Writing Comedy

Chances are you are funny. Surely you can remember a time that you made someone laugh. Comedy is a FRAME like any other PUA frame; it is a mindset that you can put on like a hat.

You probably have also told a joke that has bombed, something you heard on the Internet, or a friend told you. Maybe you shared afunny story that you ended up having to say, "Well I guess you had to be there."Like pick-ups failure is part of the game, so it is with comedy. But like any social skill you focus on the times it works and not on thetimes it doesn't.

I am not a naturally funny guy, but somehow I ended up going from a shy introvert to headlining comedy clubs all over the country. Ilearned the skill. People consider me to be funny now. They laugh at stuff I didn't even mean to be funny, but they are used to mesaying something and they are used to responding with laughter. Pavlov's dogs make a great audience.

I always wondered why people gave me higher status than I thought they should. When I met someone with higher status I would, in my nervousness, resort to humor and I would find that they would soon treat me as the high value person in the group; their EC and BL would change almost instantly.

I read a few years back in a book by Dave Barry that people who are funny are also considered MORE INTELLEGENT than themselves. I have now learned through the PUA arts that still hold true. WHEN YOU MAKE SOMEONE LAUGH THEY GIVE YOU A POSITION OF HIGHER STATUS/ VALUE. Now I know why my superiors at work treat me as an equal or HIGHER. This works for every social situation.

Once you understand some of the rules and formulas you can apply them in everyday conversation. You need only a few techniques to seem to be a funny guy.

These jokes I use here may or may not work for the pick-up set, and they are not all that funny, they are here to demonstrate the FORMULA of a joke. Hopefully you can see the formulas and apply them in conversation or pick-up as you LISTEN to others.

Listening is the most important skill to master, you put on "comic ears" and listen for the "Set-Ups".

A Joke consists of:

· A set-up

· A punch line

· Tag-ons

· Call backs

Lets look at humor in general. I found this on the net, from a book called The Art Of Laughter:"This book stated that there were only two comedy types, and both could be demonstrated to a baby. The first was to make a funnyface. The second was to offer a toy and then pull it back. The " Pee Wee's Playhouse" type of humor would be the first - making sillyfaces. Most jokes fall into the second category - offering of one outcome then taking it away and substituting something unexpected."

In the second type of comedy, most jokes fall into 8 categories:

1. Misunderstanding; This is one that David D talks about, listening for words and phrases that you can misinterpret. Example(The Groucho Marx classic)"I once shot an elephant in my pajamas…How he got in my pajamas I'll never know?"What makes that funny? First you grammatically structure the set-up to make the punch line funny. You delete certain factsgrammatically so it can be taken in two ways. You don't elaborate on who is really wearing the pajamas. It is a common deletion so assomeone hears the set-up they figure it was you in the pajamas. But the punch line twists the wording in the set up. Had you said "onetime, while I was wearing my pajamas, I shot an elephant. " the punch line wouldn't make any sense or be even remotely funny.People delete details in their sentences all the time. You can learn to listen for that and use it to twist it around. (Sound like NLP? Wellit is basically)Here you listen to someone describing an accident;Her: I once broke my leg in seven places.You: Boy I would never go back to those places again!You know what she means but you focus on her words/ sentence structure and misinterpret it.This is one of the best. Listen for DELETIONS and GENERALIZATIONS. Twist them a bit.