Writing Humour

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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 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.

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.

This novel, written in 1949, was Osamu Dazai's last work and was unfinished upon his death. It is set in Tokyo just after the war's end. It tells the story of a handsome editor who wants to leave his mistresses and a black marketeer woman who has a thick voice, a big appetite, and great strength but is also stunningly beautiful. It is a cheerful, humorous, and unprecedented novel, so much so that it is hard to believe that it was written by a novelist who was so depressed that he was contemplating suicide. All the reader can do, however, is to imagine the rest of the novel. Annotations [1] ...

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.

Part foreign affairs discourse, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide, The Geography of Bliss takes the listener from America to Iceland to India in search of happiness, or, in the crabby author's case, moments of "un-unhappiness". This uses a beguiling mixture of travel, psychology, science and humor to investigate not what happiness is, but where it is.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

This step-by-step comedy writer's guide is for the budding stand-up comedian to develop fresh original material and craft it into great performance. Become clear on what your comedy special powers are. Edit and secretly test your material. Craft your set into a streamlined performance, and become a better comic out of the gate! Now you can get rid of your writer's block!

His name is Deutsch Baggerly. He's a sort of hot, middle-aged, retired potato salesman turned private eye. He's traded the spuds to go after the puds. Anything anyone can do he can't do better. He has the instincts of a wet-bottom shoofly pie. Absurdity, apathy, and luck are his favorite weapons, and occasionally potatoes. Yet he somehow stumbles into solving cases no one else will touch. He's horrible at shark diving, paintball, karate, safe-cracking, knife-throwing, e-mailing, zip lining, you name it. But don't tangle with him: he's Pennsylvania Dutch and he may put the hex on you. He has...