Comedy Techniques for Overcoming Writer's Block
Here’s a comprehensive list of comedy techniques, grouped into categories to help you find material and structure your comedy routines.
1. Comedy Structures
- Double entendre
- Building triplets
- The so-jokes
- Top ten lists
- Incongruity
- Simple truth
- Quick and simple opposites
- Reversals
- Triples
- Three-way build-up
- Paired phrases
- Slapstick
- Comedic irony
- Paradox
- Superiority
- The soul formula
- The configurationals
- Roasts
- Public humiliation
- Persona
- Point of view
2. Specific Comedy Material Generators
- Cliché takeoffs
- Song parodies
- Ponderables
- Random lines
- Titles of movies, books, and songs
- Commercial copy
- Listing technique juxtapose
- Headlines
- Personality profile
- Slash speed date questions
- 50 facts about yourself
- Observations of physical, verbal, personal, esoteric, and behavioral situations
- Facts about family
- Cliché reformations
- Quotes, facts, and factoids
- Pet peeves
- Corporate gigs, and the research of corporate gigs
- Watch the masters with their structure, their point of view, emotions, and analogies
- Random word generator
- Multiple meanings of words
- Esoteric and exoteric meanings of words
- Assert an assumption
- The five W's
- Cliché or idiom workout
- Cliché workouts
- Idiom workouts
- Video improvs
- Word definitions
- Photo capturing
- Character development
- Coincidence
- Watch monologues, and bump up the punchlines
- Trivia
- World news
- Is that all, Bob?
3. Comedy Writing Tools
- Juxtapose
- Scenario creation
- Benign retaliation
- Recognition
- Comic masks
- Teaser chemistry of targets
- Emotions, antagonisms, surprise, exaggerations, and realism
- Embarrassment
- On the major
- Release
4. Comedy Writing Theory
- Superiority
- The soul formula
- Paradox
- Comedic irony
- Recognition
- Incongruity
- Reversals
- Building threes
5. Bonuses for Finding Material
- Read the book, Save the Cat, recommended by Jerry Corley
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