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The best humor is the humor that comes from your own personal experience. Topical humor has a short shelf life, and writing jokes is a thankless, anonymous task. But sharing your own life events can not only give folks a chuckle, it can be an enriching experience for you as well. But where to start?

To begin with, writing humor isn't as difficult as it seems. You don't have to be the funniest person in real life to write something humorous about yourself. All you need to do is choose one of two basic approaches:

A- Simply write about an incredibly unusual event that happened to you.

B- Take an ordinary experience and then "funny it up".

Let's take a closer look at both of these

ODD EVENT TOLD SIMPLY

A strange event is a natural for a humorous personal narrative. For example, if you have a story about how an Elvis impersonator almost ruined your cousin's wedding, all you have to do is tell the story. There's no need to make any changes to it. It's probably funny enough as is. Give yourself a break and use simple prose. Let the story do all the funny work.

The problem with this approach is that most people lead lives of quiet mediocrity. For most of us, life is not a sitcom where we get into wacky adventures every five minutes. Sooner or later, you're going to run out of wild adventures.

SIMPLE EVENT TOLD ODDLY

The second way to do this would be to take an ordinary experience and then "funny it up".

For example, let's take an ordinary event like a kids' soccer game and write about it. You put the kids in the car and then you stay to watch them. Here are some options to help punch it up a little...

~Hyperbole~

"The referee made a bad call. Immediately, thirty soccer moms lit torches and stormed the field."

The image of soccer moms behaving like angry villagers is an exaggeration, to be sure. Yet anyone who has been to a match knows that moms will often let their emotions get the best of them. Take the characteristics of your subject and stretch them like silly putty.

One word of caution: Always eliminate the word "literally" here. Never say something like "they literally lit torches". It kills the joke and demeans the reader. They're smart. They know this is an exaggeration. Just make the joke and move on.

~Satire~

"It was a dark and stormy Saturday on the soccer field"

A soccer game written in the style of a murder mystery can not only get you writing better, it can illustrate how boring and mundane a game can be by comparison. Try it in different styles and voices.

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