks you through all the steps pro comics take to create a list of potential laughs they can choose from for their act. He uses the blueprint to break down one of his standup jokes that he heightens repeatedly in the following section.

Finally comes the meat of book two, which is where Mike goes over all thirty-six humor heightening devices in depth. You’ll see how some pros use these same devices in various jokes of theirs. Then Mike applies each device to the joke he wrote in chapter one so you can better see how they work to create laughs from scratch. Otherwise, you’re just giving a dang speech.

At the end of the book, Mike turns that same joke he's heightened into a short standup routine to demonstrate how the laughs that come out of this process can be used to create performable material.

©2023 Michael Jon Lukas (P)2023 Michael Jon Lukas