The Surrealist Inquisition Question Sheet by Sally Holloway

Buy this book on Amazon (or somewhere more ethical)

The Serious Guide To Joke Writing (How to Say Something Funny about Anything) is definitely one of the better comedy books out there. I rank it up there with Along with Logan Murray’s Get Started In Stand-Up Comedy. It doesn’t drill “comedy formulas”, and I think any book that does is a red flag. Using a formula creates a predictable pattern, and predictable jokes are… predictable. Sally uses a similar approach to one I have adopted which is to just write in different directions from your central theme and let unusual connections come up organically. I’m amazed this book came out in 2010 I thought it was much older as it has so many references to Margaret Thatcher!

The more you write comedy, the more these techniques become second nature to you. It’s fun to “impress” students with thinking of a neat point of view for their topic, but I’ve just internalised so many of these techniques. I still use them verbatim when I am writing for other people, or more esoteric material like headlines/cartoons.