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.

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.

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.

The follow-up to Caitlin Moran's breakout hit, How to Be a Woman - a hilarious collection of award-winning columns, available to American listeners for the first time ever.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists of the modern era. This anthology gathers together, for the first time, the funniest work of more than seventy New Yorker contributors.

What if the Fountain of Youth is real? A 60-year-old virgin discovers the fountain of youth in her Miami backyard. Lorelei, the 60-year-old virgin, is part-owner of a Miami lingerie shop. When her well runs dry, she hires Juan, a Cuban well-digger, who taps into a hidden underground spring. Lorelei attributes her increasingly youthful appearance to her obsessively healthy lifestyle, but her business partner, Sharleen, suspects that it's the water she's been drinking, and campaigns to sell it from the shop. But someone else is interested in this water: Winona, a 500-year-old Native American ...

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.

What do Glazed Toddlers, Ventriloquist Farters, and The Tao of Poo have in common? Humor and writing! They helped create The Accidental Writing Lab. Author, Sheila M. Sullivan, invites us to see where and how she found the motivation to write. This is not exactly your traditional "how-to" or "self-help" book. No. This book lets us into the inner workings of one particular writer's life as she moved from San Francisco, California to Dallas, Texas and then to Fargo, North Dakota, and ultimately the Pacific Northwest over the course of months. All while attempting to complete the first book in...

“Steve Rockfish is back and kicking militia ass. In fact, the whole crew is back, busting balls as they solve crimes and track down the bad guys. The wisecracks fly fast and furious. So do the twists and turns. The bad guys are badder, the danger more dangerous, and every character as endearing as they are dysfunctional. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.” –Haris Orkin, award-winning author of The James Flynn Escapades Private investigators Steve Rockfish and Jawnie McGee's loyalty is tested when they are called upon to rescue a friend whose plan to grift a local militia goes ...

Nationally recognized and award-winning humor writer Jim Mize shares his insights from forty years of writing humor. In addition to discussing techniques, Mize credits his original sources so readers can view the materials that first inspired him. Readers will also be entertained with examples from his writing and see firsthand how Mize put these skills to work in his stories. Topics covered include joke writing, humor formats, misdirection, tension, timing, workshops, finding markets, and more. Of course, along the way, quite a few humorous things happened and these stories are shared as ...

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.

A Culinary Journey Through History The Celebrity Cookbook explores the truly important question: What on earth did famous people eat? Part cookbook, part comedy, part historical expedition gone slightly off course, this book is your guide to the favourite meals and drinks of emperors, rock stars, poets, pirates, and philosophers—some of whom really should have seen a nutritionist. The Celebrity Cookbook is a no-nonsense, laugh-out-loud collection of the actual (and occasionally ridiculous) favourite meals and drinks of the world’s most famous people—alive, dead, or somewhere in ...

This book is a collection of blogs on a wide range of subjects from the odd ways of gods to breast fixation of men and women. The blogs will make the reader smile, laugh out loud, cry, think and cause a variety of responses. Published in various sites in The Internet, they received wide acclaim and rave reviews. They discredit several myths and provoke thoughtful discussions on matters economic, social, behavior patterns and English language and grammar. The author is a retired officer of the Indian Navy and an author of a few books and several articles published in Indian media.

Jimmy, known by his friends as Meathead, is struggling to keep a secret. He wets the bed. Together with his dog and his pet ferret, Meathead rides his Big Wheel to misadventures in the gully, a swampy stream that cuts through his neighborhood. Impressing the older kids seems important, but it leads him into trouble. Losing his beloved pets and having his secret exposed, Meathead learns his lessons the hard way.

What If is an essay about the power of daydreaming, and why you should never, ever, ever, become a writer. James J. Caterino is the author of Jordan Rose and the Tomb of Resurrection, The Anti-Matter Girl, Dreams, True Stories, To Meghan, I Want to Believe, Ghost Stories, Pop Star, Time Travel Stories, The Girl from the Stars, and much more.