People will tell you comedy comes in threes. They’ll talk about callbacks, misdirection, juxtaposition. There’s the setup and punchline, the turn.
These are all great things to know, and you should learn all these things and more to help you hone your humor.
But comedy is hard to teach. And the only thing you can do, really, is to go out and try to be funny—in person or by putting your writing out into the world—to see how your humor lands. That’s how you’re going to fine-tune it.
You can spend years learning comedy. And you may hear a laugh track in your head, but until your comedy meets a listener or reader or viewer, you’re not going to know for sure if the laughter is real.
More later…