Hitting Your Funny Bone: Writing Stand-up Comedy, And Other Things That Make You Swear

by Geoffrey Neill

This step by step comedy writer's guide is for the budding stand-up comedian to develop fresh original material and craft it into great performance. Become clear on what your comedy special powers are. Edit and secretly test your material. Craft your set into a streamlined performance, and become a better comic out of the gate! Now You can get rid of your writer's block!
How can your elbow’s anatomy can help you grow your funny?
Learn to write to your own sense of humor, perform, and assess yourself. Now you have an edge in entering the comedy world! Hitting Your Funny Bone is written to get you over mimicking others and lead you to hilarity. It’s about finding your own unique humor, and making it a whole lot bigger! If you don’t have a lot of time, that’s ok! This book gives you exercises at the end of each chapter that are easy and you can accomplish at your own pace. A novice will get over 7 minutes of edited, vetted, hilarious material in 6 weeks.

Genres: Humor

114 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 14, 2015

Reviews

[Fellow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short and actionable book about how to kick off as a stand up comedian. If you are into standup and public speaking or have a TED talk planned - highly recommended.

[Fee]

I quit halfway through. It's very basic. There are some nice assignments at the end of a chapter, but the chapter itself contains stories I didn't care about. I also didn't find the example joke very funny.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I do not see myself doing stand-up comedy anytime soon, I did enjoy this book. Hey, if anything it's a short read.

[Frederic · Rating 3 out of 5]

The content of this thin book is stronger than its slapdash presentation suggests. Author Geoffrey Neill's strongest message is that comics must speak their own truth and find their voice, by tackling topics they actually care about. He urges standup comics to explore our own world views on stage, which echoes advice from Seinfeld and others. He talks about maximizing laughs per minute and offers helpful advice on memorization.

This is a very quick read that appears also to have been quickly written. Looks like less than 100 pages (there are no page numbers). Based on the writing style, which is often clunky, I think it was self-published, without even being proof read by anyone other than the author, let alone edited.

Neill teaches a standup course. It looks like he did the drawings himself, or had a child draw them.

I would have given the book higher marks if he had hired an editor, omitted the scrawled drawings and spent some time on idea generation, tied into some discussion of the various sources of humour.

[Sherri Sinicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laugh and learn!

With his quick wit and practical advice, Geoffrey Neill leads you on a journey to find your funny! He gives great examples of how to succeed and gives you a safety net to give it a go! Even if you never get on a stage and you are more of a, behind-the-scenes-I-would-rather-just-write-comedy person, this will help you with that too!