Short Humor and Satire Writing with Elissa Bassist

Overview

You don’t have to be born with a sense of humor to be funny and to write funny. Funny is a skill like any other. In this 5-week writing workshop, we’ll break down the skill and practice it every week. We’ll focus on the short comedy piece and talk about how to write and publish your own in venues like The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and more, a lot more. Students and writers of any level will learn about comedic premise, structure, speaker, target, point of view, heightening, and comedic tools and concrete ways to be funnier in writing. Workload: Read a handful of humor pieces every week (which the instructor will provide), in-class brainstorming, weekly homework, and write and workshop 300 to 500-word humor pieces (parody, satire, character monologue) with peer and instructor feedback. By the end of our time together, everyone will know 50-ish secrets to joke with confidence about yourself, your life, and your world on the page and at parties. If that doesn’t happen, then you blew it.