How can you learn to be funny?
This is a question I get all the time. As a teacher of comedy, I also get another version: “can you really teach someone to be funny?”
So can people learn to be funny and how do you teach them?
This is what I believe: everyone is funny. People don’t need to learn to be funny, but most people need to learn to reconnect with their funny part. Everyone has made a friend laugh. Even if it hasn’t happened in years, it happened at least once in their childhood. Look at kids, as soon as they get together, they play, they make jokes to each other and they laugh. All of them do, even when they’re not the kindergarten clown.
But people learn through school and through professional life to be serious. They learn from their teachers and bosses that laughter is not appropriate in the social world. A serious attitude seems to be a “must” in the adult world and people have lost touch with their funniness. Being serious is the unnatural state that people have had to learn. Can you teach people to be serious? Sadly yes, and our world is pretty damn good at it.
There is no need to teach people to be funny, because it’s already in them. To be funny, one doesn’t need to learn, but to unlearn what years of education has done to them. They need to unlearn that what they’re naturally thinking about is not good enough, that acceptance of others is hard to get and conditional, that they must project strength, among other things.
Children view life through eyes of excitement and bewilderment. Children tease each other. They’re not afraid to try things or say what’s on their minds, because they’re not afraid to be judged or rejected. To be funny, you have to reconnect with this place.
It does not mean becoming childish and irresponsible. It means that when you write or perform comedy, you trust your own ideas and explore them further, you allow space for failure, you accept yourself and feel loved unconditionally. This is what I teach with the writing and performing exercises in my Comedy Crash Course, because that’s the only way to be funny. You don’t need to become anything; you just need to reconnect with the funny in you.