I would argue that when you’re with mates you are actually working quite hard without realizing it. It seems easy because you’re relaxed, you’re confident, you’re going over a well worn subject you know and love. The general chit chat of the group gives you numerous potential set-up Lins to play off, and even though you’re thinking really hard in order to do that, you’re enjoying it so much that you don’t even notice how furiously your brain is working and how totally focused you are.


When I started working on a subject I would always worry that there would be no jokes on it. The way to overcome this was to focus on my belief that jokes are not genius thunderbolts, they already exist in the ether, and all I had to do was keep looking for them.

The second pattern I noticed was that around 3pm on the afternoon of the recording I would truly believe with all my heart that I’d written was utter rubbish that I was going to fail. A younger me would have gone into panic mode but I learnt to realize it was a mid-afternoon slump, to put the feelings to one side and keep working.

Basically the answer to all my problems was always to keep working, to keep sifting through ideas, to keep looking for that other angle or meaning or context.

This brought me to my third discovery: no matter how much I thought I’d run out of ideas on a subject, if left it by taking a break or visiting another subject, when I returned to it my brain would have new ideas. I started to think of this as background processing.


Creative is dreaming while you’re awake.


My favorite way of working is to do an hour’s hard thinking and then go for a walk. Sometimes I consciously set my brain a task, tell it I’d like a good analogy for something, and then a line or snippet will jump into my head. Trust me, if you really fire up your brain it won’t be able to stop working but you have to put the effort in first.


Once you have new meanings for your words, apply these back to your original subject, deliberately thinking each one through. Don’t dismiss them before you have done this.


We cannot escape fear. We can only transform it into a companion that accompanies us on all our exciting adventures.


The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.


It seems a lot of effort to go to for a joke that might be irrelevant in a week’s time.

That is both the joy and the tragedy of the topical joke writer. So it’ your decision about whether they’re worth it.


You can build up a bank of jokes you can dip into. You will have a job writing an interesting set that is all typical material.


Writing jokes from newspapers is about ruthless objectivity, spotting interesting lines and working them until you find the joke.


I’ve got a writing schedule that I stick to. If not I probably wouldn’t write at all.


No matter how talented you are, unless someone is putting the time in, you’re not going to be a prolific joke writer.


I admit my brain is attuned to joke writing, but I’m still putting time in. I run the subject through as many of my joke writing methods as appropriate. I like to do at least 1 hour a day. I break it up, do a bit here and a bit there. I allow my brain time in between, to process everything, and hey presto the gags come.


For me, song writing is something I have to do ritually. I don’t just wait for inspiration. I try to write a little bit every day.


Great detectives spend a lot of time sifting through stuff, ruling stuff out and I recognize that process when I’m writing jokes.

I was always witty with friends. Doing it to order, though, or doing it to make a living, requires time and tenacity as well.


I’m telling you he’s an idiot. In a parallel universe where single thing was different — he’d still be an idiot.


To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.


I can do better than that. I can do worse as well. I have no control. I just let it all come tumbling out. I say rubbish things, I say puns a child of 5 could have written, and I say great things, but I needed to say all the other things to get there. So when students look at me that way I say: this is the process.


There’s always one joke I hate and they love and vice versa.


Creativity is a process. Creative people are simply better at running this process (whether they do it consciously or not) than their less creative peers.


Describe the situation to a child in terms they can understand. Put yourself in their place and imagine how they would respond?


It’s a myth that joke writers are all geniuses. Talk to them and they’ll tell you a lot of it is drudge work, sifting through stuff, but once you get an idea it’s really exciting, and you do look really clever.


It feels magical when jokes just come. You are on a roll or just mulling something over and there it is, a fabulous gleaming beautiful funny joke. And you thought of it. You, how clever you are!


“Wow how did they think of that?” I wondered, so I watched the additional notes about the show. Larry David said that for ages he had up on his whiteboard the idea that they would take the wrong car at the airport. One day it came to him that the car could be that of a Nazi leader.


Doesn’t it often seem that when we let go of conscious thinking — that desire to analyze or control the outcome — then we begin to gain access to the vast potential of our unconscious mind that seems to know so much more than we do.


My 3 favorite honing guidelins:

  1. Never throw away or type over your previous versions of gags. You can’t judge what’s good until you have distance.
  2. Allow space for things to fail.
  3. When you find a joke write down the exact wording immediately. You may never find it again.

You can see the gag in the distance but you can’t quite grasp it.


It’s easy to get attached to long-winded setup, especially if it sparked your thinking it can seem sacred. It’s not.


People started to say I was prolific and it made me laugh if they knew how hard it was.


“But when I sit down to write, nothing comes and I get frustrated,” she said. That in a nutshell is the biggest problem all joke writers face. The first time you sit down to do anything is hard. The ability to accept that and just get on with it is probably the difference between being successful or not.


What they’re probably afraid of is failure, looking silly in front of the group, or realizing that they are not as witty as they hoped. But at this stage all we are doing is sitting writing, we haven’t got to perform or say it out loud yet, we’ve just got to do the exercise. So what we’re really afraid of is thinking!


Perhaps we are all afraid to walk down an avenue when we don’t know the outcome, in life and in joke writing. But that’s what you have to do.


If jokes were that easy to write we wouldn’t laugh so hard at them. A joke writing brain is just one step ahead of all the other brains that we want to understand and admire our joke. It can’t be outside anyone’s grasp, unless you don’t understand jokes in the first place.

Jokes are exaggeration, lateral thinking, twisting words, applying one situation to another, taking things out of context, mimicking, slapstick, observation and any combination of the above.


So each joke writing exercise in this book is a way to walk down an avenue. And walking down an avenue is a metaphor for thinking.


There may be many things to fear in this world. Don’t let thinking be one of them.


Just trust. Jokes are there and you’re going to find them. All you have to do is put the time in. Start really early.


Go for a mental walk into the unknown and don’t worry if you don’t find a joke there.