Comedy Writing: Complete 6-Week
Teach students how to write genuinely funny stories and scripts with this complete six-week comedy-writing course.
The unit builds towards an original comic story or short script, which students plan, draft, edit and evaluate.
Week 1: Introducing Comedy
- What comedy is and why writers use it
- Incongruity, exaggeration, misunderstandings and surprise
- Expectations and unexpected outcomes
- Original model-scene analysis
- Writing a scene entitled The Expert
Week 2: Creating Comic Characters
- How personality can generate humour
- Character goals, strengths, flaws and habits
- The contrast between self-image and reality
- Revealing personality through actions and dialogue
- Creating likeable but flawed characters
Week 3: Dialogue, Wordplay and Misunderstandings
- Ambiguity and literal interpretations
- Characters speaking at cross-purposes
- Distinctive voices
- Developing misunderstandings without confusing the reader
- Direct-speech punctuation and script conventions
Week 4: Comic Situations and Escalating Disasters
- Turning a small problem into a comic disaster
- Linking actions and consequences logically
- Exaggeration and playful physical comedy
- The escalation ladder
- Using the rule of three
- Writing It Was Supposed to Be Simple
Week 5: Comic Timing, Reversals and Callbacks
- Setup and payoff
- Controlling timing through sentence and paragraph length
- Saving information for maximum impact
- Reversals and changes in power
- Planting details and bringing them back as callbacks
- Planning an effective comic ending
Week 6: Writing and Perfecting Your Comedy
- Planning an original comic story or script
- Combining character, dialogue, complications and timing
- Developing a satisfying reversal or payoff
- Editing stations covering character, clarity, escalation, timing, language and accuracy
- Final assessment criteria
- Student reflection and evaluation
- Create believable characters with clear goals and comic flaws
- Build humour through choices, contradictions and misunderstandings
- Write distinctive and purposeful dialogue
- Link complications so that a situation escalates naturally
- Use incongruity, exaggeration, wordplay and the rule of three
- Control pace and reveal information at the right moment
- Construct effective setups, reversals, callbacks and payoffs
- Analyse how language and structure create humour
- Infer meaning from characters’ words and behaviour
- Edit their writing for clarity, impact and technical accuracy
The resource includes original model extracts, discussion questions, sentence starters, creative challenges, planning frameworks, plenaries, homework tasks and a final assessment.
The lessons also encourage thoughtful, inclusive comedy. Students learn to create humour through fictional characters and situations without using a real person’s identity, disability, vulnerability or embarrassment as the joke.
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