by David Swyer

Created on: August 13, 2008   Last Updated: January 18, 2011

WHAT MAKES SOMETHING FUNNY
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When I first encountered the title, "WHAT MAKES SOMETHING FUNNY", my initial reaction was that funny is anything that causes you to laugh, chuckle, or giggle. I reasoned that that being funny is not a science. How can anyone produce a set of rules for such an activity?

However, a light came on in my brain that caused me to slap myself on the side of the head. I suddenly remembered producing several dozen one-liners myself a few years ago.

The reason I decided to do this, at the time, was that a friend of mine was writing one-liners for a professional Comedian. This inspired me to try writing one-liners as if I would try selling them to a comedian.

To begin, I chose the subject of cooking.
I then derived several words which could be used to go together with the word, cooking. Some of the words that came to mind were, cremation, cooking oil, onion soup, gravy train, leftovers, dog, and coca Cola

These are not all the words I produced, however, I will stop at seven words to show you how to use them in connection with the word, cooking,

I would like to preface the explaining of this method to say that I am using the word, Wife, as the subject of cooking for these one-liners. However, any person such as the Chef in the restaurant close by, or Dad, Grandma or Mother-in-law could be inserted for
Wife.

Here are the one-liners I came up with using the seven words above:

1. My Wife's Father was a Mortician. Maybe that's the reason she cremates all of our  dinners.
2. Last week my Wife ran out of cooking oil, so she baked some cookies in oil of Olay.
They tasted awful but I loved touching them.
3. My Wife's onion soup tastes terrible, but it's the best cure for "Athletes Foot"
I've ever found.
4. In our household, even the Gravy Train is derailed
5. We never have leftovers in our house. My Wife's cooking usually self-destructs within three hours.
6. My Wife's cooking is so bad that everyday at dinnertime our dog goes over to
the neighbor's house to beg.
7. Have you ever seen that experiment where they drop a piece of meat into a bottle of Coca Cola and the meat turns white. Last week, I accidentally dropped a piece of my Wife's meatloaf in my coke and the coke turned white.

In reiteration, you can invent funny one-liners by picking a subject word and then putting your mind at work to generate a series of related words. The next step is to let your mind run wild to produce funny sayings. Try it. You will be surprised at how

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