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.

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.

From longtime New York Times and Vanity Fair writer David Margolick comes the first definitive biography of Sid Caesar: founding father of television comedy and icon to generations of Americans. By the spring of 1954, Sid Caesar was the most influential, highly paid, and enigmatic comedian in...

Five Foreigners. Two Brits. And One Island Of Delightfully Bonkers Traditions. Joana and Brian thought showing off England to their foreign guests would be easy: rolling hills, a few sheep, maybe a castle. Instead, they’re herding five wide-eyed travellers straight into the wonderfully eccentric world of British life. How do you explain a country where people apologise to lampposts, pull faces through horse collars, and race in mud dressed as maids? Where bathroom light switches hide in hallways, compliments spark panic, and adults parade with flaming barrels on their heads? And that’s ...

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.

An exciting, hilarious, and thoughtful travel memoir about one man's adventurous two and a half years on the road, backpacking through 40+ countries on a shoestring budget. From the back cover: Until his midlife crisis arrived, Chris Gattanella always played it safe. He spent two decades sinking into a nice cozy life and career in Los Angeles. Now in his forties and newly single, he suddenly feels unfulfilled and bored. Is it because he never ventured out to see the world? Impulsively, Chris burns years of saved vacation time on a six-week “test run” through Europe to see if he enjoys ...

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.

Read by the author and available digitally for the first time From the star of No Reservations, Anthony Bourdain's New York Times-bestselling chronicle of travelling the world in search the globe's greatest culinary adventures "Bourdain shows himself to be one of the country's best food writers...

A female-centred collection of four dramatisations celebrating Jane Austen’s classic novels - plus bonus series When I Met Jane Austen On 16 December 1775, a literary icon was born. Jane Austen’s groundbreaking novels pioneered the romantic comedy genre and put women front and centre...

🎃👻 Why did the undead chicken cross the road? To get to the fool's house. Knock, knock! Who’s there? …The undead chicken😆😅😂🤣 – 🧟♂️🧠 written by unknown undead. Get ready to howl with laughter (or moan, groan & face-plant 😱🤣) this Halloween! Prepare for spine-tingling, side-splitting chills with the ultimate 🎃 categorized collection of Halloween & Horror Humor that’ll tickle your funny bone🦴🩻 & leave you cackling like a witch 🧙♀️💀! Get buried alive in an utter avalanche⛷️🏂 of face-planting😒🌵 BAD (😈 EVIL?) DAD jokes -...

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.

From Robin Sloan, the New York Times bestselling author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, comes Sourdough, "a perfect parable for our times" (San Francisco Magazine): a delicious and funny novel about an overworked and under-socialized software engineer discovering a calling and a community...

This novel had its birth in the death of Martin Amis's closest friend, the incomparable Christopher Hitchens, and it is within that profound and sprawling friendship that Inside Story unfurls. From their early days as young magazine staffers in London, reviewing romantic entanglements and the...

In Furiously Happy, #1 New York Times bestselling author Jenny Lawson explores her lifelong battle with mental illness. A hysterical, ridiculous book about crippling depression and anxiety? That sounds like a terrible idea. But terrible ideas are what Jenny does best. As Jenny says: "Some people...

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.

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.

In the first of three essays included in this audiobook, Bill Bryson decides to move his wife and kids back to his homeland, the United States, after nearly two decades in Britain. But not before taking one last trip around Britain, a sort of valedictory tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home. The result is a hilarious social commentary.

Whether writing fiction or poetry, our best creations burst forth when love escapes the prison of our critical minds and reluctant hearts… when an unplanned thought, word, or action flashes across the author’s mindscape having emerged from our hitherto muted, creative depths. Both flash writing and poetry tap into that instinctive, unexpected inspiration that cries out for expression. Random thoughts give way to random words, till that moment—unspoken, undreamt—bubbles to life inside the author, who wonders, “Where did that come from?” Who knows where it came from? Who cares? ...