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1 week ago | 
theforeverworkshop.com | Alex Baia
Hey there, comedy writers. How did your funny personal essay draft go last week? Do you have any observations, or did you run into any walls? Feel free to post in the comments and let us know. Today we’re digging into one of my favorite topics in comedy writing: characters. The plan is to first quickly review voice as it pertains to character writing. Next, we’ll try to understand what comedic characters are, fundamentally, and how to create them from nothing.
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1 week ago | 
comedybizarre.substack.com | Alex Baia
Writing groups are back on the menu! Today I want to tell you everything I know about properly organizing your writing group. This post has a bunch of nitty-gritty suggestions for running a smooth comedy writing group and not going crazy. We love not going crazy here at Comedy Bizarre! Almost as much as we love going crazy. Paradox!? Nope. Okay, before we get into it: If you signed up for a Comedy Bizarre Writing Group for this round (summer 2025), your group creation is imminent.
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2 weeks ago | 
theforeverworkshop.com | Alex Baia
Last week your writing challenge was to draft a short comedic list of around 300 - 600 words. This could have been a funny list of any kind, and for those of you who wanted a more specific challenge, I suggested that you write a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list. How’d that go? I’m hoping it was fun, easy, and breezy.
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2 weeks ago | 
comedybizarre.substack.com | Alex Baia
You probably know the 10,000-Hour Rule. This is the idea that it takes around 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to gain world-class expertise at any skill. Everyone’s favorite funky-haired popularizer, Malcolm Gladwell, popularized this idea in his 2008 book Outliers, citing research by psychologist Anders Ericsson. Ericsson later clarified that quality of practice matters more than any specific number of hours.
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3 weeks ago | 
theforeverworkshop.com | Alex Baia
Hello, writers! Welcome to “Comedy for All,” in the illustrious Forever Workshop. This is an introductory humor writing workshop for writers of all varieties. Whether you write personal essays, short stories, novels, narrative nonfiction, business writing, ad copy, or comedy itself, this course is for you—assuming, of course, that you want to invest in your humor writing. If you are opposed to humor, though, this course is not for you.
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4 weeks ago | 
mcsweeneys.net | Alex Baia
The Desperado: They get a dreamy look in their eyes, then, before you know it, swoop in quick as a bandit and shove their tongue down your throat. The Zombie: Their lips are stiff and dead, and you want to whisper, “Pucker up, you lifeless weirdo,” but you can feel yourself become infected, the passion slowly draining. The Lollipopper: They suck on your tongue like a child sucking on a Tootsie Pop.
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4 weeks ago | 
comedybizarre.substack.com | Alex Baia
Scott Dikkers and I did another iteration of our Comedy for All Workshop last weekend. It was similar to the one we did in March, albeit with a few tweaks. Anyway, the replay video plus all the bonuses—including Scott’s How to Write Funny books—are all available for you here. There’s also a new humor case study in there—with our inline notes. That brings…Keep reading with a 7-day free trialSubscribe to Comedy Bizarre to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
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1 month ago | 
comedybizarre.substack.com | Alex Baia
Did you know that comedy writers need a writing group? It’s true! Here are eight reasons why. 1. Pure self-editing is too hard. Yes, you can edit your own comedy writing. But this is hard. Becoming a good comedy self-editor takes years of brain building. The issue is that we’re all trapped in our heads, unaware of whether our jokes are funny and clear.
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1 month ago | 
comedybizarre.substack.com | Alex Baia
On Sunday, I went to a movie night with some friends, and I was tickled to see they’d chosen Office Space, the Mike Judge cult classic comedy from 1999. Office Space was probably the first comedy—that I know of, anyway—to totally nail office tech culture. I hadn’t re-watched it in over a decade though, maybe longer, and I was curious how it would hold up. Movies that dissect a bygone decade can feel old—especially when it comes to comedies. Comedy Bizarre is a reader-supported publication.
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1 month ago | 
comedybizarre.substack.com | Alex Baia
There’s a naïve model of artistic inspiration for writers that goes like this:Inspiration —> WritingYou could even call this “folk wisdom.” Inspiration strikes! The mystical muse visits the writer! And then… kaboom! Work happens. The writer writes and produces a masterpiece. The problem with this idea is that it’s false, backwards, and pernicious. It reverses the causality. The truer picture is this:Writing —> InspirationIt’s action that leads to inspiration, not inspiration that leads to action.
