1. And No One Laughed…

The number one skill I would have sent myself out into the world with would have been the ability to write comedy.

Humor would have been a great place for me to figure my life out in my early twenties. It probably would have made me a decent living as well.

Nora Ephron of “When Harry Met Sally,” and, “You’ve Got Mail,” and, “Julie and Julia,” said she has a piece of advice she gives out whenever she is asked for advice by aspiring writers, and that to date no one had taken her up on it.

Don’t be a writer yet, she said. You don’t know the world yet.

You need a way to study the world, and be around and in the world, without trying to change the world in any way.

I’m paraphrasing, but it stuck with me, this idea that a person should not make a beeline for creating stories, but should enrich themselves in life first. My detour was philosophy and therapy, as I tried to work out my worldview so that it was less damaging for me.

But I think honestly, it would have been more fun if I had just succeeded in my cartoon/comedy career instead of wallowing in my failed attempts.

(Incidentally, Nora Ephron’s breakout film, “When Harry Met Sally,” took her ten years of work and she finished it when she was 48 years old; she knew what she was talking about that great story might take time and experience before you create something that moves the world.)

In 2005, my high school buddy and I made a fake movie trailer for a cartoon that didn’t exist for a film class assignment.

No one liked it.

Moreso, nobody could really “get” the cartoon because our writing was too self-referential, too much made out of inside-jokes.

We worked for over a hundred hours on it, which was a lot of time as high schoolers, but without clear writing, all of the production value and animation in the world could not save us.

It set me back, for a long time. I didn’t make another cartoon after that. I tiptoed out and tried to make modest little cartoon shorts again, about a year later, but still, with no training in how to write comedy, my work was cumbersome to make and fairly joyless to watch.

There was a lot I needed to learn at that time; most of the therapy I’ve had since then has helped me work through my attitude and come out the other side as someone who understands pain and knows how to navigate it. If I’d managed to find a place for my talents when I was fresh out of high school, I might have had less pain to navigate and consequently I probably wouldn’t be that good at navigating pain here and now, but when I think back on how I wish my life could have gone, it seems nice to imagine myself a successful cartoonist, just as YouTube was taking off.

Billy Crystal, I’m told, when he was about to get his big break and do his stand up on Saturday Night Live, was asked by Laurn Michaels, the producer, if he could cut his standup from 8 minutes down to 2 minutes.

Billy explained that the format of his comedy is 7 minutes of setup for 1 minute of punchline, so no, there was no way to cut it down.

He was replaced.

And from what I heard, he was defeated by it for about half a decade before he got back up again.

We learn a lot when we get knocked down, if we are the lucky few who get back up again.

I learned a lot from my work failing.

But wow how I wish I could have just imparted the wisdom of the skills I was missing.

2. Long Live The King And The King’s Jester

My life is too complicated now for me to create pure comedy.

Fresh out of high school, sure, I had some axes to grind, but I was trying to follow in the footsteps of Homestar Runner, a flash cartoon popular with me and my pals at the time.

Homestar Runner is fairly toothless; it’s not out to change the world; it’s distraction, and good at it.

That’s all I wanted or needed to be at the time, and if someone had taught me what I needed to know, I could have made millions laugh before I learned too much and got serious.

This is another story that I don’t have verification for, but I heard once that in the time of knights and kings, the only person in the entire kingdom who was allowed to contradict the king:

Was the jester.

The jester had free reign to criticize the king and the king’s choices.

There’s a saying that I try to live up to, (though I frequently fail to put into practice):

“If you are going to tell people a truth, be sure to make them laugh… or they’ll kill you.”

The jester is allowed to criticize his leader, because he can make entertainment out of his criticisms, and entertainment is in short supply in the millenia before YouTube.

When I (mean to and forget to) use humor now, I’m not using it to distract or divert anyone; I’m not creating humor for the joy of it; I’m constantly trying to get the word out about things I find important to share, but I know that I’m creating an unstable oil/water front that pops and crackles and burns as I try to get in there where people’s unexamined attitudes and assumptions are, and try to drag the old ideas out into the light where it’ll become clear they’re long due for an upgrade.

If I want you to think new thought, I have to make the process of examining the current-but-probably-outdated thoughts fun. Or you’ll kill me.

3. Humor Is Learnable: Go Learn It Now

Like most missing skills in my life at the time I graduated high school, I did not know it was a skill, I thought I just had no aptitude for certain things and that I was doomed to failure.

Drawing, for example, which is a pretty important part of cartooning, was something that I was very mediocre at because I knew very, very little real strategy for drawing.

Drawing is about learning some mental models which let you create a fake reality in 2D. If you look up how to draw on YouTube, you will find plenty of information for beginners that will help disabuse you of the idea that you, “cannot draw.” Most people can learn to draw, most have never been taught how, and they simply have not learned to draw, which is different from “cannot.”

You cannot eat Mt. Kilimanjaro. Any human who tries to eat a mountain will die.

You have not learned to draw.

SIMILARLY…

I had not learned how comedy works, but it is a learnable skill.

If you are interested in learning how comedy works, the basics of it, I am going to go over everything I know now that I did not know when my various cartoon attempts failed.

This really deserves to be a full-fledged course or workshop, so if things make only half-sense as you read about them here, try to focus less on the how-to’s of comedy, and more on the premise that comedy is a learnable skill which people have put a lot of effort into teaching.

If you want to learn comedy: comedy is learnable.

4. Fuck With People

No torture too small!

That was the slogan for the writers room for a story about life in hell.

The sinners shouldn’t just be tortured in obvious big ways, if there was any way to make their life less pleasant, the writers would make sure the their hell was tweaked to within an inch of its life to be made to make its inhabitants miserable.

The characters in a comedy, are often not laughing.

The humor comes from a person trying to live their life, but due to (usually) their own hubris, they are woefully underprepared for what they are trying to do, and they are destined to fail.

But not only will they fail, they will fail spectacularly, and in a way that if you stepped back and looked at it, it would seem like the writers were specifically punishing that character for their shortcomings.

When we watch a comedy, (an American and not British comedy at least; more on that later) we are investing in someone who needs to learn a lesson if they’re going to be the person who gets what they want out of life.

The comedy comes from watching in real time how slowly we learn.

Montages in comedy (unless it’s a parody montage; and I won’t be talking about parody here) are usually a squandered opportunity, because characters trapped in circumstances of their own making is where we tend to learn to love those characters.

In Notting Hill, a romantic comedy with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, Hugh’s character is very timid which results in many different problems for him throughout the movie.

The writers determined that an early draft of the film didn’t have enough humor in it, and rather than write new scenes with new sets and new production days, they took one of the scenes which already existed, and simply: made it longer.

More tortuous.

Julia Roberts’ character is an in-world actress; famous and difficult to get near. But she’s met Hugh Grant’s character, a book seller, and they’re trying to reconnect, so he’s come to her hotel thinking that they’re going to meet up.

He’s carrying flowers, and gets looks from his elevator companion when he reaches the hotel. They both get out on the same floor, and then head down the same corridor, and arrive at the same room.

Clearly something is amiss.

The door opens and it’s a frenzy inside. A producer of some sort welcomes the two of the men into the hubbub, and asks which magazines they’re from.

I don’t remember what the other guy’s magazine was, but Hugh Grant, not being from a magazine, but not wanting to be thrown out before meeting again Julia Roberts’ character, picks the first magazine he sees: Horse and Hound.

The two men are diverted to an area where they can sit and wait, and finally the other guy, this magazine journalist, pries into Hugh’s flowers. “Are those for her?”

Hugh, not wanting to seem like a magazine reporter who brought flowers for a celebrity, scrambles and lies that they are for his grandmother.

Hugh is called in first, because Julia Roberts has been waiting for him. When they speak she explains that she is so sorry, she thought this press junket would have been done by the time she told him to show up.

But, she has to tell him this in between producers showing up who still assume that Hugh Grant is an employee of Horse and Hound magazine.

In between his real moments with Julia, he must pretend to interview her, and he couldn’t have picked a worse magazine to be pretending to be from:

Does Julia think that the movie could have had more horses? Or… hounds for that matter, the readers of his magazine are equally interested in both.

No… cautions Julia, probably not, as the movie was set. in. space…

She’s trying to clue him in, since every other person in this hotel suite has seen the movie and he has not.

When they’re free again, they make plans to see each other once again in the evening, a quiet birthday party at Hugh Grant’s sister’s house.

That’s where the scene originally ended.

Instead of adding more scenes to the movie, the creators decided, hey, wouldn’t a magazine reporter have to interview everyone who played a starring role in this movie??

And so our Horse and Hound reporter, Hugh, must continue his charade for a handful of interviews that he is even less prepared for (since Julia was helping him out but no one else would be).

Fuck with people.

If Hugh spoke up and said, this is ridiculous, I’m a gentleman friend of Julia Roberts’ character, he could avoid everything.

But comedic characters avoid pain. They avoid doing the hard thing.

They each avoid pain in their own specific way (more on that in a bit) but if any of them grow a backbone, they can be released from their torture immediately in almost every case.

Comedic circumstances usually can be avoided, if the character steps up.

The comedy is us watching how painstakingly slow they realize they have the power to change their life, so long as they can face their pains.

But first, a word of warning; “Straw men serve no one.”

Torture is good, when it’s an indictment of your own limitations as a human, something that you personally realize that you need help and forgiveness for.

One of the areas where comedy gets into trouble, is when we make fun of a hell we have not experienced.

That’s a maxim I do hold myself to, as much as possible. I don’t remember where I heard it, but:

“Never make fun of a hell you have not experienced.”

Torture your characters, but don’t write characters who are the people you hate, doing the things you hate them for, it results in comedy that has been weaponized and it creates problems for the world.

5. Kill All Your Darlings But One; Unless You’re New, Then Kill Every Darling (For Now)

I heard second-hand a story about a public speaker, who went on a tour teaching something.

When he started, his presentation was about 95% content with 5% of jokes sprinkled in.

By the time he was done with his tour, the numbers had flipped. He was doing 95% humor, to drive home the most important 5% of what he had to teach.

When I tell people to learn comedy and learn sales and learn to be a teacher, I’m talking about the same thing; they’re different disciplines of the same action: how do you help a person let go of an old idea that has them stuck and let them hear a new idea which has proven to be, for most people, an upgraded thought?

Just starting out, not yet 48 and ready to rock the world with my equivalent of, “When Harry Met Sally,” it would not have been good for me to try to have even 5% of a message hidden in my comedy.

It might seem simple, switching up the ratios and having a mostly-comedy presentation by the time he was done, but this speaker would have had to have cut away huge portions of what he’d planned to speak about.

It would not have been easy, to find the most useful and salient, and essential message to get across to his audience.

Straight out of high school, I would not have had enough experience trying to teach people, to know which few things I could keep trying to teach while I wrapped my message in humor and entertainment.

The number one thing I should have used my comedy for, was to make people learn to love my characters.

6. Characters: Not Just For Merchandising!

I always wanted to see my characters on t-shirts.

I don’t care now.

But I did! Back in 2005, I would have loved to have seen my characters on shirts. I have two of my characters on my mousepad because I got a coupon for a free mousepad print-on-demand service and I sent them my characters to be printed. I love it. It is worn out and gross and should be replaced but I love having my characters around me that much that I will not get rid of it and use the mouse pad I got for free from my insurance agent. His is boring…

Back in 2005, I was very obsessed with being the richest man in the world. This is something that happens to some guys while they’re waiting to develop a personality and before they have any concept of where happiness comes from. Money-enough-to-live-comfortable does matter because if you have a living wage, it can take away the stresses of being over-budget all the time. After that, it’s limited, and your attitude plays a big big part in whether you hate the world and yourself, or not.

When I thought about being a cartoonist/animator, it was not because I would, “find it fulfilling,” or, “be faced with life lessons that I needed to learn,” or even, “to make people happy.”

I just wanted to make so much money that I could hand out middle fingers to everyone I met. I didn’t know yet how important people were to me, and having just finished high school, most of my interactions were with people who were years and years away from becoming decent people, so there was a lot of turmoil.

But telling people to go to hell is not the life giving thing I assumed it would be.

Bringing characters to life is life giving. Telling people to go to hell is a lame motivation.

When you know you’re going to try to make people fall in love with your characters, you are already on the way to not creating straw men to attack on your show. If you have the mandate for yourself that each character will be lovable, then your writing must come from a place of understanding each character you introduce. 

Straw men are defined by their creator’s unwillingness to hear the plea of that character’s point of view; they see someone in real life with a point of view they disagree with, and use story to teach people how to hate and punish that person.

Create characters that teach people how to love.

7. All Unhappy Families Are Unhappy In Their Own Way

Steve Pavlina said if you want to learn what you’re made of, squeeze, you’ll find out what’s inside of you by what ekes out. 

(This is advice I followed growing up btw, but the advice is semi-cavalier and a bit reckless, so I suggest you squeeze your characters to see what comes out, and not dive into added pressures for yourself. The whole reason I’m exploring this exercise of what if I had gotten myself into comedy while I was still in my twenties is to avoid precisely that kind of direct tryhard mentality where I give myself a hard time to “make myself tougher.” I no longer believe that’s a useful way through life.)

When applied to characters, it can be helpful to separate out specific common characteristics into individual characters, so that from a writing and watching standpoint, it’s clearer and easier to understand the specifics of the struggle a character is going through.

This is why it can help to know some character archetypes, so that you are picking the character who struggles in the way that is best for you personally to write about, because you’re writing about a hell you’ve experienced.

“All models are wrong. Some models are useful.”

That’s a statistician’s adage I refer back to often, especially when talking about something like archetypes, which simplify real life so that we can interact with the simplified model easier than if we had to bring all of the immeasurable detail of real life into our project.

When people hear “archetypes” they may assume I’m saying overly-broad, slapstick, blunt characters with no basis in reality.

Mostly I’m just talking about calling shotgun.

8. What’s Your Brand?

Sally Hogshead is a marketer.

Her list of archetypes is explicitly not meant to be a psychological typification system that tells you what you should know about yourself, but rather it is a strategy that acknowledges:

People will not give you much of their time or energy.

When someone is viewing your content, or the book cover equivalent for your content, they are judging whether or not it is for them, and whether or not it is up to their standards, and they’re checking where your subject rests within their own priorities.

Want someone to pick up your stuff?

An audience member needs to realize you make things for them, decide that you make it well enough that they expect your interaction to go well, and it needs to be one of the things that is high high high on their list of things they care about right now.

If it’s not the right time, they may come back to you later, if they remember that you make things for them, and that they believe that you make those things well.

So how do you get someone to recognize right away that you make the things they care about?

By not trying to be all things to all people on your first meeting.

Leslie Knope of Parks and Rec, once introduced herself to her best friend’s fiance by saying something like, “What are your five biggest hopes, and dreams, and fears, and regrets?”

No one has time to be their full self at a first meeting.

Which means, that whichever sliver a person sees of you, unless they are a particularly forward thinking person, they will just assume, “Ah, this person is ENTIRELY this sliver.”

You want to control which sliver they see.

Sally’s book is called, “How the World Sees You,” and I recommend it for anyone living in the 21st century because it can help you prioritize what aspect of yourself is going to bring you the right customers, but for anyone who is going to tackle story or humor, I find it to be required reading.

The other archetype book I have is called, “The Comedy Code” by Gunnar Rohrbacher, which is archetypes applied specifically for comedy.

Between the two systems, I know that broadly speaking, I will be doing stories that are about Innovation and Passion, meaning new ideas explored through characters talking a great deal, and that the comedy will come from Anarchy and Drama [Queening], which is when the Innovation becomes untethered and spirals out of control, and when the Passion moves beyond interaction with people and becomes politicking within those same friend groups.

Then specifically, my main character is likely to be a Dreamer, the person in a friend group who has big ideas about how the world should be, but those dreams are not at all backed up by preparation.

I know the easiest character for me to write is going to be that Dreamer, because it’s the archetype most closely associated with my life. It’s extremely difficult to look upon my life and find ways to laugh about my own shortcomings. This is especially difficult because I am not a character, and plenty of the things that made my life hell were complex and genuinely out of my control.

To write from what I know, using archetypes allows me to read what is common among people who move through life as I do, and see laid out before me, how my foibles indeed are funny.

What stupid things am I consistently doing which get in my own way?

And which stupid things do I do that get in the way of others?

9. Who Has The Sanity Ball?

Imagine an inflatable beach ball.

In a room full of people, only one person at a time will be holding the beach ball.

In a comedy, during any line in the scene, only one person will be holding the sanity ball.

The ball that says, “I can’t believe no one else just saw that… This is unacceptable! I’m the only sane person in this world!”

All of the other characters will breeze pass the transgression except for the person holding the sanity ball.

But it’s not a defining trait of the main character or anything; line by line, it bounces around from character to character.

This concept comes to us from, “The Hidden Tools of Comedy,” by Steve Kaplan.

We laugh, Kaplan tells us, not when the funny thing has happened.

It’s when we see the torture dawn on the face of the person affected by the transgression.

That’s the sanity ball.

Characters within a comedic world are not, themselves, laughing.

For the character holding the sanity ball, they are consumed by the upset that the comedic circumstances have caused them.

Start noticing that it’s characters who are angry, most often, that are making you laugh, not the character who is doing something silly.

Comedy is about characters being tortured, by other characters, and we laugh when the tortured character is impacted by the comedic world; we don’t laugh at the comedic world.

Characters in a comedic world are all just terrible and inflict trouble on each of the other characters in the comedic world, and one at a time, someone realizes how shitty it is that that character did something shitty. But like a beach ball lobbed from one person to the next, within seconds, it’ll be someone else who is transgressed upon, possibly by the person we were just empathizing with.

10. If There’s Love Dear, Those Are The Ties That Bind

Gunnar Rohrbacher’s, “Comedy Code,” also stipulates that a key difference between comedy and drama is that in a drama, there are real fallings-out.

People break up in awful, gut-wrenching ways in dramas.

In comedies:

Everyone still loves one another, even if they don’t like each other right now.

So while comedy is about passing around the sanity ball, and different characters getting tortured, moment by moment, it’s never a torture that breaks them apart from the other characters.

Joseph Campbel said that comedy isn’t the opposite of tragedy, it’s the transcending of tragedy.

When we write comedies, we have a tough job, to navigate through the things which in real life break our spirit, but to present those tortures in a way which when viewed, have enough perspective that suggests that a character got maybe precisely what they deserved in that moment, and by round-robin passing the torture from one to the next, we are collectively seen as a group which has no one who we can truly excise and remove from the group; we all need to do better, we are all terrible.

Steve Pavlina, who I mentioned briefly, also said that love’s challenge for us is always, “What about now? Can you still love now? Even after everything that has happened?”

Dramas and most people in real life say no. There are some hard edges that we will not brook, and that person has to go.

Comedies say, we can still love, even now. Even that person we will love.

11. American Fuck-Ups vs British Fuck-Ups

The Office was a British TV show before it was remade in America.

Ricky Gervais told the showrunners in America that British audiences will tolerate a main character being bad at their job for far longer than American audiences will want to see, and that they would need to show glimpses of the main character being good at the sales portion of his job, and simply bad at the management portions of his job. This was someone who was a good salesman and got promoted to manager and is a terrible manager, and British audiences like seeing him be a terrible manager, while American audiences will only go for it in the long run, if they can see the glimmer that he might one day become someone worth rooting for.

I think it was Stephen Fry or John Cleese who said, the divide in American and British comedy is as follows.

Picture a party.

There is a man who picks up a guitar and starts playing mediocre music.

Another man walks up and grabs the guitar and smashes it so that people can go back to the party as it was.

Americans want their main character to be the man who smashes the guitar. British audiences want their main character to be the man whose guitar was just smashed.

In American storytelling, we protect our characters so that they can be heroes. We want to see characters who triumph over their circumstances and come out the other side.

British audiences do not care if a character never learns from their mistakes; they’re not there hoping to see someone transform and grow.

American comedy is about watching someone transform and grow, but that transformation is allowed to take a decade if the show is good enough.

12. Get Thineself A Golden Goose

If I were instructing myself to start in comedy, I’d pass on the wisdom from Sterling and Stone, the Amazon ebook author/publisher collective.

Make a series.

Instead of doing the work to create characters that people love, and then have them fade into obscurity because their journey was a short one, make something that lasts:

Make a series.

It takes effing forever, years, for real change to happen.

If you’re writing a comedy, and you have picked out clear archetypes and therefor journeys for your characters, there is no reason why you will ever have to contrive a scene.

So long as your characters have just enough stress to make bad decisions and negatively impact one another, you will have all the content you’ll need.

Nina Harington, who teaches romance novel writing and especially romantic comedy, will tell you that the major problem in most of the romance genre is that the writers come up with artificial ways for the characters to stay apart from one another.

But this is unnecessary, she says.

The characters are wounded people. These are people who have built their worldview around avoiding the repeat of some past pain, and they jump through endless hoops trying to prevent life from forcing them to confront what ails them.

That’s enough for your story.

Even once a character has had a scene where they confront their pain, consider that life is not like A Christmas Carol; Scrooge might seem to have turned around for a great December the 25th, but by New Year you have to know that guy will be slipping back into grumpiness; HABIT IS REAL and momentum does not change with a single action.

Once you understand your characters, and you understand why they are ill-prepared for their lives, and you understand how their shortcomings impinge upon the other characters in the story, and how those characters impinge right back- then you ought not to struggle with a blank page and where to start. Always the answer will be: 

So… someone fucks up; who?

13. One Fuck-Up At A Time

Thumbnails matter.

Thumbnails rule our lives.

Thumbnails and titles determine if we will click onto a thing and see if it really has anything to do with us.

We have so many demands on our attention; so many good and useful ways we could already be spending our life.

A new thing??

New things have almost no chance.

One of the benefits of this competition for our attention, is that it can make us create clearer things.

The Greek origin of competition means, “To seek together.”

We make each other better, in our side-by-side pursuit.

Let the competition for people’s attention make you a clearer writer.

Have a goose that lays golden eggs; have years of content from the same premise.

But each time you sit down to write, lay out only one egg, if you can. Remember Notting Hill; force Hugh Grant to keep pretending he’s from Horse and Hound, allow your characters to be tortured by the same thing longer. They need to learn their lessons the hard way anyhow.

AND:

It will make for a clearer thumbnail.

The more a single thing is happening in a scene, the more high-concept it is, which means it’s easy to explain to someone.

We do this, because it’s a mercy on our audience.

When things we create pass by word of mouth, every time someone tries to get one of their friends to look at our thing, they have to explain it.

If it’s easy to explain, that also will mean it’s easy to understand.

If it’s hard to explain, the recipient will have to expend energy to try and understand what our creation is about.

The more we can make our content clear enough to be explained easily, the more it is natural that people will share our content and not someone else’s content.

The clearest content wins the sharing game.

So make your snippets of comedy clear.

Make them small enough to be clear.

Einstein said that we should simplify things as much as possible; not more though; never over-simplify.

So long as we see a character and we can understand their deal, and we get why they’re going to make a mess of things, we won’t need much more.

The very first piece of writing strategy I got, when I tried to passively learn how to write better comedy, by not searching for help at all, but by bumping into things, was from the TV show, “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.”

“Buy the premise, buy the bit.”

The character was explaining that he was reading a fledgling writer’s script, he had gotten all the way to page two of the script, and even though he’d handed out the writing assignment, he still could not tell what this script’s story was about.

You have to sell people on the idea of what you’re doing, then they can buy in, and you can deliver.

Also, bonus tip, consider the thumbnail ahead of time.

Once you know your characters well enough, and you’ve given their design love and care, sometimes a single snapshot of that character, in a clear crisis, is all you need to get the wheels in motion.

14. Then Graduate.

I wish I had learned all this when I was fresh out of high school.

It would have kept me busy for many years, and in that time I would have possibly been able to make some people laugh, and make some people fall in love with wonderful characters worth loving.

As we progress further into this century, characters become more important as surrogate hold-overs for the fact that we now have more information disparity than ever before and so we see eye-to-eye less and less with those we love.

Characters are important. Characters give us someone to love, who, instead of being human and messy, are created specifically for our human needs and because of that allow us to have cleaner outlets for our need to not-hate-everything-and-every-one.

I believe that we do need to get better at forgiveness and understanding one another, and that we need to become more realistic about a person’s limitations before we condemn one another so readily.

But in the meantime, characters help.

That would have been a very good job for me to have while I learned more and more about how the world got into a state where we can barely tolerate one another.

But regardless, we cannot change that past, and I learned that information all the hard way, and there are certainly benefits for having gone the way that I did.

I’m hopeful that as you went through that crash course in comedy, you started to develop and understanding that comedy is not a mystery; we may not be able to guarantee a hit, but we can start with reliable structure instead of winging it and hoping the work pays off. Hope is not a strategy.

Now that you know that strategy exists within the world of humor, I’m hopeful it will expand your capabilities of being heard.

This was the information I’d give myself, when I was a beginner at life.

The advanced use of comedy, is to use comedy to deliver tough transitions to the audience, and it has to be done very well…

Or they kill you.

Stay tuned to see if I get myself dead, or actually manage to help people with the makey-you-think comedy I will be trying out nowadays.

The above post was an entry for Paul Scrivens’ 30 Day Prompt Challenge.

Prompt: You’re able to design a Summer School course curriculum for your 18-year-old self that is about to enter the real world.
What do you make sure they know and learn?