How Comedy Works

Join us for a virtual craft workshop available to all DG Members! 

Hosted by Tari Stratton our Director of Education and Outreach, this workshop will be presented and taught by Screenwriter David Misch. David has presented this workshop for Sony Pictures, Lucasfilm, the Writers Guild, Second City, Actors Studio, Columbia, Yale, Oxford, American Film Institute, CineStudio Paris, and the University of Sydney.

“How Comedy Works” has no direct instruction but is a critical, and serious (though funny), exploration of comedy as an art form, the idea being that understanding how comedy works will help you work in comedy.

Topics include the Rule of 3 (Why are things funnier in threes? Really, why? I mean, why?); the relationship between Comedy and Logic (spoiler alert: they’re bitter enemies); and how the mechanics of jokes – tension and resolution, pattern recognition, misdirection and surprise – provide a template for all humor. As for practical applications, the presentation includes copious comedy clips from TV and movies, from Buster Keaton to Monty Python to Bo Burnham, which show how these principles translate into actual laughter.

David Misch is a former comedian, screenwriter (“Mork and Mindy,” “Saturday Night Live,” “The Muppets Take Manhattan”), author (“Funny: The Book,” “A Beginner’s Guide To Corruption”), teacher (his own courses on comedy at USC and musical satire at UCLA) and lecturer at Yale, Columbia, Oxford, the Smithsonian, 92Y (NYC), Raindance Film Festival (London), CineStudio Paris, University of Sydney, VIEW Cinema (Torino, Italy) and San Miguel (Mexico) Writers conferences, Austin Film Festival, American Film Institute, Writers Guild of America, Sony, DreamWorks, Lucasfilm, Disney, Second City,  Studio, and more than 30 lifelong learning programs around the country.

More at davidmisch.com.