Literature at its most serious is almost always funny. It’s hard to name an authentic great—Dickens, Faulkner, Zadie Smith—who’s not a gifted comic, too. In our conversation for this series, Sean ...

Right now at Arnold, I’m doing something not many creative directors get to do anymore: I’m running a group that turns out a whole lot of funny (and the occasional “funny”) content. We are in a near ...

James Bugg is a comedy writer and former recipient of the BBC Radio Comedy Writer's Bursary where he was a staff writer between 2013 and 2014. As part of Mental Health Awareness Week he explains how ...

When it comes to writing comedy, every syllable counts. Host Scott Simon talks to Mike Sacks, author of And Here's the Kicker: Conversations With 21 Top Humor Writers On Their Craft, and writer and ...

There are 10,390,411 goats in Niger. Go on, count them. Make my day. It’s not quite as many as Kenya, but it’s more than Brazil. I know this because the quiz website Sporcle tells me. It also tells me ...

You can't force funny writing. It helps to look for the absurdities in everyday life, make fun of yourself and, like the best comedians, learn how to set up the punch line. When we recently polled our ...

Twitter was abuzz with chatter about Mindy Kaling yesterday. She had attended a breakfast at Book Expo America and said funny things like “This is like a high school reunion where all the jocks were ...

The two of us blinked at each other. We had just swapped edits for chapter one of our latest coauthored book, You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our ...

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is funny. A funny game! There aren’t that many of those – not really. Gaming famously tries a bit too hard when it comes to comedy; a quick look at Duke Nukem, the ...

Writing a comic novel is hard enough – getting people to find it funny is even tougher. Is this why serious writers avoid jokes, asks author ED O'LOUGHLIN IN 1969, a 31-year-old professor of English ...