Improving Our “Signals” and “Beings”

This is a book review of Mel Helitzer’s Comedy Writing Secrets: The best-selling book on how to think funny, write funny, act funny, and get paid for it.

Mel Helitzer is a professor at the Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Though a humorous professor seems like a bit of an oxymoron, he has been described as the “funniest professor in the country” by Rolling Stone magazine. After reading this great book, he definitely seems like a funny guy as I found myself laughing on many occasions so the material he teaches definitely works.

I purchased this book because I had heard great things about it and I wanted to be able to teach others how they can be funnier in conversations. The book’s title doesn’t do it justice as it isn’t just good for writing funny. It’s also a good door stop. (Okay, I’ll have to work on my understatements in humor.) It is a great book for becoming a funnier person in general. If you’d like to be able to write a few funny jokes for your speeches, have funny conversations, cheer up your spouse, or make your team at work laugh, then you’re bound to find this book a great read.

Some people will be skeptical of this book and any book that teaches people to be funny. These people say things like “you can’t teach people to be funny” and “you’re either naturally funny or not”. If humor can’t be learned, it would be impossible for comedians to improve their acts as they wouldn’t be able to become funnier. Humor is a communication skill that can be learned like any other and is extremely valuable like any other.

Comedy Writing Secrets starts off by addressing these issues in the first section plus a few other issues commonly related to humor like uncovering why we laugh. You are given many techniques in the second section for being funny like using understatements, exaggerations, play on words, paired elements, triples, and realism to name a few. The third and last section deals with creating humor for specific situations like speeches, cartoons, cards, salesperson, radio, television, newspaper columns, sitcoms, and stand-up comedy. Those who aren’t interested in comedy writing can skip the third section of the book. The meat and potatoes of learning how to be funny is in the powerful second section.

It is said to be the number one book on learning to write funny so it is a quality book that primarily deals with content. There a few tips on how to deliver humor like not giving away the surprise part of your joke away with your body language and using silence to build tension, but the book is mostly about constructing the right words to be funny.

The book is filled with hundreds and hundreds of classic examples from comedians like Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, and Chris Rock, plus many other lesser known persons. The examples are well fitted with the techniques the author is describing so you’re sure to clearly understand how and why jokes work while getting plenty of laughs yourself.

The power behind this book is in the exercises you do at the end of each chapter. If you do the given exercises, which can take a minute to 30 minutes per exercise, I can almost guarantee you that you will be developing your own original jokes. Keep in mind that the book isn’t just about developing jokes, but learning how to construct humor such that you become more natural at it. Once you do the exercises, you’ll find yourself naturally using the techniques in conversations. The exercises provide a step-by-step guide to writing funny jokes. For your convenience, here’s one I came up with by myself in an early chapter:

My wife always complains about the two of us not having luxurious meals. We sit down at the dinner table and she’ll nag me about wanting to have a nice meal in a restaurant. One angry night she told me, “Come on! Take me out!” I finally had enough of her nagging so I agreed and took her out… with a shotgun.

It ain’t the best joke, but like all humor, some people will find it hilarious while others will think it’s stupid. The joke is from someone who has never made up a joke before and who can’t even remember more than 10 jokes. If I could do it with the step-by-step exercises, then so can you.

Overall, I was very impressed by the book. This is my first book I’ve read on becoming funny as I’ve always naturally been a funny person (humor must be the only communication skill I am naturally good at), but now I understand why things are funny and how to be funnier. It is a great book that I recommend for you if you’d like to become a funnier person. You can grab your copy of Comedy Writing Secrets from Amazon by clicking here today.

Enjoyed this post? Please leave a donation for me (Joshua Uebergang) so you too can enjoy giving and show me your thanks. You can also signup to my newsletter for more great information.

I'm creator of a highly praised program called "Communication Secrets of Making People Like You". You can read about it here and order it here.