Category: Books & Comics

Dave Barry Reveals Secret To Being Funny

andertoons1 Comment

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Lately I’ve been reading And Here’s the Kicker: Coversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on their Craft by Mike Sacks, and I ran across this little gem about writing funny via Dave Barry:

It’s a lot like a magic trick, in that there’s a very mechanical way in which it’s done. There are a lot of obvious and basic structural things you do with a sentence and with a joke and how you set it up on the page. And the trick is to do it in such a way that it doesn’t look like there was any effort involved–that it’s somehow magic.

He continues:

There’s a certain amount of inspiration, but there’s also a fair amount of work and repetition and practice and mechanics that are involved…

I’ve never seen it put that way before, but he’s exactly right! While cartoonists know the work involved in crafting cartoons, to pretty much everyone else it’s magic.

Cool.

Great Tip For Getting Your Content Found Online

andertoons3 Comments

inbound_marketing_book.jpgI recently read a very good review of Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, so I picked up a copy. Wow! Not only succinctly written, but inspiring as well. I have a host of new projects in the queue for my developers.

While the whole book is good thus far, this particular snippet leapt out at me in the chapter entitled “Get Found in the Blogosphere” about producing remarkable content:

Create cartoons or caricatures of things happening in your industry. For inspiration, take a look at the funny cartoons in the Sunday New York Times that parody politicians, and then find an artist who can create something similar for your industry. Buy a copy of the New Yorker magazine and take a look at the cartoons and try to find someone to create similarly humorous ones about your own industry.

Hmm… Seems to me like someone else wrote something similar recently…

Anyway, the whole book is full of great ideas like that. I recommend it highly!