Comedy Bizarre

1 week 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.

2 weeks 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.

3 weeks 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.

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.

1 month ago | comedybizarre.substack.com | Alex Baia

We all know the importance reading a lot to inspire our writing brains. I usually break this into three categories:Read the kinds of comedy you want to write,Read (or watch/listen to) everything that’s funny generally, whatever the form, andRead classic literature that’s stood the test of time. But we can learn from art that’s outside our wheelhouse and our medium, whether we’re talking movies, music, visual art, theater, or public access television shows from the 1980s.