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How to Use This Book

The club where we sometimes play golf has four practice areas just outside the clubhouse. These are not places where you play the game. They’re reserved strictly for golfers who want to do some swing exercises. But why are there four of them? Wouldn’t one area set aside for drills be enough?

No, it wouldn’t because there are different types of golf swings that require different practice areas. For instance, this particular club has a driving range where you can swing freely and hit the ball as far as you like. It’s a place where you can experiment with the full golf swing. There’s a putting green where you can do drills to improve your putting, and only your putting. There’s a chipping area that is strictly for practicing your chipping stroke. Then there is an area for pitching and sand shots.

Which area should the golfers use? They should use whichever one they want in order to work on whichever shot they feel needs improvement. Comedy writers, too, should practice different skills. That’s why this book is divided into various practice areas—each one dedicated to a different writing genre.

Part 1 (Exercises 1 through 24) covers joke writing in general. Its purpose is to offer some practice in developing your sense of humor and learning the basics of good one-line writing.

Part 2 (Exercises 25 through 47) is about studying various comics and their styles and writing material for specific stand-up performers.

Part 3 (Exercises 48 through 66) deals with selecting a specific comedian as your mentor and learning from and attempting to replicate his or her delivery, style, and material.

Part 4 (Exercises 67 through 87) helps you learn by viewing, analyzing, and duplicating those shows through the years that have featured great sketches and legendary sketch writing.

Part 5 (Exercises 88 through 114) teaches you to teach yourself to create, outline, and write salable situation comedy scripts.

All of these practice areas are available to you. There is no strict protocol for which exercises you should follow and no set order in which you should do them (although in some cases, you will work on a series of related exercises that you should do in the specified sequence, but they’ll be clearly marked). But for the most part, you can work on the exercises whenever you feel like doing some writing or whenever you feel that a certain area of your writing needs work.

There are many reasons for doing the exercises in this book, and which exercises you choose to do may depend on your specific reasons for wanting to do them. You may recognize some or all of your reasons among the following:

To learn a new skill: If you want to learn to play the piano, your instructor may have you play “I Am Mr. Middle C.” It’s a simple drill, but as you repeat it, you learn many things—where middle C is on the keyboard, where it is on the music staff, and how to relate one to the other. In short, you’re learning to play that note.

In keeping with our golf analogy, if you want to learn to hit a golf ball, a teacher shows you the correct swing motions. However, you don’t really learn to swing correctly until you practice what the instructor told you. Your exercise then is to hit golf balls on the driving range.

To develop dexterity: After you learn a skill, you must become proficient at it. That’s why you spend time on the driving range—to translate what you’ve learned into a golfing skill. You transform knowledge into technique. Pianists practice scales in order to develop a quickness and finesse in moving along the keyboard. A beginning guitarist who learns new chord formations may repeat them over and over in order to become adroit at playing them to tempo. The adage “Practice makes perfect” applies here.

To learn new techniques: Even accomplished performers can learn new skills. Like the beginner, they must then practice these to perfect them.

To reveal preferences and tendencies: Various exercises can reveal different techniques. Often you not only will learn new techniques, as we mentioned, but you also may discover that you are very skilled in this new style or that you have a preference for it. Either revelation can be beneficial.

To develop consistency: Ability is only useful when you can depend on it. When a pianist plays a recital, he or she should be fairly confident of getting through the selections flawlessly. Returning to our golf example again, the prevailing wisdom is “to hit the shot you know you can make.”

To foster confidence: Amateur golfers often can’t understand why they hit the shot perfectly at the practice area but then mishit it terribly on the course. One reason is that the practice area is stress free. The pressure is off. You won’t be penalized for executing the shot badly. Anxiety can affect performance. Doing exercises helps develop consistency, as mentioned, and that promotes confidence. Your practice exercises should prove to you that you can perform under pressure. That’s confidence.

To enhance strengths: All of us, in whatever area we work, have strengths—certain facets that we execute better than others. Naturally, these are useful. In competition, they may give us the edge we need. They’re valuable, and we should rely on them. However, they’d obviously be more valuable if we could improve on them. Performing strategic exercises can make our strong points even stronger.

To eliminate weakness: All of us, in whatever area we work, have weaknesses, too. Those are the failings that competitors may take advantage of. Exercises can eradicate those flaws. Or at the very least the exercises can make the flaws less problematic. When we lessen our weaknesses, we strengthen our entire performance.

To serve as a warm-up: In watching any sport, you’ll see players warming up. Basketball teams come out on the court and start shooting basketballs. Pitchers throw balls in the bull pen. Tennis players hit the ball back and forth. Golfers hit various shots on the driving range or drop a few balls and stroke them on the putting green. It’s a way of easing into the strenuous activity gradually. Exercises can do that for the writer.

One comedy writer began each day by writing a humorous limerick. His philosophy was “When I’m sharp enough to create a funny five lines of poetry, I’m ready to begin writing real comedy.”

So the way to use this book is any way you want to. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say any way you need to. There is no strict order to the exercises in this book. If you want to start at page one and complete all the exercises in progression right to the last page, that’s commendable. However, you can also randomly select an exercise and work on that. You may find an exercise that emphasizes a technique you’ve never tried before. It might be fun to give that one a try. You decide where you need work, find an exercise that helps develop that skill, and devote your time and efforts to that one. The choice is totally yours.

This book has a limited number of pages, and we could include only a certain number of exercises. However, that shouldn’t restrict your practice time. You should keep this volume handy and use it often. Many of these exercises can and should be repeated several times. You don’t practice the scales on a piano just once. You can return to any exercise in this book anytime you feel that specific skills need fine-tuning, or for whatever reason.

In some cases we will offer specific items to work on; for instance, in Exercise 5 we ask you to come up with new punchlines for the old gag “What’s black and white and red all over?” You can always return to this exercise and generate new gags for the same setup. You are also free to create a new setup for the exercise. Pick a new “old” joke (forgive the oxymoron) and generate new and unique punchlines for that.

This collection of exercises is extensive, but it’s not exhaustive. It doesn’t contain every possible comedy writing exercise imaginable. That’s where you can add some creativity to your self-education. You can devise new exercises. Using the exercises in these pages as a springboard or going out completely on your own, you can design comedy writing practice sessions to build your skills. The possibilities are endless.

The main thrust of performing exercises is to keep you writing and keep you learning. As we’ve mentioned, many experts feel that there are three ways to learn to write. They are to write, to write, and to write.

In the following pages you have many and varied exercises, so now is the time to write, to write, and to write.

Have fun with them.