I will help you with editing.

You should ask your Uncle Ric for some tips on amazing creative humour!

Actually, I am writing a book right now also. Mine is a drama/lovestory/military/sci-fi. Eventhough my book is more on the serious note, I try to throw some comedy in there. To make the book comical it is best to not just put it in one conversation with someone that is funny. But spread it out little by little through out the book. To keep the reader intrested. You can make almost anything comical weither it is the environment, a person, an animal, the weather. Just make sure to make it descriptive and most of all funny.

What up Chris. So, what I'm thinking is, watch funny shows and rip off what they do. Seriously. Sounds totally f&^ked up, but believe it or not it's the best way I know of to learn comedy and how to write it. Basically, there's probably about a total of 20 jokes in the world, 20...say..."funny contexts" in life. ALl the jokes and gags and funny things written in the world are just variations on those 20 themes. If you learn tons and tons of different jokes and funny situations (and you do that by stealing them, changing them, and putting them in your works) you will start to subconsciously know those themes. At that point it becomes a lot easier to write comedy, it starts to come out fresh without having to blatantly plagiarize other things like Simpson's, Family Guy, Friends and other shows. So, I would suggest watching a lot of the following shows and writing down the situations and lines and gags and bits of physical business (humor) you like and find funny.

- Simpsons

- Family Guy

- Friends

- Life with Bonnie

- Jim Carrey movies (like "Bruce Almighty". This is a great example of what I mean. A lot of that movie is about Bruce walking around with superpowers and using them in really funny or silly ways. This is a theme -- a character is endowed with obviously super or magical powers, whatever they are, and they do funny unexpected things with those powers. That is the same story of many ancient myths, Disney's "The Sorcerer Apprentice" with Mickey Mouse, and many other stories.) Jim Carrey is also a physical comedy genius, but that is going to be a lot harder to portray in comic books.

- Comic books. Steal everything you can from Lenore and Squee. Jhonen Vasquez is a genius at presenting unlikely situations (like Squee's parents hating him, and then being abducted by aliens instead of Squee and getting really messed up by the aliens...ah, justice is served). Lenore being dead is automatically funny -- little boys and such fall in love with her, not understanding that she's not even alive. Her total insensitivity to the delicate nature of animals like bunnies and stuff is really funny when she kills them accidently, and then thinks they're still alive, just "sleeping".

Mostly comedy is about doing the unexpected. Contrasting things, making unlikely things meet each other and interact. Humans tend to laugh when pleasantly surprised (not scared, of course). The unexpected or unpredicted event is usually funny when it's in the right context. Those contexts are the themes I mentioned earlier, and stealing those from other sources is totally fine, that's the only way to learn what they are.

-T.

Think about what you find funny in your own experiences in life. An off handed or sarcastic comment from a friend, borrow from the humor of real life and you cant go wrong....oh and uh, Kid, I have 2 words for you....SPELL CHECK.

Wink.

Love,

Mom