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This book will help improve your ability to create original humor spontaneously by giving you repeated opportunities to come up with your own funny lines. The most important feature of the book is that it does most—but not all—of the work for you by setting up a context in which everything is provided except a key word or phrase that completes the punch line. You provide the punch line. A clue is provided to help you focus your thoughts in the right direction. Once you've made the effort to come up with your own answer, you can check the answer given at the end of that section.

The reason this approach works is that it calls attention to the different types of thinking that are involved in the creation of a joke. In the seminars I provide on humor and stress to organizations around the country, a common complaint is, "I just can't think of anything funny to say. No matter how hard I try, I just can't think that way." By the time you become an adult, you've had years of practice at thinking in a "straight" direction. To create humor, you've got to learn to think "crooked." You have to learn to play with words and ideas. You need experience at exaggeration, understatement, reversal, and other traditional techniques of making up jokes.

When we were children, we all loved to play. We could spend all day playing. Most of this play was physical, but as we got older we learned that playing with ideas was fun too. We all went through the "riddle stage," during which we drove our parents crazy with endless riddles. We found great pleasure in turning the world upside down by distorting things, exaggerating, saying the opposite of what we really meant, and so forth. In order for you to become skilled at creating your own verbal humor now, you need to rediscover that child-like enjoyment of playing with ideas. This book will help you achieve this by getting you actively involved in the process of creating humor.

How Do Humorists Think?

How do people (like Steve Allen, Jerry Seinfeld or Eddy Murphy) who are good at coming up with original verbal humor think? They think the way we all thought when we were kids. They love to play with ideas—to distort things, or twist them around. They're very flexible mentally, and are much more willing than the rest of us to consider crazy ideas "just to see what happens." They're good at spotting life's absurdities, ironies, and incongruities. They see the ridiculous side of everyday situations that the rest of us take for granted or don't notice at all.

I argued in my 1979 book, Humor: Its Origin and Development (now out of print) that humor is basically play with ideas. A humorist is just a big kid who never stopped playing. S/he just switched from playing physically to playing mentally. And when it comes to playing with ideas, there's no limit! The entire world of everyday experience is a potential playground.

Humorists especially love to play with language. Language, after all, is our main vehicle for thinking about the world. And while language is not essential to humor, it plays a key role in the humor of most of our everyday social interactions. Think back to the time (around first grade) that you first realized that words could have more than one meaning. Do you remember how exciting it was to trick someone else in telling riddles? If you come from my generation, you'll recall such groaners as "Why did the moron bury his car?" "Because the engine died." Or, still worse, "Why did the moron jump off the Empire State Building?" "Because he wanted to try out his new spring suit."

This kind of humor, of course, is known as a pun. The reason we groan at puns as adults is precisely because they're generally very simple. Basically, puns are children's humor. And yet this is the level at which you probably stopped developing your own humor skills.

Many of us couldn't come up with a spontaneous pun or other funny remark in the next 10 minutes of conversation if our life depended on it. The 1940's comic Jack Benny, however, had a wonderfully funny response when, in a skit, a mugger came up to him and shouted, "OK, buddy, your money or your life!" Benny hesitated, and hesitated even longer, and finally the mugger repeated, "I said, your money or your life!" Benny responded, "I'm thinking it over." (Jack Benny was known to be very "tight" with his money.)

This book develops your ability to create verbal humor by starting with puns, and then sampling a broad range of other joking techniques. With practice, your ability to see the potential for humor in everyday language will quickly grow.