There are six essen­tial ele­ments of humour, sug­gests Dil­bert’s Scott Adams, as he looks briefly at how to write com­edy:

  • Pick a Topic: The topic does half of your work. I look for top­ics that have at least one of the essen­tial ele­ments of humor: Clever, Cute, Bizarre, Cruel, Naughty, Recognizable.
  • Sim­ple Sen­tences: Be smart, but not aca­d­e­mic. Prune words that don’t make a difference.
  • Write About Peo­ple: If you must write about an object or a con­cept, focus on how some­one (usu­ally you) thinks or feels or expe­ri­ences those things. Humor is about peo­ple, period.
  • Write Visu­ally: Paint a funny pic­ture with your words, but leave out any details that don’t serve the humor.
  • Leave Room for Imag­i­na­tion: Leav­ing out details allows read­ers to fill them in with what­ever image strikes them as fun­ni­est. In effect, you let read­ers direct their own funny movie.
  • Funny Words: Funny words are the ones that are famil­iar yet rarely used in con­ver­sa­tion. It’s a bonus when those words have funny sounds to them.
  • Pop Cul­ture Ref­er­ences: Ref­er­ences to pop­u­lar cul­ture often add humor.
  • Ani­mal analo­gies: Ani­mal ref­er­ences are funny. If you can’t think of any­thing funny, make some sort of animal/creature anal­ogy. It’s easy, and it almost always works.
  • Exag­ger­ate, then Exag­ger­ate Some More: Fig­ure out what’s the worst that could hap­pen with your topic, then mul­ti­ple it by ten or more. […] The big­ger the exag­ger­a­tion, the fun­nier it is.
  • Near Logic: Humor is about cre­at­ing logic that a-a-a-lmost makes sense but doesn’t. No one in the real world could put gum on his penis and retrieve an iPod from a storm drain. But your brain allows you to imag­ine that work­ing, while simul­ta­ne­ously know­ing it can’t. That incon­gruity launches the laugh reflex.
  • Call­back: A call­back is when you end with a funny ref­er­ence that already got a laugh. It puts a nice period on your humor writing.

I won­der how much of this applies to speak­ing, too?

via Ben Cas­nocha