COMEDY 108 [M] [READING] [ASSIGNMENT] - Classroom A - Classroom BLesson 1Comedy Writing WorkshopWorking With Captions WORKING WITH CAPTIONSI once worked for a client who asked if I had done any jokes about a particular item that appeared in that morning's newspaper. I confessed I hadn't, and the client was annoyed. He had done a press conference earlier in the day, and one of the reporters asked about that particular topic. The comic had no quotable reply. I said, "I didn't realize you wanted jokes about that." He said, "I want to have something to say about everything that happens." That's quite an assignment for a comedy writer. I'm not sure I could afford the expense of that many typewriter ribbons. But that is the humorist's goal in life--to have a comment ready on practically anything. Much verbal humor is commentary. It's making a statement about something--an event, a person, a happening. If you review the joke examples in Workout lA (and it might be a good idea to do that right now--read them over quickly before continuing), you'll see that they follow a particular form. They make a factual statement, then they comment on it. Some one-liners may simply be the comment, because the statement either has been made previously or is assumed. The comment is like a caption on a factual statement. Most of us are familiar with captions. We see them done on the Johnny Carson show periodically We've seen books with comic captions applied to paintings, statues, and photographs of all kinds. Most cartoons, of course, are drawings with captions. The photograph, drawings, or whatever is the set-up, and the caption is the punchline. Captioning is an easy form of joke writing because the straight-line is furnished for us. We don't have to begin writing from scratch; we have the photo or the drawing as our starting point. We merely have to funny it up. Many one-liners are exactly the same, except that we have to provide both the setup and the punchline. The writing of jokes or one-liners seems a bit easier if we remember that the factual statement is the setup. Then we simply have to find a caption for it--a punchline that makes it funny. If you can caption a photograph or a cartoon, you can caption a statement. That's writing jokes.
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