How to Write Comedic Dialogue That Is Actually Funny

Lesson 4 of Comedy for All: The Humor by Genre Workshop

Art by Mariam Chagelishvili

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Hey friends, welcome to the fourth and final week of Comedy for All: The Humor by Genre Workshop.

Before we dive in, let’s recap.

The goal of this workshop is to equip you with some tools and insights to help you add humor to your writing, regardless of your preferred genre.

Each week’s lesson culminates in a challenge to amp up your writing with newfound comedic flair.

Week 1 - Write a funny list.

• We learned five core principles of humor writing: Overgenerate; Write with your nonjudgmental clown brain; Write fresh jokes and avoid clichés; Be specific; Get feedback.

• We applied those principles to writing a simple humor piece in list form. This is a fabulous way to get started with comedic writing.

Week 2 - Write a humorous first-person essay based on a personal experience or viewpoint.

• We dug into the idea of voice as central to comedic writing.

• In the personal essay, the author adopts either their natural, unaffected writing voice or a heightened (slightly more absurd) version of it.

• You can use this “light-to-medium voice” to find humor in one of your opinions or life experiences.

Week 3 - Write a character monologue or first-person flash fiction.

• Now, we escalate your writer’s voice to the level of an absurd character.

• In a character monologue, you construct a character with an unusual point-of-view, and you have this character expound on their point-of-view.

• The character monologue is an effective way to hone your voice-driven character writing, a skill that’s so, so helpful in all kinds of comedy.

Finally, in week 4, we’re getting into comedic dialogue. 

In this week’s lesson, we build off last week’s work with comedic characters, and we see how multiple characters can play off each other.

Comedic dialogue is really fun to write. It’s a lot more fun, anyway, than describing a sad babbling brook for three pages and making it a metaphor for daddy’s alcoholism. Sorry, literary fiction writers!

(By the way, be sure to follow my weekly Substack for funny writers, Comedy Bizarre, for more comedy writing tips, challenges, etc.)

Ready to get into some funny dialogue?

Comedic Dialogue: Examples and Analysis

First, let’s look at a varied bunch of funny dialogue examples. We’ll extract a lesson or two from each one.