Comedy Courses By The Sea

A lot of modern comedy comes from the personality of the performer/writer which is fantastic. However if you are faced with a deadline or you need topical jokes or you have to write on a subject you have no interest in, or have just run out of steam then you need a method and to understand the logic behind joke writing.  This is where the course fits in. I look at the logic behind how jokes work and how they can be found. I believe that some comedy is a work of genius and genius, like anything inventive, is often about making links between things that were previously unrelated.  Those links, as clever as they seem, are there to be found. Or as I like to think of it, they exist in the ether (hey man!!) It’s often not a matter of thinking of a joke it is finding the joke. Which is much easier than believing that you have to come up with brilliant gems with just your grey matter.To find jokes you need tools, time and faith that they are there. The most common problems people come up against when sitting down to write jokes are boredom, panic and fear. When I used to go on topical news shows, I had to come up loads of jokes on lots of different subject, some of them very boring. Every time I did it, I felt both panic and fear but by coming at things from different angles, by looking for links and analogies I always succeeded, and as a result developed the practices that I now teach.  I believe if you sit and work logically through these exercises you will find the ideas you need to write jokes.
I don’t lecture much in the class, I prefer to analyse the way jokes could be written, illustrate it by leading the group  or get you to do it in groups to build up your confidence, before you do the exercise alone – still in class.  I also look at honing, and give advice about what do with all those weak jokes that are the inevitable by product of writing one good one. I believe that joke writing is a muscle and that the brain will background process thoughts and ideas. I will teach your brain to think like a joke writer and then it will carry on doing that whether you want it to or not – you might find you do five hours in the group and then write jokes on the way home! I provide homework every week so you can practice what you have learnt between the sessions.  I offer on-line support for the entire duration of the course so that we can work on jokes together and I can give you encouragement to keep going. Every group ends with a writers circle where the group shares what they have written in that session and to give you a chance to chip in on each others jokes. If, when you hear a great joke you think, ‘I wish I’d thought of that,’ then this is the course for you!  In fact why not keep note of it now and bring it along and I’ll show you how it’s done.