by Writing Workshops Staff
4 hours ago
You've read something that made you laugh out loud—a New Yorker Daily Shouts piece, a McSweeney's Internet Tendency article, an Electric Literature essay—and thought: I want to do that. But when you sit down to write something funny, the words feel forced. The timing's off. What reads as hilarious in your head lands flat on the page.
Here's what professional humor writers know: being funny is a craft, not a gift. The writers who consistently place work in prestigious humor publications aren't just naturally hilarious—they've learned specific techniques, practiced them obsessively, and figured out how to translate the mechanics of comedy onto the page.
Let's break down some of the most reliable humor writing techniques used by working writers today.
The Rule of Three: Comedy's Oldest Friend
The rule of three is so fundamental to humor writing that you probably use it without realizing. The structure works like this: two items establish a pattern, and the third breaks it in an unexpected way.
Consider this example from Phoebe Robinson's Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: "Being from the Midwest and attending a private Catholic prep school, even though I'm not religious, meant a lot of things—having a sense of humility, caring about the greater good, eating at Wahlburgers more often than I care to admit to..."
The first two items (humility, caring about the greater good) are earnest and expected. The third (fast food frequency) derails the pattern in a way that surprises and delights. This technique works because our brains naturally seek patterns. When you break that pattern, you create comedic friction.
Try This: Take any serious list of two items and add a third that's tonally mismatched. "My morning routine consists of meditation, journaling, and panic-scrolling my email before my feet hit the floor."
Heightening: When More Is More
Heightening takes an emotional truth and exaggerates it to absurd proportions. The key word there is truth—the exaggeration must be grounded in something real and relatable.
In Samantha Irby's Wow, No Thank You, she describes the difficulties of making friends as an adult: "'I'm gonna friend you on Facebook!' I blurted at the back of her red shirt and mom jeans, feeling my bones weaken and my arteries calcifying as I aged forty years in one second."
Did Irby actually age forty years? Of course not. But the hyperbolic description matches her internal emotional experience. The reader recognizes that specific flavor of adult-friendship mortification and laughs because someone finally named it accurately.
The Power of Specificity
Vague is the enemy of funny. Specific details create vivid images that lodge in readers' minds—and make them laugh.
Compare these two sentences:
- Generic: "I ate too much at the party."
- Specific: "I ate seven cocktail weenies while maintaining unbroken eye contact with the host."
The number seven is funnier than "too many." Cocktail weenies are funnier than "appetizers." The specific, somewhat uncomfortable detail of the eye contact creates a complete scene in one sentence.
Professional humor writers have also discovered that certain sounds are inherently funnier than others—hard consonants like K and G tend to create more laughs than soft sounds. "Eating with a spork" lands harder than "eating with a spoon."
The Committed Narrator
Some of the funniest humor writing comes from narrators who are completely committed to a flawed or absurd premise. They never wink at the audience. They play it absolutely straight.
Sarah Garfinkel, whose work appears in The New Yorker's Daily Shouts, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Electric Literature, excels at this technique. In her piece "I'm a Teacher and I Do, in Fact, Live at School", the narrator earnestly explains the logistics of living in a classroom—where she keeps her toiletries, how she handles parent conferences in her pajamas. The comedy comes from her total commitment to the premise.
This technique requires trust: trust that your reader will understand the joke without you explaining it. The moment you break character to acknowledge the absurdity, you lose the comedic tension.
Finding Your Comedic Source Material
Where do humor writers find their ideas? Often, in frustration.
Julie Vick, author of Babies Don't Make Small Talk (So Why Should I?) and a frequent New Yorker contributor, describes her process: "One of my biggest forms of humor inspiration is frustration. If I'm feeling irritated about something—whether it's about parenting or my inability to pick out a good melon—then that is often the kernel of an idea for a humor piece."
The trick is training yourself to notice when you're noticing something. That moment of irritation at a self-checkout machine, the absurdity of corporate jargon in a meeting, the strange rituals of adult socializing—these are all comedic goldmines waiting to be excavated.
Writer's Exercise: Keep a running note on your phone of things that annoy, confuse, or strike you as odd. Review it weekly and look for patterns—that's where your unique comedic voice lives.
Brevity Is the Soul of Wit (Shakespeare Was Right)
Humor relies on quickness and precision. If it takes you three paragraphs to set up a joke, you've probably lost your reader before the punchline lands.
Stand-up comedians can stretch a setup because they have facial expressions, timing, and vocal inflections at their disposal. Writers only have words. Make them count.
The funniest lines in humor writing are often single sentences. Cut everything that doesn't serve the joke. If a word isn't earning its place, delete it.
Reading Like a Humor Writer
The best way to improve your humor writing is to study pieces that make you laugh. But don't just read them—dissect them.
Take a highlighter to a piece you find genuinely funny. Mark the specific moments that make you laugh. Then ask yourself: What technique did the writer use here? Was it the rule of three? Heightening? An unexpectedly specific detail? A committed narrator playing it straight?
This kind of close reading—what writers call "reading as a writer"—helps you internalize techniques so they become natural in your own work.
From Technique to Publication
Understanding humor techniques is one thing. Writing pieces that actually get accepted by publications like The New Yorker, McSweeney's, or Electric Literature is another challenge entirely.
These publications receive thousands of submissions. Editors can spot amateur humor writing immediately—the jokes that try too hard, the premises that feel derivative, the pieces that mistake randomness for funny. Breaking through requires not just understanding the craft but developing a unique comedic voice and learning the specific expectations of different publications.
This is where working directly with an established humor writer can accelerate your development dramatically. A mentor who has successfully placed work in major publications can help you identify blind spots in your writing, refine your comedic voice, and understand what editors are actually looking for.
Ready to Study with a New Yorker Humor Writer?
WritingWorkshops.com offers a Humor Writing Mentorship with Sarah Garfinkel, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker's Daily Shouts, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Electric Literature, and The Rumpus, where she serves as assistant editor of the Funny Women column. Sarah has taught humor writing at Harvard University and Columbia University.
In this one-on-one mentorship, you'll work directly with Sarah to develop your comedic voice, master humor techniques, and prepare pieces for submission to top publications.
The Permission to Be Funny
Here's the thing about humor writing that nobody tells you: you have to give yourself permission to fail. A lot.
Not every joke lands. Not every piece works. The writers whose humor you admire have written countless drafts, received countless rejections, and told countless jokes that died on the page. What makes them successful isn't that they're funnier than everyone else—it's that they kept writing anyway.
So take these techniques, experiment with them, and don't be afraid to write badly at first. The rule of three, heightening, specificity, committed narrators—they're all tools in your toolkit. The more you practice, the more natural they become.
And who knows? Maybe the next piece that makes someone laugh out loud will be yours.
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