Attempts at writing comedy as a non-funny writer
As far as writing advice goes, I would not consider myself the best at it, but I am at least somewhat knowledgeable about some specifics. Though, most of my advice has come from the writing prompts on Tumblr and Pinterest memes that recycle the content into little essay jpegs collages. I am not a professional writer in any capacity but like my life advice, I have dabbled enough to offer cursory advice. I am first and foremost a horror fiction writer so why, dear readers would I be talking about comedy? Because I have had experiences with writing comedy and feel the need to share to spare any other writers the learning curve, I had to scale like an amateur skateboarder underestimating the velocity of a slope resulting in a collision of flesh into a slab of concrete. Save yourself the pain don’t jump into comedy without studying it first so hare is what I learned.
At a simple glance, don’t let the fun times fool you
Comedy at face value is by far the most subjective making it the hardest of the genres to write. What you find funny would not necessarily be found funny by others. People find humor in different things. Take many American comedians for example some are much more popular abroad than they are stateside. If I had a nickel for every comedian skit, I sat through from a world tour where the comedian mentioned that civilians’ broke laws against large assemblies in order to see them, I have two nickels which isn’t a lot but it’s weird it happened twice.
If you want to write a comedy for an audience and not just what you find funny studying what is currently popular in the comedy world is a good start. Staying current is a great starting point, that said I think building off of your own comedic taste by studying other pieces that make you laugh in detail is a much better starting point to growth as a writer.
If you want to be funny expand your horizons and study what is still popular after years, what holds up. Not every Monty Python skit is as funny today as when it first aired but many people still talk about The Holy Grail and Life of Brian. Both are similar but have drastic differences leading to Python fans being divided by which one is better.
Melodrama is only funny if it is obviously melodramatic
If you think studying to get better at being funny is backwards advice, oh boy, do you have a long way to go! Comedy is probably one of the most technical genres to write, as sentences can hinge on a single structural choice to deliver the joke and can make or break an entire piece. This is also why melodrama is one of the hardest genres to write by far.
This is a tough one. The earliest melodramas can probably be attributed to ancient Greek theater like most basic genre structure finds its origins in but the melodrama style we recognize today can also be attributed to soap operas that were made on shoestring budgets. Overdramatizing something is the best way to bring comedy into any situation. That said, it is also a double-edged sword. It can make you, as the writer, come across as a dry sarcastic jerk, or insensitive to your subject matter.
Shakespeare is really one of the best places to start to get how a melodrama can be good, soap operas and telenovelas are great, but a vast majority of the ones out there have comedic aspects only because it’s so bad it’s good. There are other good melodramas in modern times, but you’ll find a lot of similarities to the older stuff which you find the more you dig really love to copy another piece and just stretch it more and more with each melodramatic internation. Parody is much easier to write than melodrama but it sacrifices its creativity to take jabs at source material in order to build comedy. But, melodramas advance situational awareness.
Parody and absurdity are two different camps
As stated in the previous section, parody is melodrama without its freedom. Parody is definitely the easiest to get into and has the most readily content to pull from, but it suffers a lack of quality as a result. The parody comes prepackaged with its plot and you can get straight to the fun part which is writing the jokes.
Parody is only as good as its effort, and most parodies don’t work because they are done in a mean spirit. Nobody likes a hater who makes fun of what’s popular. Everything has its flaws and flaws are what make stories enjoyable. The best parodies are done with love towards their source content and the actual story. This is why most parody musicals do better than other parodies.
Take Star Kid and how people still talk about Twisted on the internet. They took the story of Aladin and expanded upon it adding more and focusing the comedy into character traits that do not detract from the ensemble cast and shine through in the musical numbers. Twisted works because the characters are terrible people who make mistakes, but they face the consequences and grow as characters — not many parodies can claim this.
The best parodies are really just legal fan projects because the only way to make any other public profitable content for your favorite stories is to openly mock them. Which is hilarious from a legal standpoint but also an intrinsic part of keeping the entrainment industry humble. This where absurdity comes in. It doesn’t need to be rooted in a tangible conceived idea like parody, it just is silliness at its extreme and is not necessarily needed to elevate parody writing.
It is okay to use what you know
Many people interested in comedy try too hard to stick to what they know people find funny, (like DreamWorks with fart jokes) or venture too far into something different to try and be known resulting in it not being funny because the audience cannot identify it (think of every scientist trying to be funny by relating to normal people).
If you know something really well, stick with it as a starting point and build from there. If you know something use it. The story is only as good and funny as much as you invest yourself. Sure, most adults find DreamWorks films to be unfunny but seven-years-olds don’t. If you do decide, you want a larger more appealing audience piece, that’s okay, but you must still find what you’re writing about funny.