Imagine a website where you go on a day-to-day basis to see a funny thought for the day. And what if instead of providing off, you’ve-heard-it-a-thousand-times-before humor, that site provided fresh, baked-daily humor made on-site in their in-store ovens? And it’s turning out to be quite the challenge to keep up with baking all those daily loaves of guffaws.
So how does one go about making an idea for the day that is funny with no need to be a pro comic? Consider the sorts of things in your day to day life that you find surprising, daft, hard-to-understand, mad or humiliating. Come up with a technique to express one of these things in a way that leads the mind in one direction. Then, all of a sudden shift direction with the final part. This is the setup / punch line structure of humor. For a given idea, generate as many setup / punch line differentiations as you can.
Keep pushing to generate them, even if you suspect you cannot come up with any more. The ones you fight hard for are often the funnier ones. Attempt to make your humor express your last point in an indirect way. It’s funnier to claim someone could use “subsidies of something” than to assert somebody “someone has not got much something”. With each setup / punch line, play with the words to try and make your humor passing and to the point. Boring “humor” sometimes isn’t as funny as transient humor. Try and hide the final destination of your funny setup / punch line till the end. You need the punch of your humor to be displayed at the end, with nothing trailing it to empty the funny part away.
You will have to use your best judgment here.
This is better to do if you set what you have written aside for one or two days. Lots of the lines that are lacking humor will stick out like a throbbing thumb. Here’s a demonstration of how I made a funny line: The word “imagination” popped into my mind, and I was thinking about how insulting it is to be charged with having no imagination. For the setup I needed to suggest that I was going to compliment baby-kissers by asserting they’d a lot of imagination. So I thought “With the quantity of imagination statesmen have”. My approach was “they should qualify for state subsidies”. If you do not find that line funny, that is OK. Your humorous character might be different than mine. Humor is very subjective, and there’s a wide variety in the things folks find funny. Also, researching the creation of a joke step by step, like we probably did above, has an inclination to kill the humor as you go. This is the method I am using on a constant basis to make fresh humor for my thought for the day site. It is not an easy task, but it is fun and gratifying when the funny pours out. And it’s great to suspect that perhaps I have added a little humor to the middle of somebody’s day, perhaps just at the point at which the person’s daily stress was going to overwhelm them. That’s the reason why I call my funny thought for the day Laugh Vitamin.