What You'll Learn

• Understand why things are funny — the mechanics of surprise, timing, and subverted expectations
• Sharpen your powers of observation and find comic potential in everyday life
• Build jokes from setup to punchline, and extend humor beyond one-liners into scenes and stories
• Master absurdity, exaggeration, and the "logic of the ridiculous"
• Write low humor, insult comedy, and innuendo with confidence and control
• Use pop culture references as comedy shortcuts — and make them last
• Create visual humor that works on the page, stage, and screen
• Wield satire, parody, and sarcasm — comedy's sharpest tools
• Apply improv techniques to make your writing faster, fresher, and more spontaneous
• Develop your own comedy material and establish a sustainable writing process

Requirements

• No prior comedy or writing experience required
• A sense of humor (even a bad one — we'll work with it)
• A computer or device for writing

Course Description

Here's what nobody tells you about comedy writing: it's not about being funny. It's about understanding why things are funny — and then doing it on purpose.

Comedy is the one genre where everyone assumes you either have it or you don't. That's wrong. The greatest comedy writers in history — from Mark Twain to Tina Fey, from Mel Brooks to Nora Ephron — all relied on learnable techniques, repeatable structures, and craft they developed over time.

In this course, USA Today bestselling author Steve Alcorn takes you inside the mechanics of humor. You'll start with the fundamentals — what makes something funny, why surprise is the engine of comedy, and how observation turns ordinary moments into comic gold.

From there, you'll build a complete comedy toolkit. You'll learn joke construction, from simple setups and punchlines to extended comic sequences. You'll explore absurdity and exaggeration — the tools behind everything from Monty Python to The Onion. You'll dive into the guilty pleasures: slapstick, insult comedy, and the kind of humor that makes you laugh even when you think you shouldn't.

The course goes deep on pop culture humor, visual comedy, and comedy's sharpest instruments — satire, parody, and sarcasm. You'll learn the difference between comedy that gets a quick laugh and comedy that makes a point. A full section on improv gives you techniques that professional comedy writers use to generate material fast and stay spontaneous under pressure.

The final section brings it all together: the forms of comedy writing, building your material portfolio, and developing a sustainable comedy writing process.

40 lessons. From "I wish I were funnier" to "I can't believe I wrote that." Whether you want to write sitcoms, sketch comedy, humor essays, comic novels, or just make your other writing more engaging, this course gives you the tools.

Who This Course Is For

• Writers who want to add humor to any genre or format
• Aspiring comedy writers looking for a structured approach to the craft
• Content creators, bloggers, and speakers who want to be funnier on purpose
• Anyone who's been told "you should do comedy" and wants to learn how