Carl Foster
“You’re Funny! Turn Your Sense of Humor into a Lucrative New Career"
By D. B. Gilles
October 16, 2011
Laughter is the best medicine, but such recreational use as we see in many homes makes it look more like an addictive drug. It is the language of madness and drunkenness and meticulously contrived revenge. It is the supreme mockery of all human suffering. Meanwhile it is the pastime of infants and senile people. But how do we get paid to make people do it?
You’re Funny!, bestselling sequel to the less popular book You’re Ugly!, is a reference guide for those who wish to inflict others with Kuru, death from laughter, which has taken lives selectively throughout history (Khan, 2010).
This book’s target is the individual who is passionate about learning the first steps to take for finding a job somewhere in the most prominent realms of comedy: television, film, stand-up, and online content.
D.B. Gilles, affectionately dubbed “The Peony in the Garden of Delights,” is a professor of comedy and screenwriting at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. His blog is called “Screenwriters Rehab” and his landmark contribution to comedy is a confabulated series of journal entries called W. The First Hundred Days. A Whitehouse Journal.
Gilles’s strength in writing this particular book comes not from his ear for witty dialogue, nor from his hair of comic genius, and much less from any recognizable facial feature or good idea in his head, but most of all not for his apparent dedication to teaching over working in comedy. The strength lies in his serious, exacting approach to the content he desires to give the reader.
He is not sweet and supple with his concepts, but dry and technical in the fashion of a Heimlich maneuver poster. A fledgling writer must enter the field knowing all the terms and tactics of his veteran coworkers. Furthermore Gilles is not encouraging toward people who are not already known to be naturally funny by friends and strangers alike; and while the book refers to many textbook terms of comedy it does not halt its progress to relate their meanings in depth.
However D.B. Gilles does not throw around terms like “bit,” “sketch,” or “button” lightly. In fact he seems to have a profound relationship with these words, and the reader can recognize it immediately. I myself once had a longstanding fling with the phrase, “Nearly jumped out of my bones!” until the persistent urgings of family and friends convinced me to drop it for good. Nearly jumped out of my bones about it too!
People need to laugh. One person’s surrender to boisterous laughter naturally imitates the echoes of a boundless canyon within his or her small, crowded, and ultimately inconsequential life. Any child, even a very dense child–even a child conceived and reared in the most
promiscuous stupidity, crawling limbless over the muck of this Earth–would know that.
Gilles relates the same opinion in an interview with Ann Baldwin (2011): “In the current state of the world with the threat of terrorists, global warming, inflation, and all the other stuff that can bring people down, it's nice to know that there are places and people to turn to for entertainment.” Judging from the disbursement of television subject matter, people require entertainment more than the relentless disturbance of current affairs.
In a highly laughable review of You’re Funny, Amanda Porter (2011) offers a string of supportive phrases which are one typo away from accurately describing the book: “No matter who you’re trying to get a laugh out of D.B. Gilles can help you harness your humor. Gilles covers and do’s [sic] and don’ts of comedy and how to best convey your jokes to audiences of all ages.”
Porter is obviously enamored with the quotes shared by Gilles, who no doubt combed Bartlett’s Book of Familiar Quotations in both its “Comedy” and “Laughter” sections, skipping a wide array of relevant quotes from the Bible, to produce very profound and notable thoughts ranging from Steve Allen to Aristotle.
The best comedians and writers are very aware of how the audience is feeling during the playing out of their material, like a spiritual leader whipping up a crowd into a jabbering frenzy. There is a level of psychic intimacy between the one who jokes and the one who laughs that many in the humor industry find preferable to physical contact.
This preference for laughter over eroticism has become latent in the 20th century viewer, as evidenced by the widespread technological availability of humorous content in writing and on screen. Of bygone eras which preceded sitcoms and late shows, Rollo Ahmed (1994) writes of the importance of temples where religion and sexuality meshed in the form of ritual as “Humanity had not learnt to conserve and use its creative force intelligently, and often with no impure motive could see no other way of invoking the blessings of abundance”(242).
Disgruntled Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky used to give public readings, some of which lasted up to forty days and nights. When he looked up from the page and saw weary, inattentive faces he was known to bring levity with his trademark complaint: “Anyway, my penis still hurts.” He never failed to bring the house down with that one, and in some cases to make it flat and even curve it downward like a bowl full of St. Petersburg snow.
This How-To book is not inspirational or crammed with fodder. It wastes little time in educating the reader: the only real pauses in Gilles’s facts and advice are either famous quotes or examples of content displayed for the sake of teaching formats.
After perusal of You’re Funny!it becomes clear that a newcomer must demonstrate all the expertise of a professional before ever securing a steady income in comedy, and this inexpensive book will give any basement screenwriter the appearance of someone who has attended a seminar of fairly high quality. I recommend this book as a starting point, even to serious journalists who enjoy satire enough to consider Steven Colbert or Jon Stewart as role models.
Sources in APA Style
Ahmed, Rollo. The Black Art.
Gilles, D. B. (2010). You’re Funny: Turn Your Sense of Humor into a Lucrative New Career.
Studio City, California: Michael Wiese Productions.
Khan, Z. (2010). Kuru. Medscape Reference: Drugs, Diseases, and Procedures.
Retrieved from http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/220043-overview
Baldwin, A. (2011). Future of Story Interview Series: D.B. Gilles. Writer Store.
Retrieved from http://www.writersstore.com/future-of-story-interview-series-d-b-gilles
Porter, A. 2011. Book Review: You’re Funny. School Video News. Retrieved from
http://www.school-video-news.com/index.php?
option=com_content&view=article&id=879:book-review-yourre-funny&catid=21:
books&Itemid=41
“You’re Funny! Turn Your Sense of Humor into a Lucrative New Career"
By D. B. Gilles
October 16, 2011
Laughter is the best medicine, but such recreational use as we see in many homes makes it look more like an addictive drug. It is the language of madness and drunkenness and meticulously contrived revenge. It is the supreme mockery of all human suffering. Meanwhile it is the pastime of infants and senile people. But how do we get paid to make people do it?
You’re Funny!, bestselling sequel to the less popular book You’re Ugly!, is a reference guide for those who wish to inflict others with Kuru, death from laughter, which has taken lives selectively throughout history (Khan, 2010).
This book’s target is the individual who is passionate about learning the first steps to take for finding a job somewhere in the most prominent realms of comedy: television, film, stand-up, and online content.
D.B. Gilles, affectionately dubbed “The Peony in the Garden of Delights,” is a professor of comedy and screenwriting at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. His blog is called “Screenwriters Rehab” and his landmark contribution to comedy is a confabulated series of journal entries called W. The First Hundred Days. A Whitehouse Journal.
Gilles’s strength in writing this particular book comes not from his ear for witty dialogue, nor from his hair of comic genius, and much less from any recognizable facial feature or good idea in his head, but most of all not for his apparent dedication to teaching over working in comedy. The strength lies in his serious, exacting approach to the content he desires to give the reader.
He is not sweet and supple with his concepts, but dry and technical in the fashion of a Heimlich maneuver poster. A fledgling writer must enter the field knowing all the terms and tactics of his veteran coworkers. Furthermore Gilles is not encouraging toward people who are not already known to be naturally funny by friends and strangers alike; and while the book refers to many textbook terms of comedy it does not halt its progress to relate their meanings in depth.
However D.B. Gilles does not throw around terms like “bit,” “sketch,” or “button” lightly. In fact he seems to have a profound relationship with these words, and the reader can recognize it immediately. I myself once had a longstanding fling with the phrase, “Nearly jumped out of my bones!” until the persistent urgings of family and friends convinced me to drop it for good. Nearly jumped out of my bones about it too!
People need to laugh. One person’s surrender to boisterous laughter naturally imitates the echoes of a boundless canyon within his or her small, crowded, and ultimately inconsequential life. Any child, even a very dense child–even a child conceived and reared in the most
promiscuous stupidity, crawling limbless over the muck of this Earth–would know that.
Gilles relates the same opinion in an interview with Ann Baldwin (2011): “In the current state of the world with the threat of terrorists, global warming, inflation, and all the other stuff that can bring people down, it's nice to know that there are places and people to turn to for entertainment.” Judging from the disbursement of television subject matter, people require entertainment more than the relentless disturbance of current affairs.
In a highly laughable review of You’re Funny, Amanda Porter (2011) offers a string of supportive phrases which are one typo away from accurately describing the book: “No matter who you’re trying to get a laugh out of D.B. Gilles can help you harness your humor. Gilles covers and do’s [sic] and don’ts of comedy and how to best convey your jokes to audiences of all ages.”
Porter is obviously enamored with the quotes shared by Gilles, who no doubt combed Bartlett’s Book of Familiar Quotations in both its “Comedy” and “Laughter” sections, skipping a wide array of relevant quotes from the Bible, to produce very profound and notable thoughts ranging from Steve Allen to Aristotle.
The best comedians and writers are very aware of how the audience is feeling during the playing out of their material, like a spiritual leader whipping up a crowd into a jabbering frenzy. There is a level of psychic intimacy between the one who jokes and the one who laughs that many in the humor industry find preferable to physical contact.
This preference for laughter over eroticism has become latent in the 20th century viewer, as evidenced by the widespread technological availability of humorous content in writing and on screen. Of bygone eras which preceded sitcoms and late shows, Rollo Ahmed (1994) writes of the importance of temples where religion and sexuality meshed in the form of ritual as “Humanity had not learnt to conserve and use its creative force intelligently, and often with no impure motive could see no other way of invoking the blessings of abundance”(242).
Disgruntled Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky used to give public readings, some of which lasted up to forty days and nights. When he looked up from the page and saw weary, inattentive faces he was known to bring levity with his trademark complaint: “Anyway, my penis still hurts.” He never failed to bring the house down with that one, and in some cases to make it flat and even curve it downward like a bowl full of St. Petersburg snow.
This How-To book is not inspirational or crammed with fodder. It wastes little time in educating the reader: the only real pauses in Gilles’s facts and advice are either famous quotes or examples of content displayed for the sake of teaching formats.
After perusal of You’re Funny!it becomes clear that a newcomer must demonstrate all the expertise of a professional before ever securing a steady income in comedy, and this inexpensive book will give any basement screenwriter the appearance of someone who has attended a seminar of fairly high quality. I recommend this book as a starting point, even to serious journalists who enjoy satire enough to consider Steven Colbert or Jon Stewart as role models.
Sources in APA Style
Ahmed, Rollo. The Black Art.
Gilles, D. B. (2010). You’re Funny: Turn Your Sense of Humor into a Lucrative New Career.
Studio City, California: Michael Wiese Productions.
Khan, Z. (2010). Kuru. Medscape Reference: Drugs, Diseases, and Procedures.
Retrieved from http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/220043-overview
Baldwin, A. (2011). Future of Story Interview Series: D.B. Gilles. Writer Store.
Retrieved from http://www.writersstore.com/future-of-story-interview-series-d-b-gilles
Porter, A. 2011. Book Review: You’re Funny. School Video News. Retrieved from
http://www.school-video-news.com/index.php?
option=com_content&view=article&id=879:book-review-yourre-funny&catid=21:
books&Itemid=41