Crazy beautiful website. A few thoughts on comedy: - In "Step by Step to Stand-up Comedy" (great book about doing standup), the author describes the process o

Crazy beautiful website. A few thoughts on comedy: - In "Step by Step to Stand-up Comedy" (great book about doing standup), the author describes the process of writing a standup routine. Basically, first you write a lot of jokes on random topics, and tag them by categories (like "driving", "postal service", "marriage", etc). Once you have a few dozen jokes, you organize the ones that can belong to a similar topic together, and then figure out how to string them together into a coherent routine, where one joke leads to another. So routines are written "bottom-up" from jokes, first you have jokes, then you find a way to put them together in a way that makes sense, but doesn't need much meaning or structure beyond that. - Movies or sictcoms, on the other hand, are written "top-down". First you have a story structure, which can, but doesn't have to be that funny(laws for comedy and drama are the same), and then you brainstorm jokes using your scenes as topics. If you came up with some good jokes or scenes separately, that don't necessarily fit, you can find a way to "shoehorn" them into the script, nothing wrong with that, but generally it goes structure first, jokes second. - Jokes are "absurd associations". Our brain thinks in patterns. When you put together two patterns(ideas) that don't belong together, it creates the feeling of absurdity, the less patterns belong together, the less they fit together, the more absurd they will feel. ("A man on a bicycle" is not absurd, "a man on a unicycle" is a little bit absurd, "Hitler riding a unicycle" is very absurd, "Hitler riding a unicycle while wearing a white dress and juggling fish" is absurd as fuck). Comedy is the art of finding connections between patterns. You "connect the dots" between two ideas, find an overlap(an association) between two patterns that are far apart, and you put them together. The more absurd(less compatible) the two ideas are, and the stronger the connection(the more it makes sense), the funnier the joke will be.