LOL 101

Everything you ever wanted to know about writing jokes.

With a blithesome barrage of puns, this book wastes no time in getting to a successful joke’s secret ingredient: surprise. After both showing and telling why the unexpected twist is what makes a joke funny, Roth and Shah give their audience assignments in amusement; a wordplay exercise involves listing similar-sounding words, coming up with a punchline, and reverse-engineering the joke from the punchline. Next, the authors explain the “rule of three” (where humor derives from an unexpected final item in a list of items); the accompanying exercise uses a fill-in-the-blank formula. The section on exaggeration follows the same accessible formula, though some may not appreciate the prompt (“My grandma is so old…”). A section on advanced wordplay, which walks kids through idioms, is the strongest how-to, as it demonstrates that not all uses of the formulas are equally successful and why. After a brief discussion about effective joke-telling, readers land in “The Serious Section,” which troubleshoots jokes gone wrong, from delivery that falls flat to an audience that doesn’t laugh, followed by not-quite-sufficient caution to make friends laugh instead of upsetting them. Final sections cover visual humor, offer a recap, and suggest jobs that involve comedy. Art features anthropomorphized creatures; occasional humans are mostly bright pink.

An efficient, punchy pun-generation primer.