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Topic : Re: How do you make a character witty? How can a character be made to appear witty, or funny? That is, the character amuses other characters, not the reader, who should ideally be impressed with - selfpublishingguru.com

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In addition to what others have said:

It's easy enough to buy a joke book or search the Internet for jokes. Then pick a few that you can fit into your story.

I read a book about how to be funny years ago -- not saying that I got A's in that class! -- where the writer said that an important trick is to be able to adapt jokes on the fly. You can often take a joke that was written in one context and just change some of the details around to fit it to the present context. Like, I read a joke once that involved telegrams. Well, no one sends telegrams any more. But then one day we were sitting around talking about email and I took a telegram story and just changed all the references from telegram to email.

(Of course you can't just blindly replace words. You can't necessarily just change "A beautiful young woman went to see a doctor ..." to "A beautiful young woman went to see a database engineering consultant ..." and have the story make any sense. Doctor jokes routinely hinge on the idea of the doctor behaving inappropriately, which is jarring and funny because we expect doctors to be very proper and reserved. But we expect database engineers to be crude, so there's no humor there.)


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