I love to write humorous pieces and have posted a couple elsewhere in the Block. I also consider myself quite adept at spontaneous witty retorts, but creating jokes has always challenged me. It might seem the wrong forum to post this thread, but I am seriously interested in the art of crafting a funny joke. There have been times too in the past when I've needed to create a joke within the framework of a piece of erotic fiction, so this isn't totally off-topic (I hope).

My guess is jokes are all borne out of a small group of scenarios, not unlike the way all fiction can be reduced to seven basic plots. In fact, they're quite likely interchangable for jokes, eg:, 'fish out of water' story analogous with many blonde jokes; 'unrequited love' for penile disfunction jokes, etc.

Forget about one-liners for the moment as I suspect these could be quickly created in a brainstorming/word association thread. What I'm more interested in is the mini-story kind of joke - a paragraph or two that introduces characters, quickly creates a scene in which disbelief is briefly suspended, and then a sudden and unexpected statement about the preceding that acts as the climax. The narration arc of these is exactly the same as you find in fiction, only condensed cleverly into a short passage of words.

So there. I've justified this thread as a bit of pencil sharpening (LOL!) - let's get down to it. Thoughts?