How to Write Humor for Kids Using Proverbs and Life Story Excerpts

Authors interested in writing humor and comedy for children might be interested in the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators. If you're looking for information on meetings in the Sacramento area, there's a local chapter in Placerville. Or you might write to the address, SCBWI, CA North/Central, P.O. Box 487, Placerville CA 95667.

Here's how Sacramento writers, and authors anywhere else can writing humor and comedy for children, using unique themes ranging from proverbs to life story excerpts, create video games motivating kids to eat their vegetables and fruits, or write ethnic to science or history-related scenarios. Poems and song lyrics also can be turned into stories using proverbs and/or humor.

You have poems that make children laugh. Children can understand your humor and quickly get the punch line or the surprise or giggle at the riddle. Here's how to turn your humor and comedy writing into children's books. First capture the rhythm, timing, and element of surprise.

Use the 1-2-3 rhythm in your humorous writing-with the beat or emphasis on the third word or syllable as in one-two-THREE. Write 30-second gags. Put them together. You have a children's book. For more information on specialized writing for children, see my paperback book, How to Turn Poems, Lyrics, & Folklore Into Salable Children's Books: Using Humor or Proverbs.

The gags, of course, should be appropriate for the children's level of understanding for the age group you want as your intended audience. Check your facts with booksellers and publishers as to what's not salable and what's welcomed as far as writing humor for children in the various age categories of children's books. These age categories begin with 0 to age 4 for texture-and-touch books, sound books, and books read as stories to children by adults.

Often age 4 to 8 books have stories with repetition, sometimes rhyme, and usually a fable, message, or proverb. The ending has an element of surprise. Books for the age 9 to 12 reader contains adventure, history, biography, and stories of interest to students in the fourth through seventh grades. In books for the 9 to 12 age group, story books with female characters usually sell only to girls. Books with male main characters sell well to both boys and girls of this age.

Stories about animals on an adventure or special interest, science, how-to books, and humor appeal to children in the middle grades. The young adult group includes early teens and older. The range of humor expands in novels that run about 35,000 to 40,000 words and longer.

Young adult books contain adventure and historical plots, sweet teenage romance, and school or family-related real life stories and diary novels. Main characters that are female appeal mainly to female readers. This category includes diary novels. Boys will read diary novels if the main characters are male and the diary is an adventure, such as a story about camping in the wilderness in present or historic times.

In any of these categories, you can write humor, comedy, surprise, riddles, puzzles, mazes, or adventure with humor. Your goal is to inspire children to laugh. To find out what makes children laugh, visit schools as a children's book author and ask children what makes them laugh. Keep a notebook of what they say as inspiration for writing humor. They'll often tell you it's that element of surprise and irony.

Use using surprise and humor with an attitude. Human can be a vehicle to get across a message, fable, proverb, timeless wisdom, history, or point-of-view. How do you actually write appropriate and uplifting humor or comedy in a children's book?

In Melvin Helitzer's Comedy Writing Secrets book, the chapter on triples explains that it's the da-da-TA, da-da-TA, da-da-TA sequence makes it the most important number in comedy. According to William Lang's theory, a triple is "one of the most perfect formats for a joke, because there are only three parts to most comedic bits."

Use the preparation to set up the situation, anticipation to play out your triple, and the punch line to give the story payoff. The rule of three applied to comedy emphasizes three lines, three visuals, then the set up. Show 1, 2 as similar, and make 3 different. On three, get the laugh.

Gags are tripods. Write gags using statements in groups of threes. Everything you can put in threes become funny. Three friends, three words, three of most anything becomes a gag. Three relationships, three careers, or three issues of concern. Three funny statements in one gag works by evoking laughs faster. The brain recognizes groups of three to imprint and set up a burst of laughter.

Three elements of surprise. Three revealed hidden truths. Three comparisons of opposites. Three oxymorons. Three exaggerations. Three funny sounding words or words beginning with the three funniest letters, "p", "k," and "sch." A cat born with three legs is named Tripod. Does the name fit? What just happened in your brain to make the connection?

The brain is hardwired to respond to groups of threes. And threes become funny when used to show opposites, oxymorons, and reduced sentences that come to the point concretely with surprise: "the buck stops here," as well as metaphors and similes: "rosary-wracked as a Tuareg sheik in Coney Island." Humor. Gag. Compare opposites. It's not often a sheik becomes rosary-wracked at a Coney Island burger stand. Use opposites to show contrast as you lead up to surprise.

Make abstract ideas concrete, clear, and concise, especially when you have 30 seconds for your gag to reach the punch line. As TV's Judge Judy's dad told her, (mentioned in her TV interview) "Do you see schmuck written across my forehead?"

Showing that the more things change, the more they stay the same is how irony makes a statement funny and concrete. It's a funnier way of saying the more abstract, "Do you see uninformed written on my face?"

The funniest gags use irony in many ways. How many ways can you show that the more things change, the more they stay the same? That's one example of irony. Surprise in itself as a gag is a type of shock value. Set the audience up for the surprise, but don't give a clue before the punch line, only a connection so they can form a real image.

You don't need the four-letter words for shock. Surprise will do it when the sound of the word, itself, is a gag. It's the "sch" sound. Like the "k" sound in kitsch, kvetch, kravitz, and even cranberry. And the "sh," "p," and "k" sounds are funny. We're wired that way, as animators say. View 1960s TV re-runs now on DVD of comedy series that used sound and surprise in humor, such as the Bewitched TV series.

Note the names of supporting characters in the series that emphasize the humorous-sounding 'k' word-Mrs. Kravitz, a supporting character that lived across the street from the Bewitched series main character in the series. Note how often the 'k' letter is used somewhere in the names of humorous characters in comedies and stories with humor.

Our brains are wired for funny with certain opaque sounds. These opaque nuances include the following: threes, irony, elements of surprise, reduction of words, simile and metaphor. Humor also uses opposites to bring together two very different words to make a whole new image.

One example would be a line like the following: "I was under such pressure in that relationship, that my hope chest petrified into the Hope Diamond." Here, you bring together two unrelated subjects, a hope chest (wooden storage trunk for brides storing gifts for a future time when and if they will marry) and the Hope Diamond.

You could substitute the words "wedding cake" for "hope chest." Children of current times probably wouldn't have a clue what a hope chest is. The term was common in the 1920s and 1930s. If you write historical humor for children, explain terms not used today such as "looking glass" for mirror.

In the 1930s women gave "old maid" parties on their 25th birthday if they were not yet engaged. You might write a book for teens or young adults with humor centered on family life in the early 1930s. The hidden message in the humor would emphasize patience as a virtue for all generations.

Humor makes children laugh when there's a transition from one topic to the next. Use connecting words to create that element of surprise. Keep a proverb in mind as your message. In the humor connecting the Hope Diamond to a hope chest, the connecting word is the element of surprise.

The connecting word brings up the image of pressure. The pressure of millions of years of weight bearing down on a piece of coal turns it into a diamond. The pressure of being rushed to get married or submit to an old maid party at age 25 also is about pressure being applied.

Use exaggeration. What makes the transition and joins hope chest to Hope Diamond is the use of a connecting word. The connector helps the child's mind to understand how two unrelated words connect. Exaggeration and connecting words helps the brain make the leap of understanding by "getting the humor."

It takes pressure to turn coal into a diamond. You're using surprise here as the connector. You're using exaggeration in this gag. A relationship is under such pressure. The outcome is exaggerated. Pressure over time petrifies the coal, the pride, and the bride. Exaggeration gets a laugh in a timed gag. You can use this technique to turn poetry into gags.

You want to say: "all hands on deck," not "I'd like everyone up here." Three 30-second gags form a 90-second story plot or humorous dialogue in a children's book or radio play. A spin-off of a humorous children's book created from a humorous poem also can be used as Web-streaming video narrated by a standup comic or animated character.

Save as an MP3 file and upload the audio to the Web as a podcasted sound bite. Or use a dramatized video clip to promote your children's book. You might want to research the question of whether we are born with a gene for reacting by laughter to anything in threes.

Gag writing in groups of threes are funny. Groups of threes taste like eye and ear candy for the brain's laugh center. Threes are funny because they're kinesthetic. They get to our feeling of high touch and low tech in a world where tech can be funny if the right celebrity is saying the most unexpected words, that secretly we expect the celebrity to be thinking.

Thirty second gags for the Web work well in young adult story books and humorous biography or nonfiction when the subject is about relationships or careers. The subject matter can be set in the workplace or at home.

Humor in 30 second gags works best when the area of focus for the punch line is about payoff. What does your character in the gag want most from behavior? There are four payoffs that get laughs in behavior because they are universal. Those payoffs are the following: power, rapport, exemption, and anger.

Gags are about reducing a long winded explanation to the smallest number of words. For example, the phrase, "All hands on deck," is a reduced number of words that means "Every person, please come up to the deck right now to work."

Reduce the number of words to create gags that convey a universally understood meaning. Communication is about sharing meaning. If we can identify with the gag as something almost everyone goes through anywhere in the world, then the gag has the potential to be funny when placed in context with surprise and exaggeration.

Gags are practical ways of telling people all they need to know about a behavior or emotion. You explain shyness by the body language as in "He took a sudden interest in his toes." Use gags to show visually in words detailed, concrete ways of describing body gestures. Gags are the kind of tag lines you see in romance novels that describe the way someone speaks in tone and texture, movement, mood, and gesture.

Using The Four Payoffs To Write Gags: Power, Rapport, Exemption And Anger: The Payoff Of Power In Writing 30 Second Gags

To get power, a character in your book wants to understand nature. This character will become the butt of the joke and part of the gag. The desire to understand nature is funny when the punch line is timed to give the audience irony or an oxymoron.

To get power, you write a bunch of gags about women in the White House, about ambition, or about understanding technology, science, nature, parallel universes, fission, time travel, or business. You have stock market gags such as the "Fed dangling interest rates like diamond earrings." You can adjust the "understanding nature" theme to any child's age level or focus on writing humor for young adults. Even books for eight-year-olds can revolve around understanding technology to get power. The payoff is power.

Under the power payoff, you have jokes about scientists. You also have mystery or suspense novels for children. The storyline uses humor to unmask any fear of understanding nature as a means to achieving power. Children learn that science is fun and understanding nature does bestow the power of knowledge to be used in many ways.

Gags about the power payoff in understanding nature also can twist ambition. Power, life, and understanding nature will not be contained. Each must be used with compassion and responsibility. Your book could be about using humor to make the world a better and gentler place. Harmony or healing harp music could be another theme. Humor happens when the power payoff is likened to life.

Use humor to show how life, power, and the will to understand nature cannot be contained. Those three elements found in explorers and pioneers will find new frontiers to colonize-out of this world. Humor in science fiction or fact encourages children's imaginations and ambitions. You might write a children's book about how photography links children in many countries.

Some of your gags will be about the payoff of going to any extreme to achieve power, especially when contrasted with people who look powerless. One example, would be a child who becomes a public speaker and travels all over the world speaking to children his or her own age.

In young adult books, power also encompasses gags about adults in the main character's life who are perfectionists or bullies and those who put time squeezes on employees. The boss or community leader often is the target of a stand up comedy roast or gag at a corporate dinner. The toast is the roast. Payoffs of power emphasize ambition rather than security or hard working, untiring dedication.

Payoffs of power focus on gags about a person's precocious desire for achievement, climbing higher, understanding science or nature, and the desire to improve anyone and everything, such as the thirteen-year old stock broker who made a fortune or young genius out to dominate the world with technology or the megalomaniac who thinks he's invincible. Gags can show the positive or negative sides of the payoff of power.

The Payoff of Rapport in Writing 30 Second Stand Up Comedy Gags for Children

Rapport means going to any extreme to obtain attention. Gags about doing anything to find rapport with another person include the feeling and emotions behind people desperate to connect with another person. It's a way of beating loneliness turned into a joke.

Re-write the following two sentences as a funnier gag line: "I was so desperate for a relationship, that I was willing to fight. He said give me a break, and I replied, not until you give me a connection."

Your first step would be to remove the weak, passive verb 'was' and use action verbs as you write in the present tense. The two lines are about finding rapport at a price. Rapport uses oxymoron and metaphor as well as opposites in tone, texture, mood, gesture, and words.

By comparing words that are opposites: 'break' with 'connection,' you have contrasting acts of behavior. He wants to break off rapport to get exemption from the burden of duty to the wife, and she will go to any length for connection and rapport.

Use emotions and behaviors to show the payoff of rapport when writing a gag. Some phrases have several meanings. For example, a comic can put people in stitches from laughing, and a bully can put people in stitches for laughing at him.

Rapport gags can be used not only in children's books but also at fund raisers to promote causes. Gag lines take the nervous edge off. Fear plays upon the need for rapport. Use humor to stir people to action and/or donate money for fundraising purposes. Rapport in humor also satisfies the need to attract attention to a cause or character.

The Payoff of Exemption (From Duty or Burdens) In Writing 30 Second Stand-Up Comedy Gags or Humor for Children's Books

The payoff of exemption means gags will get the person in the gag out of some duty or burden, some commitment or responsibility by withdrawal, exemption, or disappearing act. The person, normally hardworking more than ambitious, and devoted to strong institutions like the government, the military, hospitals, and utilities companies, being a stranger at home but at home with every stranger if it will give him or her more job security.

Gags describing the payoff of exemption usually are about a hard working, tired, and burdened person going to extremes to run away from duty. Use contrasts and opposites for humor. Exemption from duty or burden is the payoff.

Notable is the use of reduction of words to make a point usually explained by the use of a lot of words. An example of word reduction used to convey a universal or national meaning is "the buck stops here."

Humor also can be about being out of place or time and being perceived opposite from what you see yourself as. Exemption humor often is about complaining of need, scarcity, or lack in the face of abundance. Exemption gags compare opposites. For example, "I asked my husband for a hug, but he told me to wait until Christmas. He goes on vacation for the holidays."

Exemption gags also use exaggeration. Exemption gags use complaint to point out realities. Some gags are about legs or arms taking up space in planes, busses, and trains. Other exemption gags point out differences between men and women regarding who claims more personal space around a bus seat.

Timing and exaggeration are combined. By combining exemption from duty or burden with comparison of exaggerated opposites, the timing and punch line work together to get a laugh by using the element of surprise. Surprise is funny. Exaggerations are funny. Exemption is funny. Combine all three and reduce the number of words to make a universal statement similar to "the buck stops here," and you have a gag.

The Payoff Of Anger In Writing 30 Second Stand-Up Comedy Gags

Anger has long been taboo in children's books, unless it comes from the town villain, and children are the heroes, saviors, or good guys in a children's novel for the aged 9 to 12 category. Anger when used as a payoff to create a gag in a 30 second time slot means showing what villains do, to what extreme villains will go to annoy somebody else to get their payoff.

The payoff is not that the children get angry so much as it is to get an anger response out of the villain who must be transformed into the nice guy by learning a universal lesson. In humor, the schlemiel (victim) is the person who gets splashed in the theater by sodapop poured from the balcony by the schlimazel (villain or bully). The story must move forward so that the victim actually turns out to be the hero who saves his village or does a good deed that makes the town a better place.

It has been said in humor that you have a doer, the schlemiel, and the person done unto, the schlemazel. These are Yiddish words often used to describe the practical joker and the innocent receivers to whom practical jokes happen. In related, Aramaic cultures, such as the Lebanese, Syrian, Assyrian, and Chaldean ancestors, in humor, the schlemiel is a "deeb," a sly wolf with a plan, and the schlemazel is a "dib" or unaware and innocent bear who is on the receiving end of the gag. It's the schlimazel or dib whose payoff is in inciting anger, annoyance, or frustration from the schlemiel or deeb, the victim, the stooge, the one who is done unto.

The person using the payoff of anger in a gag could be a teenager who tells a grownup that he did something bad or brags to others in order to get his mother mad in order to rebel. Teaching rebellion to rebellious kids is one payoff of the anger response in humor. However, booksellers and publishers would be reluctant to buy books that teach rebellion, unless it's done in a context, such as a history of the American Revolution of 1776, with the outcome being liberty for the nation-and where a child plays a hero's role.

Another response is using the three friends like the "three amigos" or "three musketeers," in a gag scene who work together as friends to fulfill a mission of annoying the heck out of somebody who wronged or hurt them or put others down. So to use anger to save the world from a tyrant in a gag, means saying words that would get on the nerves of the dictator or person in power about whom one can make jokes.

You can be funny without being insulting. Saying something intelligent with the element of surprise or exaggeration makes use of proverbs. The payoff of anger in gag writing also uses sounds. The "p" sound is funny as in the word, "pickle." Combining the "p" and "k" sound is funny as in park. Yes, park is a funny word. Look for funny sounds that reveal surprise and opposites in a short sentence. "Pickles, the parrot was speechless when my cat sang for the birds."

Writing humor with a short time slot of 30 seconds for a gag depends upon you offering the element of surprise, of comparing and exaggerating opposites, of using oxymorons, such as "an illiterate writer." All this is funny in a split second of recognition by the audience. What makes people laugh is something said using reduced words that rings true for them. Use a phrase that suddenly reveals the truth, a truth that most people not often admit. Revealing the truth suddenly is funny.

Exaggeration works along with revealing a hidden truth Do you want to be funny, touching, or convincing? Use surprise, exaggeration and reduced words that reveal universally understood commands. Use oxymorons, opposites, and suddenly revealed truths. Use words that begin with funny sounds and letters, such as "sch" and "k" or "itz" or "p." Use the four payoffs, which are: power, exemption, rapport, or anger to understand how to write 30 second gags and humor or skits.

Use surprise and sudden truth. What is universally recognized as humor? What is culture-specific? People look for intelligence and truth in humor. Say it smarter, and use timing in the punch line by looking for exaggerations, oxymorons, or opposites compared.

Write the hidden emotions. In stand-up comedy, gags work when the celebrity speaking the line gets a laugh for saying the particular words. The words may work only when a celebrity repeats it, or an animated character, as in a cartoon character saying, "I'm not really bad, I'm just drawn that way," from the movie, Roger Rabbit. Make sure the words can be spoken by anyone and still get a laugh even when the words are in a paperback story book.

The best advice humorists give for gag writing is that surprise makes us laugh loudest or longest and next loudest, exaggerations in words. When you have a short time such as 30 seconds for a gag, say or write it in fewest words and get to the punch line using surprise, uncovered truth, and comparing opposites. Humor is funniest when it reveals step-by-step people's universal emotions to children in a way that is a positive learning and entertaining experience.

Here are some of my books that may be of help to authors.

Here's how to turn your poem or folklore-type lyrics into salable children's books-step-by-step and how to use humor to make your books memorable and popular. What children want in a book, poem, or folklore, is a cave where they can go to be themselves.

Book Description

Do you want to adapt your poem to a storybook that tells a story in words, and pictures-or only amplify the images that you create with words? Would you rather turn your poem into a picture book that tells a story with pictures?

Will words take second place to illustrations? Decide first whether you will write a story book or a picture book. Then use the images in your poem to clarify your writing. You won't be able to read a picture book into a tape recorder or turn it into an audio book or radio play. You will be able to narrate a word book for audio playing.

Start with an inspirational poem, proverb, or song lyrics. Ask children what makes them laugh. You can make something out of nothing. You can make a story out of anything intangible, such as an idea with a plan still in your mind.

Capture your children's dreams, proverbs, song lyrics, and the surprise elements that make them laugh. Record imagination--"what-if" talk, and personal history. A folktale or story is something that could come from any place in the past, from science, or from nothing that you can put your hands on.

What children want in a book, poem, or folklore is a cave where they can go to be themselves. When suspending belief, children still want to be themselves as they navigate fantasy.

The story book becomes a den or tree house where children can go inside, shut the door, and play. Introduce children to poetry by showing how you transform your poem into a children's book by expanding and emphasizing significant events in the life story of one child.

Poems, memorable experiences, significant life events or turning points are all ways to make something out of nothing tangible. You begin re-working a concept, framework, or vision. Here's how to write, publish, and promote salable material from concept to framework to poem to children's book-step-by-step.

Some of my books and lectures you can download as e-books, audio lectures, videos, or obtain other works as paperback books from the lulu.com website, storefront. Other paperback books are at the iUniverse.com publisher's site. So you can browse my paperback book there.