Unlock Your Humor Writing With Humor Formats

Humor WritingWriting
Written By Alex Baia

Constraints can be creatively liberating. Suppose I tell you to sit down, and, in the next ten minutes, write a one-page flash fiction story about anything whatsoever. Well, that’s hard.

In contrast, say that I tell you to write a one-page story about a talking, sentient smart refrigerator that goes rogue and betrays its owner. I bet you’d crank out the story and have fun with it. The constraint makes the writing easier. Or, at the very least, it makes getting started much easier.

Today, we’re talking about how to liberate your humor writing with a particular type of creative constraint: humor formats. If you want to write a funny piece but you feel stuck, try choosing a highly specific format—perhaps one that you’ve never tried before. It’s a superb trick for getting unstuck and building momentum.

What do I mean by “format”? A humor format is just a way of structuring a piece of funny writing. It is the scaffolding of your piece. A common example of a humor format is a first-person character monologue. Here’s one of my favorite character monologues from Slackjaw:

“I tell them a bee beard is like a puppy. A horrific buzzing puppy that could sting me to death in seconds.

Bees are a lot like cats. You start feeding one on your back porch, and the next thing you know you have several thousand clinging to your face and neck in a freakish undulating mass.”

Humor formats can unlock, or unblock, your comedy writing for two reasons: 

First, if you already have a comedic premise (an idea) in mind, but you don’t know how to turn it into an article, simply picking the right format will show you structurally where to begin.

Second, specific formats lend themselves to certain jokes and escalations. When you narrow to a format, the comedic path narrows, and this makes it easier to find your way on a line-by-line and joke-by-joke level.

Let’s say you want to write a funny piece about a tech company CEO ending work from home and calling her employees back to the office. That’s a bit of a dated premise by now, but it’ll do fine as an example. You could write this satire piece in several formats:

  • An uninterrupted character monologue from the CEO, delivered to the employees, during a Zoom meeting.

  • An in-person dialogue between the CEO and the human resources manager where they discuss how to get their reluctant workers to come back to the office.

  • An email from the office manager to the office supplies company, explaining that their office supply needs are about to increase monumentally.

Each of these formats pushes the piece in a different way. Each offers its own way of finding the funny.

Let’s explore five somewhat less-common humor formats that I really like. You can have bucket-loads of fun with these bad boys.

1. Inanimate object monologue 

The author shows us what an inanimate object might sound like (if it could speak). The object doing the monologuing can be anything from a piece of furniture to a creepy clown doll to something entirely abstract like a meme, a scientific theory, or the square root of pi.

If your running shoes could speak, what would they say? What might their point of view be? Would they scold you for leaving them in the closest through months of disuse? Would they beg to go into retirement because they’re ten years old and filthy?

Here are two inanimate object monologues that I like a lot:

“I was meant to be filled with ammunition, MREs, and tourniquets. Meant to be stained with grit and blood. Meant to be astride the back of a grizzled, bearded commando in a sun-baked war zone.

Instead, I am here, with Trevor, in the Delta Sky Lounge. Instead of a combat loadout, I am filled with miscellaneous snacks, a Kindle 38% through an Elon Musk biography, and self-loathing.”

“I’ve been giant my whole life, and you know what? People love oversized things. A big red dog? Sure. A giant gorilla that falls in love with a woman then climbs the Empire State Building? Kinda weird but why not. But nobody cares about a giant peach, or rather, nobody cares about how I feel. They just put me on display and take credit for being the town with the world’s largest peach until I rot and become forgotten.”

Notice the funny, distinctive voice in each piece. Within a few lines, I’m bought into the idea that that’s what a military assault backpack and a giant peach actually sound like.

2. Interview

I’m a fan of dialogue-driven humor pieces. The way people speak is inherently pretty funny. Yet dialogue-centric humor pieces are oddly rare and under-used. One fun type of dialogue piece is the interview.

But don’t limit yourself to typical interview scenarios like a boss interviewing a job candidate, or a journalist interviewing a celebrity.

A humorous interview could take place between literally any two people, or any two entities that can speak. You could interview God, an alien, or the inventor of the bread bowl. Likewise, anyone can do the interviewing. Why not have an alien from Arcturus interview the inventor of the bread bowl? I would read that piece.

Here’s a good interview-formatted humor piece:

“ME: Do you ever catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror before you leave the house for your run? That is to say, do you ever witness the appalling discordancy between the jeans on your legs and the running shoes on your feet?

J.G: I don’t own any mirrors.”

It would’ve been tempting to write this piece as a straightforward character monologue, e.g. “I Am the Guy Who Runs In Jeans.” 

But, instead, Molly elevates the premise by allowing an interplay between the weird sprinting-in-jeans guy and the pedestrian interviewer who truly wants to understand this guy’s strange behavior. The incredulous interview questions paired with the sincere but weird answers make the piece sing.

3. Documentary parody

Short parodies of literature, movies, television, and other cultural artifacts are a time-honored and important part of the prose humor world. A particular cultural parody form that I much enjoy is the documentary parody. Here’s a lovely one from Kelly Shanley: 

“Here we have a thirty-something female returning home from the rare, wild night out. A birthday party is the likely culprit. Her attire, high waisted jeans and a crop top, suggests that she is likely still single, which could be the reason she is in fact so intoxicated.

Once paired up, thirty-somethings tend not to dress so vibrantly or get quite so inebriated, deeming it less necessary once they’ve attracted a mate.”

I love the serious, sincere tone of the narrator—you can easily hear David Attenborough’s British voice in the piece—paired with the descriptions of a lonely, drunk thirty-something woman. 

If you want to give a clinical deconstruction of a funny or ridiculous subject, try formatting your piece as a documentary.

(Real quick: grab my Humor Writing Cheat Sheet to get a PDF of some of my best humor and satire writing tips and recommended resources.)

4. FAQs (frequently asked questions)

This format is simple: A list of frequently asked questions and answers to those questions. FAQs are topically quite flexible. While you might think of an FAQ for a consumer product or a website, an FAQ can be about literally anything: something fictional, something real but hyper-specific, or just something random and weird. Here are a couple of awesome examples to stimulate your imagination…

“Q. How far underground is the sculpture, and how does one get to it?

A. The four phalluses are located 200 feet below ground, and you reach them by an elevator journey entitled “The Descent to Glory.” Going down into the rich silence of the “Chiefs’ Chamber” often casts a reverential hush over guests, and in this hush, many claim to hear the throbbing heartbeat of our nation.”

“Okay, why do you only play 4% jazz?

At 4% Jazz, we believe that jazz is a sometimes treat. It’s freethinking and loud, and sometimes it goes on for a terrific amount of time. So at 4% Jazz, we only play 4% jazz: enough jazz to let you enjoy a little boogie for a few minutes, but not so much jazz that you find yourself lost and shivering in a chaotic aural soundscape, suddenly dissatisfied with your gruel and dreaming of a better life.”

The beauty of the FAQ as a humor piece is that it is simple and specific, and it cuts to the chase. It prevents the writer from needing to overly justify or explain the weird idea behind the premise. We’re able to move right along into the hilarious and bizarre details of those lovely ideas.

5. List of quotations or testimonials 

As we’ve already seen with the FAQ, list-formatted humor pieces are good because they allow you to escalate a premise with minimal effort. Just focus on the jokes, dammit. 

Lists of quotations are another great example. Here is one of my favorite New Yorker pieces by the illustrious Jack Handey.

“I noticed Spartacus sitting in his cell, writing. I asked him what he was writing, and he said poetry. I encouraged him, and the next day he showed me his poem. It was a vulgar, obscene poem about my mother. It didn’t even rhyme.”

Again, there are so many ways you could write a historical humor piece about Spartacus. But focusing simply on the testimonials of his disgruntled prison guards is ingenious. We never hear from a historian, an emperor, or Spartacus himself. We don’t need to hear from them. We need no additional description, scene settings, or opinions from the author. The guards’ testimony tells the whole story of who Spartacus really was.

How to find the right format for your humor?

Besides the five formats above, there are hundreds or perhaps thousands more humor formats. Hell, there are probably infinitely more. If you want a nearly comprehensive guide, check out The Ultra Mega Huge List of Humor Writing Formats.

So, how to find the right format?

Try this: When you have a humor premise, go into unfiltered clown mode (free writing mode), and write as many funny ideas or jokes as possible using your premise. Next, look at what form these jokes take. And think about how these jokes could be expressed in the most amusing or economical way. A format may leap out at you. If not, you can always pick a format by sheer intuition or brute force and try it out. If it doesn’t work, no sweat. Try a different format.


Remember, when you write humor, you don’t have to default to a hum-drum, first-person “humor essay” with a jokey tone. There are far more possibilities. Try giving your piece a specific format that best serves the tone and jokes you want. The more humor formats you try, the more comfortable you’ll become at surfing these formats like a beautiful wave. 

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Alex Baia
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