12 Best Books on Comedy Writing, Ranked by What You Can Use

Vorhaus opens from a position that irritates people and then proves it: comedy is a set of solvable problems rather than a personality you either have or do not. He works through the comic premise, the clash between a character and the world they are stuck in, the notion that comedy grows out of truth plus pain, and the habit of making bold choices early instead of safe ones. Every section closes with exercises he genuinely expects you to do. The tone is dry and mildly impatient, like a teacher who has heard your excuse before. It is short and there is almost no padding.

Toplyn wrote for David Letterman and Jay Leno, and this reads like the internal training document a head writer hands a nervous new hire. It breaks short form comedy into named parts: how to choose a monologue topic, several specific procedures for generating punchlines out of that topic, then desk pieces, sketches, parodies, audience bits and remote segments, each with its own method. Worked examples run throughout, showing the ugly middle stage of a joke before it is any good. Nothing in it is inspirational and that is exactly the point of it.

Dean teaches the joke as a mechanism rather than a mood. The setup makes you assume one story, the punch reveals a second story that was sitting there the whole time, and the switch between the two is where the laugh comes from. He names the moving parts, including the target assumption and the reinterpretation, then makes you build jokes out of those parts on paper. The second half turns to performance: working a room, surviving a bad night, assembling a set from material you have tested. The prose is plain and occasionally clunky, and the model underneath is very hard to argue with.

Johnstone taught at the Royal Court in London and wrote this out of what he kept finding in the rehearsal room. The famous part is status: every exchange between two people has one of them going up and the other going down, and once you can see that, you can see why some scenes are funny and others simply sit there. There are also chapters on spontaneity, on the way schooling kills invention, on narrative skill, and on masks and trance, where it gets genuinely strange. This is not a comedy manual. It is a book about being alive on stage that comedy writers keep robbing.

Halpern wrote this with Del Close and Kim Johnson, and it sets out the long form school that ran through Chicago and then through most of American comedy. The instruction is easy to say and hard to do: agree with your partner, add to whatever they gave you, look for the honest thing rather than the joke, and trust that funny turns up when nobody is chasing it. It also explains the Harold, the structure where scenes and themes recur and connect across a set. It is a slim book with a great deal inside, and it is almost entirely about listening rather than being clever.

Sedita is an acting coach in Los Angeles and he built this around a claim that most successful sitcom casts are assembled from the same eight roles, among them the logical smart one, the lovable loser and the dumb one. He shows how each type generates comedy through what it wants and what it cannot see about itself, then runs examples from well known shows so you can test the framework against something you have already watched. A good deal of the book covers auditioning and playing comedy, since it was written for actors first. Writers get the more useful half.

Dikkers edited The Onion for years and this is his attempt to write down what that room was doing without ever saying it aloud. His main tool is a set of funny filters, each one a distinct way of bending a plain statement, including irony, hyperbole, wordplay, parody, shock and misplaced focus. You take something true and dull, push it through one filter, and look at what comes out the other side. He is also honest about how much rewriting one funny sentence takes. The book design is amateurish and the self published feel puts some readers off, so ignore the cover.

Helitzer taught humour writing at a university and this grew directly out of that course, which is exactly how it reads: chapters, definitions, drills, and hundreds of examples. He offers a formula for what makes humour work, built around target, hostility, realism, exaggeration, emotion and surprise, then applies it across stand-up, speeches, sketches, greeting cards, advertising and journalism. The range is the selling point, because no other book here covers a wedding speech and a sitcom between the same two covers. The problem is the examples: many are decades old and a fair number would not be printed today.

Carter runs comedy workshops and this is that workshop transcribed, organised so you can work through it a day at a time with tasks at every step. It handles stand-up first, then moves into sitcom scripts, one person shows, and using comedy in corporate speaking, a lane almost nobody else here bothers with. There is heavy emphasis on mining your own irritations for material, and on the business side of it: getting stage time, building a set, dealing with an agent. The voice is loud and motivational, much closer to a coach than a theorist.

Sacks interviews comedy writers across several generations and asks them practical questions instead of famous ones: how a script gets broken, how much of the day goes on staring at nothing, what happens when a room turns against your idea in front of you. Between the interviews he drops short pieces of concentrated advice and oddly precise craft knowledge. What comes through across all of it is how unglamorous the job is and how much of it is rewriting. Read it to find out what the work feels like from inside, rather than how to do one part of it.

Apatow started interviewing comedians as a fifteen year old for his high school radio station, and somehow talked established names into sitting down with him. He kept the tapes, kept interviewing people for decades as he became a director himself, and this book collects them. The early ones are the treasure: a teenager asking famous comedians earnest questions about how they do what they do, and the comedians answering him seriously. The later conversations are between peers and run looser. There is very little technique in here. There is a great deal about what this life does to the people who pick it.

Martin tells the story of building an act out of nothing, starting with magic tricks at Disneyland and ending in arenas, and the middle of the book is years upon years of small rooms and bad nights. He is precise about the theory he was working from, which was to strip out the punchlines and let the audience decide when to laugh, and honest about the anxiety attacks and the flatness that arrived alongside the success. Then he stopped completely and never went back to stand-up. It is a short book written with real control, and the coldness in it is deliberate.