Writing Humor

Author Scott Dikkers will tell you how to write jokes. He’s a master joke writer, founder of the world’s most popular humor site TheOnion.com, number one New York Times best-selling humor author, professional public speaker, and successful cartoonist. In this definitive joke-writing handbook, he'll teach you comedy writing and how to write a joke with a simple comedy-writing and joke-writing formula you can use right now to write your own jokes.

Dr. Peter McGraw, founder of the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, teamed up with journalist Joel Warner on a far-reaching search for the secret behind humor. Their journey spanned the globe, from New York to Japan, from Palestine to the Amazon. Meanwhile, the duo conducted their own humor experiments along the way-to wince-worthy, hilarious, and illuminating results.

This entertaining and sharply written guide - for both beginners breaking into comedy and professionals seeking to improve their sets and advance their careers - examines the work of great comedians such as Louis C. K., Jerry Seinfeld, Eddie Izzard, Moms Mabley, Hannibal Buress, Sarah Silverman, Richard Pryor, and more as a means of illustrating the most important techniques of performing and writing stand-up.

Maria Bamford is a creative genius. But the process of creating is not something that “comes easily” or “is enjoyable” for her. So, over the years, she’s invented a number of helpful techniques for tricking, shaming, coercing herself into doing things. You Are (A Comedy) Special is 15-step comedic send up of a self help guide that examines Maria’s approach to stand-up in a hilarious fashion.

The New Comedy Bible is a step-by-step, no excuses manual for writing, performing, and launching your career as a stand-up comic. Written by Judy Carter, the author of The Comedy Bible (2001), which was called by The Washington Post and Forbes as a “Comedy Essential”. This new book, penned in classic Carter’s style - part career coach and part comedy dominatrix - has 100 percent new content.

"If there is any life that is happier than the life we led on our timber ranch, it must be the sort of life which I have not read of in books or experienced in person," wrote Mark Twain, and now you can share in that experience. The beloved American humorist spent seven years on a "pleasure trip" through the untamed wilderness of Nevada. Twain intended to spend three months touring silver mines, but the lure of rough terrain and comfortable clothes proved irresistible - as will this vibrant travelogue.

Can you learn how to write comedy? Absolutely - anyone can. Scott Dikkers will tell you how. He's co-founder and longest-serving editor-in-chief of The Onion, the world's most popular humor publication, and founder of The Onion Training Center at the Second City in Chicago. He's also a number one best-selling humor author and winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor. In How to Write Funnier, he tells you everything you need to know to start writing funny stories, how to write funny scenes, and how to write funny sketches.

They shouldn't have tear gassed best-selling (bald) author Adam Fletcher. It ruined his supposedly normal holiday in Istanbul, made him curious, and began a quest to visit places everyone else is trying to escape from, and tourists don't normally go to. In this hilarious travel memoir, he'll enter a blizzard in China armed with only biscuits; pose as a scientist to sneak into Chernobyl; be chased by Croatian police boats en route to Liberland (the world's newest country); become a reluctant diving board star in a North Korean water park, and much more.

I've always been her shelter in the storm. Hockey players. MMA fighters. Rock stars. The boys in blue. Even sexy SEALs have all offered to slay my dragon - or in my case, my stalker. Why can't they get it through their thick, stubborn heads that I can take care of myself? I'm no damsel! But...what if the real villain in this story is me? Now the one person I've never been able to resist has appointed himself as my protector.

Drunk customers. Shoplifting raccoons. Otherworldly visitors. As night shift clerk at the 24-hour gas station at the edge of town, Jack has pretty much seen it all.

Romantic Secrets (Book One) Abby likes sex but has never had an orgasm. She wants to fall in love but knows she never will. That kind of luck doesn't happen to a girl like her...a girl from a hardscrabble past and a heart that's grown a protective shell. When Abby arrives in New York for her cousin Emma's funeral, she hopes to leave the past behind and start a whole new life. She meets Isabella, her cousin's former roommate, who provides a reference to Miss White, the imposing madam who runs a high-class escort agency. Soon, Abby is propelled into a whole new life of money, glamour, and sex...

Although there's no shortage of books on writing and publishing, there's none quite like Robert's Rules of Writing. Drawing on his many years of experience as an award-winning journalist, TV writer, and the author of over 20 books, Robert Masello addresses all the issues that confront, and all the problems that beset, writers of all stripes.

Trae and Corey will take you from the smallest of small towns to major US metropolises (or is it metropoli? We haven't a fartin' clue!). They'll even cross the pond to sip tea in some of them fancy kings-and-castles places that PBS Viewers Like You can't stop yapping about. From Chickamauga to Cheyenne, New York to New Orleans, Seattle to Scotland—no matter where these two wandering jesters go, there's something to roast, something to toast, and something to learn about what ties us together as humans. Even the most outrageous of us.

Writing Erotica can be HARD! Daisy Smutly was not his real name, but the pseudonym allowed him to pay the bills and travel the world. He didn't have the name recognition of other erotic writers who had gone mainstream for one reason or another, but that didn't matter. He wasn't in it for the fame or glory. He wanted to make a living, of course, but he was also looking for love. By writing erotic adventures of men much more endowed (and more), he was able to explore and finally become attractive to someone on planet Earth. This hot, steamy and sometimes funny erotic story follows Eric Smith ...

An indispensable, richly informative, and always entertaining audio sourcebook on Provence, by the writer who has made the region his own. Though organized from A to Z, this is hardly a conventional work of reference. It is rather a selection of those aspects of Provence that Peter Mayle, in almost 20 years there, has found to be the most interesting, curious, delicious, or down-right fun.

Amusing and informative, Hey Ranger! teaches as it entertains with tales of boat-ramp misadventures, lost Afghani campers, encounters with wild animals, dumb crooks, and more. One chapter, "Tales from the Wild Side", brings together unusual incidents from National Park Service reports, and the concluding essay, "Don't Be a Victim of Your Vacation", advises visitors on how to avoid being a story on the evening news.

Without bothering to get approval from the President, the State Department, or even the FTC, Dave Barry's publishers sent him to Tokyo. You'd think they would have known better. Now the word is Barry has set back our diplomatic relations with the whole Pacific Rim by a couple of decades. Japanese culture, dining, sport, and industry all come under Barry's relentless scrutiny.

With her books sporting other people’s names, ghostwriter Jake O’Hara works behind the scenes. But she never expected a séance at a New York apartment to be part of her job. Jake had signed on as a ghostwriter, secretly writing for a grande dame of mystery fiction whose talent died before she did. The author’s East Side residence was impressive. But her entourage—from a Mrs. Danvers-like housekeeper to a lurking hypnotherapist—was creepy. Still, it was all in a day’s work, until a killer started going after ghostwriters, and Jake suspected she was chillingly close to the ...

Selling firecrackers by the side of the road, floating in space with no hope of rescue, reflecting on goldfish philosophy, the sunsets at San Nada, and the trees at Appomattox, I Awoke One Morning to Find Three Psychoanalysts in the Closet is a collection of short stories, prose poems, and other short writing. The topics, and the words used to fill them in are often silly, occasionally poignant, but always aiming to entertain.

Do you want to be more humorous? Have you ever watched someone effortlessly make a group laugh and wished you knew their magic? Well, wonder no more. The mystery of charisma is finally unveiled; the fallacy of "you either have it, or you don't" has been laid bare. Anyone can learn to make people laugh. Observing a couple of surprisingly simple rules, Make People Laugh is a comedic tour de force, as it explores all the facets of laughter. Turn your lazy bones into funny bones, and you will have made the world a better place.