Generate a humorous texture by:

• Overlapping systems of language – e.g. Produce and technology in “My BlackBerry is not Working”; sex and intellectualism in “The Whore of Mensa” (“I want a quick intellectual experience, and then I want the girl to leave”; “That’s so deep, baby.”)
• Creating incongruities in gravity – e.g. In “The Seagull Army,” the juxtaposition between Nal’s life “jump[ing] the rails” and him getting “an ‘avant’ haircut performed by Cousin Steve”; or the aggression suggested by Nal’s “ravaged head” after Cousin Steve “razors” his hair, juxtaposed with Nal’s emotionless response of “radical” (and also with the dispassionate, matter-of-fact narration).
• Being more or less specific than the reader expects to generate surprise – e.g. Examples of humorous specificity in “The Seagull Army,” include “Cousin Steve (rather than “his cousin” or even “his cousin Steve”), “airmailed” (rather than “sent” or “mailed”), and “$17.49 in postage.” “Examples of un-specificity include “Nevada, America” and “the United States desert.”

Keep the joke fresh by:

• Varying its logic throughout the piece, even if it is essentially the same joke – In “How Things Even Out,” we come to expect a two-part joke structure: 1) an assertion that X evens out, and 2) a ludicrously illogical illustration of how. Still, Handey manages to keep the joke fresh by varying that illogic, basing it on false equivalencies, tension and release, anti-jokes, inversions, puns, hypotheticals, &c. Since we never know how the joke will work, it continues to surprise us and make us laugh.
• Starting with a simple joke and making it more elaborate as the piece progresses – Presenting the joke simply at the outset is important for conveying the premise of your piece with immediacy and clarity. Once you’ve established this, you can create surprising twists on the joke by expanding its details. e.g “My BlackBerry is Not Working” moves from the simple pun in the title to “well you could try using a mouse to drag the blackberry to the trash, and after you’ve done that you might want to launch the blackberry from the desktop”; Handey’s “How things Even Out” breaks a rapid-fire sequence of jokes and takes a surprising comic turn with the ludicrous story about the bum who wins the Nobel Prize.
• Shifting the pattern from one section to the next – In “How Things Even Out” Handey inverts the joke halfway through by shifting the pattern to things we do expect to even out—coin flips, the afterlife—and disrupting that logic.

Spin an initial joke into a longer piece by:

• Staging the joke in a dramatic situation – Give the joke a chance to unfold, one punchline at a time, within a longer narrative.
• Creating a character – Put the joke in the mouth of a character (or characters) and use their personalities to carry its zany logic forward.
• Brainstorming – Generate lists of associated words that you might use in elaborating the initial joke (e.g. lists of fruit words and technology words to elaborate the initial pun in “My Blackberry is not Working!”)

Keep puns from being groaners by:

• Putting them in the mouths of characters – When characters are the mouthpiece, the puns are attributed to their personalities rather than to the author trying to make a joke.
• Not acknowledging the joke – The more it feels like you’re trying to make a joke; the more forced the pun will feel. Puns are typically funniest when they feel effortless. (The strained humor of Dad jokes is the opposite of effortless puns.)
• Increasing the velocity – Like most jokes, puns feel funniest when we don’t have time to anticipate them.
• Bringing together un-like things – The wider the incongruity, the more creative, surprising, and absurd it will seem. (e.g. Fruit and technology is more unexpected than sign language being “handy.”)
• Making them unexpected – The cleverer the linguistic overlap, the more comic surprise it contains.