Writing Humor

This entertaining and sharply written guide - for both beginners breaking into comedy and professionals seeking to improve their sets and advance their careers - examines the work of great comedians such as Louis C. K., Jerry Seinfeld, Eddie Izzard, Moms Mabley, Hannibal Buress, Sarah Silverman, Richard Pryor, and more as a means of illustrating the most important techniques of performing and writing stand-up.

Maria Bamford is a creative genius. But the process of creating is not something that “comes easily” or “is enjoyable” for her. So, over the years, she’s invented a number of helpful techniques for tricking, shaming, coercing herself into doing things. You Are (A Comedy) Special is 15-step comedic send up of a self help guide that examines Maria’s approach to stand-up in a hilarious fashion.

Amusing and informative, Hey Ranger! teaches as it entertains with tales of boat-ramp misadventures, lost Afghani campers, encounters with wild animals, dumb crooks, and more. One chapter, "Tales from the Wild Side", brings together unusual incidents from National Park Service reports, and the concluding essay, "Don't Be a Victim of Your Vacation", advises visitors on how to avoid being a story on the evening news.

They shouldn't have tear gassed best-selling (bald) author Adam Fletcher. It ruined his supposedly normal holiday in Istanbul, made him curious, and began a quest to visit places everyone else is trying to escape from, and tourists don't normally go to. In this hilarious travel memoir, he'll enter a blizzard in China armed with only biscuits; pose as a scientist to sneak into Chernobyl; be chased by Croatian police boats en route to Liberland (the world's newest country); become a reluctant diving board star in a North Korean water park, and much more.

Drunk customers. Shoplifting raccoons. Otherworldly visitors. As night shift clerk at the 24-hour gas station at the edge of town, Jack has pretty much seen it all.

The New Comedy Bible is a step-by-step, no excuses manual for writing, performing, and launching your career as a stand-up comic. Written by Judy Carter, the author of The Comedy Bible (2001), which was called by The Washington Post and Forbes as a “Comedy Essential”. This new book, penned in classic Carter’s style - part career coach and part comedy dominatrix - has 100 percent new content.

This step-by-step comedy writer's guide is for the budding stand-up comedian to develop fresh original material and craft it into great performance. Become clear on what your comedy special powers are. Edit and secretly test your material. Craft your set into a streamlined performance, and become a better comic out of the gate! Now you can get rid of your writer's block!

Dr. Peter McGraw, founder of the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, teamed up with journalist Joel Warner on a far-reaching search for the secret behind humor. Their journey spanned the globe, from New York to Japan, from Palestine to the Amazon. Meanwhile, the duo conducted their own humor experiments along the way-to wince-worthy, hilarious, and illuminating results.

Trae and Corey will take you from the smallest of small towns to major US metropolises (or is it metropoli? We haven't a fartin' clue!). They'll even cross the pond to sip tea in some of them fancy kings-and-castles places that PBS Viewers Like You can't stop yapping about. From Chickamauga to Cheyenne, New York to New Orleans, Seattle to Scotland—no matter where these two wandering jesters go, there's something to roast, something to toast, and something to learn about what ties us together as humans. Even the most outrageous of us.

What is a man to do after the tragic ending of his loving marriage and a nasty divorce? How does he rediscover the essence that makes him a man after years of being forced to attend ballets, eat vegan food, and participate in intimacy seminars? There is only one way: drink, play, f@#k.

In Drink, Play, F@#k, Bob Sullivan, a jilted husband, sets off to explore the world, experience a meaningful connection with the divine, and rediscover his passion.

Without bothering to get approval from the President, the State Department, or even the FTC, Dave Barry's publishers sent him to Tokyo. You'd think they would have known better. Now the word is Barry has set back our diplomatic relations with the whole Pacific Rim by a couple of decades. Japanese culture, dining, sport, and industry all come under Barry's relentless scrutiny.

An indispensable, richly informative, and always entertaining audio sourcebook on Provence, by the writer who has made the region his own. Though organized from A to Z, this is hardly a conventional work of reference. It is rather a selection of those aspects of Provence that Peter Mayle, in almost 20 years there, has found to be the most interesting, curious, delicious, or down-right fun.

Pix just wants to hunt monsters, craft armor, and pay off her college loans. Her partner Jaz does too. She just wants to pet the monsters more. While wearing impractical hot pants armor. And wielding a sword so massive she needs magic gems to carry it.

Hello. It's Todd Barry. Yes, the massively famous comedian. I have billons of fans all over the world, so I do my fair share of touring. While I love doing shows in the big cities (New York, Chicago, Cleveland), I also enjoy a good secondary market (Rochester, Springfield, Toledo). There's something great about performing in a place where they don't expect to see you.

Do you want to be more humorous? Have you ever watched someone effortlessly make a group laugh and wished you knew their magic? Well, wonder no more. The mystery of charisma is finally unveiled; the fallacy of "you either have it, or you don't" has been laid bare. Anyone can learn to make people laugh. Observing a couple of surprisingly simple rules, Make People Laugh is a comedic tour de force, as it explores all the facets of laughter. Turn your lazy bones into funny bones, and you will have made the world a better place.

No other writer is more suited to chronicle the absurd and chaotic times we live in. This book—based on Hyde's spectacularly funny Guardian columns—tells the story of the hellscape of the Cameron, May and Johnson eras, Trumpian wtf-ery to celebrity twattery, the Royal soap-opera and the series finale of the United Kingdom. Hyde sees through the looking glass and calls out the utter crap rained down on us from populists, tech billionaires, reality TV monsters, media barons, sporting pundits and Gwyneth Paltrow.

I've always been her shelter in the storm. Hockey players. MMA fighters. Rock stars. The boys in blue. Even sexy SEALs have all offered to slay my dragon - or in my case, my stalker. Why can't they get it through their thick, stubborn heads that I can take care of myself? I'm no damsel! But...what if the real villain in this story is me? Now the one person I've never been able to resist has appointed himself as my protector.

Ian Moore is a stand-up comedian in the UK and a husband, father of three boys, farmhand and chutney-maker in France. He is a mod in both walks of life and most of his time is spent travelling grumpily between the two. Comedian, mod and professional grump Ian Moore has had enough. Tired of being unable to park anywhere near his cramped house in a noisy town he doesn’t like, he hatches a plan to move his wife and young son to a remote corner of the Loire Valley in search of serenity and space.

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists of the modern era. This anthology gathers together, for the first time, the funniest work of more than seventy New Yorker contributors.

Penniless and downtrodden at the loss of his wife and one of his daughters, Samuel Clemens turned to writing. The short stories and essays in Letters from the Earth find Clemens—under the pseudonym of Mark Twain—at perhaps his most quizzical and questioning state ever. Written as diary entries, Twain penned a series of letters from the point of view of a dejected angel on Earth who observes the many curious natures of man. These pieces, gathered by Twain's literary executor, feature sharp takes on the inconsistencies of Christianity and farcical criticisms of American life.