Yoga for Your Funny Bone, by Leigh Anne Jasheway-Bryant
Exercises to Strengthen Your Comedy Writing
Or perhaps another way to procrastinate?
Do you need to warm up to writing each day? If you do, maybe comedy writing exercises are your way into getting what you actually want done, done.
If so, this book might be what you’re looking for.
For a second, I’ll skip right to the back of the book and the index. 35 different exercises are listed for you to try.
That’s a lot.
Which means if the book’s title hasn’t put you off, time to dive in and find out what it’s about.
To break you in, the comparison between yoga and comedy is interesting. It’s a bit different to the usual intros you get from comedy instructional type books.
Is that comparison helpful though? Not really.
I mean, is comedy writing like performing dentistry without a license, like walking to work naked, or like a clifftop selfie on slippery stones?
No-one really needs to know. If you were to make the dentistry comparison, it could make you rich, while your patients get a jawless experience.
Especially if you stand there cracking jokes as you extract their teeth.
But got to get the laughs where you can, eh?
Those early yoga comparison pages explain the benefits of comedy writing. Then it’s on to some facts about laughter.
They’re written well enough and with enough humor that it’s no chore to get through. In other words; sufficiently interesting and not very long.
Following that come quotes by famous people on comedy. These short snips are from comics, writers, or other people in the entertainment industry.
“You’ll never know when you’ll need it,” Lion Tamer, seconds before the lion took control.
Emo Phillips, Erma Bombeck and Jerry Seinfeld are among those quoted, while among the others is singer songwriter, Jimmy Buffett.
Why not include Warren Buffett? Mmm. Perhaps not enough interest.
Are the quotes helpful? Not really, but then there are some tips for yoga with their “respective” comedy writing tips, which are all really bits of advice to get you in the zone to write.
Finally, on page 32, in a book about yoga and comedy, the first yogic/comic exercise presents itself. On the rubber mat of the paper page, as written by the author, you get something to start with.
Yes, finally, a 3rd of the way in. So you don’t have to wait much to get here, as the book isn’t overly long.
The exercise gets to understanding your own sense of humor, with another couple of exercises to round out the chapter.
And given that it’s yoga, the author wrote it in a downward dog position. Or so I guess. You can have your own wonder if she did.
To take things further, how about you try writing your next bit of material in a yoga position. Maybe if you’re a busy father who doesn’t have enough time for your kids, you can do it in the creased over, deadbeat dad position.
Listen, they’re calling you. Run away, and quick, turn out the lights. Hold that stance for a few hours. You’re not in. In a spiritual sense.
Or in a mental one. Now breathe out.
The book goes into a lengthy, enormously lengthy, incredibly lengthy, 2 page discussion on what humor is based on.
And it’s not good.
Really. That’s what the discussion’s about. Bad things.
That leads to some explanation and more exercises for you to try out. They help you explore the bad states so you can mine then for comedy.
Just Say Om is a chapter on brevity.
Following that is Breathing Through Your Comedy Eye.
But back to the chapter on keeping things short for a moment.
There are four exercises to practice the skill of being concise. Save for the good one on producing greeting card ideas, three of the four are very testing. Say you thought the original Twitter character limit was hard to manage, these are ten times worse.
They’re the writing equivalent of driving on ice. You can turn the wheel but you don’t know where you’ll end up.
And now back forward to the comedy eye breathing chapter. If you’d been holding your breath, well, you can breathe through other body parts, so why care?
There’s an exercise based on questions, a group activity, a what, where, when, why, who, and how game to get your mind working. Or maybe even shutting down.
Whether any of this will generate any useful material is debatable.
Perhaps that’s not the point of this book. This is more to get you warmed up. Prepped before action. Like stretching. Which in turn links to yoga.
Now I see! With my third eye. Is that yoga?
No, it’s bull poo.
Things continue with short and sometimes vague guidelines to improving jokes. Then a bit of how yoga and comedy share similarities.
A bit of a gimmick to go along with the book’s theme, but I write this as I stand on one leg, outdoors, in nature, as a bird hovers in mid air in front of me, pecking gently at my forehead.
That comedy & yoga sharing similarities gimmick, or not gimmick, depending how you see it with your third eye, leads into an exercise to get as many joke set-ups done as you can in a short amount of time.
It’s a bit of a tenuous link from gimmick to exercise, but it’s another exercise.
And if you expect a definition of set-up, none is given. The task is set, with the author’s set-ups available as examples.
Then you’re tasked with taking the same amount of time to write the punchlines for those set ups. No author’s example is given.
Perhaps she failed. Logically though, she’s already left for yoga class.
Leigh Anne gives eight different formulas to her classes to assist with their writing. Here they are printed for you (in book, not in this review).
To keep in line with the book’s shortness, there’s no detail on each type; they get explained with a joke. That’s about enough to understand them…just.
The Letting The Story Write Itself exercise comes with an amusing example. It’s an interesting way to go for writing bits & pieces, or even longer items (the author believes she created her best work this way, with her stage play Are We There Yet).
Unbalance Your Brain is less an exercise and more a shift to another mental state. Get into that other place and you may find your writing more focused than before. Or more disturbed.
Like falling asleep on the warm, snugly tarmac of the M25.
The book spells out difficulties you’ll face writing comedy. The pain, the hurt, and utmost tragedy of sitting behind that blinking cursor.
Yes, we all know it’s too much and you should quit now.
The author’s advice to overcoming these fears extends to things outside the comedy sphere. Conquer yourself there and comedy writing should follow. Or you’ll have fun doing other things and it will remain unwritten.
One suggestion is you should jump out of an air plane. That’s bold. You’ll first have to sneak that crowbar past security so you can jam the door open.
Leigh Anne attempts re-entry to the comedy sphere with some different exercises. One’s more a challenge, while Power Through is like that earlier brain unbalancing; more about state of mind.
Getting close to the end of the book, there are some more wacky things to try, some interesting exercises, and perhaps one or two strange ones.
Using Comparisons to help find the similarities between different objects is the most directly useful one for comedy writing.
The suggestions, I mean exercises, on pages 92 and 93 are on the money. They aren’t so much about writing, in fact they’re very little to do with writing, but it’s good, solid advice.
The chapter Completion is as it says, in that it finishes the book.
Done.
Getting to the end wasn’t that hard, really. In a book mixing comedy and yoga, it was only a moderate stretch.
And since I’ve stretched your groan muscles, it’s on to a verdict.
Verdict
A somewhat odd book in the canon of comedy writing how tos.
In the end, it does what it promises on the front page; provide you with a number of exercises to work through. Will they make your writing funnier? Well, if someone could watch you struggle through them it would be pretty sad. But the end result?
Pick up a copy of the book and find. You might enjoy them and find them useful.
Recommended for:
People wanting different writing exercises
Some different approaches to generating comedy
Not for:
Joke writing, as in specifically one liners. What? Yes, it never really explains about set-ups and punchlines.
Other thoughts
A little bit of further explanation here and there of some of the items wouldn’t have needed too many more pages, but could have got some things over a bit clearer.
Length
105 listed pages. The text is a little bit bigger than most books, while there are formatting breaks and blank pages. It reads more like 80.
Quicker readers will be through in a number of hours, or a day or two.
The slower, dedicated type will be done in under a week.
But if you do all the exercises, you’ll be here a lot longer.
