Correspond a Dido
7. Timing is everything with comedy, even with written humor. You need to build up to the punch line enough that it packs a wallop, but not for so long that you lose your audience.
1. Dream of your audience. A joke that fills the room with laughter at a hardware convention might not get the same reaction at a meeting of doctors.
2. When in doubt, keep it clean. Sure, plenty of people enjoy an 'off-color' wisecrack, but unless you're sure why take the risk of unnecessarily offending someone?
3. Try to keep it short and sweet when possible-a few sentences or so is ideal. No joke is guaranteed to receive big laughs, but there's nothing worse than a looooong joke with no payoff.
4. Include something unexpected or contextually inappropriate, usually the heart of the joke's finale, or 'punch line.' A good example of this is Rodney Dangerfield's old classic, "My wife just signed me up for a bridge club. I jump off Tuesday."
5. Don't be afraid to take a chance with a joke. The worst thing you can do is bomb, but the plus-side is the chance to make someone's day with a good laugh.
6. Dead-pan humor, a la the great Steven Wright, is big these days. The key here is following up a normal statement with something completely out of left-field, such as, "I recently installed a skylight in my living room. The upstairs neighbors are furious."
The rules for joke-writing can vary wildly depending on if you're crafting humour for a speech, film, website or other medium. The consequent guidelines, but, should deed you some solid course regardless of the example.
