Comedy Writing Step by Step: How to Write and Sell Your Sense of Humor

Watch Mama's Family? Like to learn from one of the masters of writing comedy? Gene Perret is one of the best and this book helps you learn what he knows: comedy writing takes practice. Persevere and complete these exercises and pretty soon, what first seemed "impossible" becomes doable and then, fun. This book gives a lot of writing exercises, tips and tricks of the trade that you can use to write funny. A very good buy!

This book generates good ideas...but you have to do the exercise to be creative. Published in 1982 but it still provides basic principles of comedy writing in year 2002 and beyond.

Mr. Perret teaches traditional comedy writing through word association exercises. Reading this book won't make you funny, but doing the excercises might. The best beginner book I've seen.

This is probably the best book about writing stand up comedy I've read. It really explains to you in detail not only how to write stand up comedy material, but how to write for sketch comedy and sitcoms. You can also get more jokes per topic with Gene Perret's method than any other joke writing method I've seen. This book in my opinion even surpasses Stand up Comedy the book by Judy Carter, because you can get more jokes with Perret's mehod and it tells you how to prepare and overcome the dreaded writer's block, even though I do reccomend Judy Carter's book, I suggest you read Comedy Writing Step by Step first.

I have just gone through the book "Comedy Writing Step By Step", and I have to say that it is truly one of the best "how to" books I have ever had the pleasure to read. Speaking as a professional ventriloquist of 22 years, I have always struggled to write my own material, and after finishing Perret's book I not only have renewed confidence in my comedy-writing abilities, I'm also producing fabulous results! Perret makes the reader feel as though they knew him personally, and I highly recommend this wonderful work to anyone with aspiring hopes as a comedy writer.