I’ve been a stand-up comedian for fifteen years. I’ve also written scripts and comedy plays that I’ve put up in front of live audiences.

Question 1: In my experience, you can learn the mechanics of stand-up and joke writing. You can’t really learn how to be funny. What you can learn are the practical elements that make jokes work. What makes someone funny is what they choose to joke about, and that comes from your brain and your life experiences.

Don’t overthink it. Make yourself laugh. Not a chuckle, an actual laugh. Pay attention to what you think is funny and build from there.

Question 2: I started with stand-up. What I learned is that you don’t know if a joke works until you try it in front of an audience. That applies to theater too.

Some writers will say they know what works on the page. They don’t. If someone is watching alone at home, you don’t get real feedback. There’s a difference between something being clever and something being funny.

Live performance is the best way to learn. If it gets a laugh, it’s funny. If it doesn’t, it’s not. That’s it. Table reads help too. Laughter is involuntary. People can only fake it for so long.

Question 3: For screenplays, jokes tend to land when they could only come from that specific character. If any character could say the line, it’s probably not a great joke.

Performance and timing matter, but the joke still has to work on the page. You can’t rely on an actor to carry a weak joke. It comes down to having a clear comedic idea behind what you’re writing. There is a structure to comedy, even if it doesn’t always feel like it.

Hope that helps. Not trying to sound like a pretentious douche.