How to Write a Joke

Have you agreed to give a speech at your best friend’s wedding? Are people expecting this speech to be funny? Are you realizing that engaging in extemporaneous humor and delivering jokes are not the same thing? Have you spent the months leading up to the big day waiting for comic inspiration to strike, but still don’t have a single joke to show for it? Is it only just dawning on you that you’ve never written an actual joke, in the formal sense of the word, in your entire life? And are you currently wondering whose idea it was that weddings should involve a stand up segment where the best friend is expected to audition a tight five in front of a live audience?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may have a serious problem. But what if we told you that there was a solution‽

In Joke Farming: How to Write Comedy and Other Nonsense, veteran comedy writer and 99PI collaborator Elliot Kalan says that he was once like you. When he first began working in comedy, he relied almost entirely on inspiration, leaning on his comic talent, waiting for jokes to come to him. But on days when inspiration didn’t strike, he was left with nothing to show for all that waiting around. So Elliot finally decided to develop a system for coming up with jokes on demand — based on his deep understanding of their underlying logic and constituent parts. He calls his system “joke farming,” and he’s here to break it down for anyone who has ever had to give a wedding speech…or just wants to better appreciate a really good joke.

Elliott Kalan’s credits include head writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, former show runner of Netflix’s Mystery Science Theater 3000, cohost of The Flophouse, and cohost of 99PI’s very own breakdown of The Power Broker.

Joke Farming: How to Write Comedy and Other Nonsense is out on Nov 12. Find it in your favorite bookstore.