Funny is one of the most beautiful, magical, and vulnerable expressions we offer to others… and to ourselves. It is gift to make someone laugh and it feels like a gift when someone makes us laugh. It’s hard not to feel a magnetism, an attraction and trust in someone who makes us laugh. It is power and at the root of it is a playfulness and a vulnerability. Often crying and laughing are mixed, you start laughing and end up crying or you’re crying and end up laughing.

Funny can be satire like a Saturday night live sketch with impersonations, it can be slapstick, who doesn’t love watching a serious person trip, it can be dry humor like the deadpan deliveries in The Office, you can be sarcastic, seeing and sharing the irony of something, there is self-deprecating humor, a dark humor, etc. etc. There is no right way to do these but there are qualities that enhance each type whether it’s physical, vocal, word play, emotional impression, mixing of context and many more.

There is an interesting catch-22 in our ‘funny mechanism’ … when we are doing it purely for the laugh of someone else, it can work but it tends to be heavier in technique and timing, whereas, when we are engaged in it ourselves and cannot help but find it funny then all technique can go out the window. In fact, sometimes things that are not funny can become funny if you cannot help but laugh at yourself.

This class will guide you through finding humor on the page, discovering the humor between the lines, dialogue inference and editing for funny, how to allow the body and voice to express funny where it is not, opening yourself up to the risk of failed humor, how timing can work in drama to create comedy, where does physical humor work or not and how to allow the vulnerability that elicits a funny state of play