Writing How to Write Funny Scenes – Lessons from My Chapter “The people's architect”

[Omarfaruq]

Telling people to use ai detectors if they want, but have mentioned in the past that they're unreliable?
Neat. I'll do it too.

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Nice

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I was just joking. didn't you see the lol ?
Ai detectors are really unreliable.

Challenge accepted

Even 'Example:' is flagged as ai ??

 

[Dawnathon]

I was just joking. didn't you see the lol ?
Ai detectors are really unreliable.

Even 'Example:' is flagged as ai ??

90% of AI Detectors are in themselves AI. 10% of AI Detectors just generate random numbers on the fly. They're the more accurate ones.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

I would say comedy can be boiled down to:

1. Twisting expectations. This is like the character dodging an attack by falling down, either the example above or the classic slapstick stuff like slipping on a banana peel (if you need more examples, look for old episodes of a show called "Get Smart!"- he had a lot of escapes that way, though some of them were directly borrowed from Marx Brothers or Three Stooges routines) but there are other ways as well (another bit from that show is an entire episode built around a gun with one trigger and two barrels, dubbed a "stereophonic pistol" - when the bad guy actually gets one, holds it to the hero's head. and pulls the trigger ... it plays music because the guys who put it together took the name literally).

2. Just flat-out being SILLY. Using nonsense words (Twas Brilig and the Slithy Toves...), misusing words (not just puns, but they can be the best examples, as can using dialect - though that can cause problems as it can easily become offensive or just go over the heads of readers not familiar with the dialect being mimicked; the "authentic frontier gibberish" scene from Blazing Saddles or the "I speak jive" moment in Airplane are examples of how this can work or fail).

3. Sowing chaos - this can be through misunderstandings, just having random things happen, or just having too many things happen at once (the TV series I Love Lucy had some great takes on this, the most (in)famous being the one at the chocolate factory and the machine going faster and faster), or turning the mundane into the absurd (There is a play called Rhinocéros about a disease that turns people into rhinoceroses. Can't get much more absurd than THAT).

4. Exaggeration - especially exaggerating things like drunkenness (I Love Lucy again has a great example with her endorsing a food supplement that turns out to be 10% alcohol...) or character quirks.

 

[Omarfaruq]

I would say comedy can be boiled down to:

1. Twisting expectations. This is like the character dodging an attack by falling down, either the example above or the classic slapstick stuff like slipping on a banana peel (if you need more examples, look for old episodes of a show called "Get Smart!"- he had a lot of escapes that way, though some of them were directly borrowed from Marx Brothers or Three Stooges routines; another bit from that show is an entire episode built around a gun with one trigger and two barrels, dubbed a "stereophonic pistol" - when the bad guy actually gets one, holds it to the hero's head. and pulls the trigger ... it plays music because the guys who put it together took the name literally).

2. Just flat-out being SILLY. Using nonsense words (Twas Brilig and the Slithy Toves...), misusing words (not just puns, but they can be the best examples, as can using dialect - though that can cause problems as it can easily become offensive or just go over the heads of readers not familiar with the dialect being mimicked; the "authentic frontier gibberish" scene from Blazing Saddles or the "I speak jive" moment in Airplane are examples of how this can work or fail).

3. Sowing chaos - this can be through misunderstandings, just having random things happen, or just having too many things happen at once (the TV series I Love Lucy had some great takes on this, the most (in)famous being the one at the chocolate factory and the machine going faster and faster), or turning the mundane into the absurd (There is a play called Rhinocéros about a disease that turns people into rhinoceroses. Can't get much more absurd than THAT).

4. Exaggeration - especially exaggerating things like drunkenness (I Love Lucy again has a great example with her endorsing a food supplement that turns out to be 10% alcohol... ) or character quirks.

What I presented is just the basics; it’s for new writers who struggle to write comedy.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

What I presented is just the basics; it’s for new writers who struggle to write comedy.

And tread the same ground a few times.
A good reference for comedy is anything Mel Brooks was involved with (my introduction to him was Get Smart!, but then I found the novelization of Young Frankenstein and started watching anything I could with his name attached - still have a few more things to watch but have seen most of it).
Also writers like Douglas Adams (an expert at the twisting stuff - like having one whole, seemingly irrelevant chapter on flight - which is nothing more than "throwing yourself at the ground and missing" ... only to have the MC trip a while later and ... miss the ground), or Terry Pratchett (an expert at wordplay and good at all of it, especially in his Diskworld stuff), Peter A. David (chaos and exaggeration, but also good at twisting stuff), or Lewis Carroll (absurd stuff and use of nonsense words, and possibly the masterclass for sowing chaos).