I have been meaning to write this for a long time. I went away for a while trying to understand how to be funny. It is hardass work, man. Being funny is not easy at all. Especially when someone is reading your funny, you need to be ahead of them at every possible step. For example, since you have started reading this piece, you have been wondering where I am going with this; you are even hoping that I give a solid tip by the end of this blog on how to write jokes of your own that make your friends belly laugh uncontrollably. Trust me, I have been wondering about this for the last six years. And there is very little you can do in terms of learning from a tip or following a particular course. Yet, how does one learn how to write good jokes?

I will give you a tip: a word of caution—you need to learn something else* before you can learn comedy; but I will tell you this, you need to understand the concept of a beat and timing before you can deliver the punchline of a joke. The joke would never work if you don’t understand its rhythm and deliver the punchline at the most opportune moment. To achieve this, you need to learn the pauses in the telling of a joke…

A good pregnant pause is worth a thousand descriptive words. Give your audience the time to catch up with you. If your audience is waiting with you to discover the climax of a joke, you have them in your charm. It doesn’t matter how poorly worded the punchline is, if you nail the last beat in the telling of the joke, you will invariably be rewarded with a wave of laughter.

Better yet, if you do the things you need to do in the punchline correctly, you get to be an established comic. Because, anything you write after that will be funny.

The most critical, and second, tip to writing comedy is to make the revealing word in your punchline the last one.

P.S: *The something else you must learn before learning to tell jokes is music.