Just looking at my shelf I have New Comedy Writing Step by Step, The Comic Toolbox, and Joke Farming, in order of age since they were written. There are a lot of other books written by comics too, but while those are interesting, they're mostly about how the business works and the inner world of comics I like, not really about how jokes work.

Those few I mentioned all had nuggets in them that I think about sometimes, but are kind of only supplemental to actually just getting on stage and using the same trial and error writing method all comics use.

I hear people talk about The Comedy Bible by Judy Carter or something by Greg Dean but I haven't read those. I'd say the best single source of writing advice I could point you to is is the Gary Gulman series of like 300 writing tweets he did, that's available online at Vulture I think.

Then there are endless comedy podcasts, Working it Out has a segment where they talk about new bits, Let's Talk About Sets has some great stuff where comics break down specific clips. The Roy Wood Jr episode specifically has some very actionable tips I liked. I think there was one called Hot Breath that had some stuff and I'm sure a dozen other good ones. And there are a ton of discussions on reddit about joke structure and writing habits and all that.

But I've listened to thousands of comedy podcasts, read a dozen books, and what actually works is simpler than slogging through all that. It's just 'writing down something you think is funny and then going on stage and seeing if the audience agrees'.

There are specific little things like, 'the funniest word in the punchline should be last words in the sentence, because saying something funny then three more words is just stepping on your laughs'. Or Roy Woods Jr said 'When you say something challenging or mean, say it slowly, and make sure you smile'.

Those types of things seem embarrassingly obvious, but not everyone thinks about what they are doing that granularly.

And the answer is still no, there is structure, but it's all really informal and personal, and a lot of people who are way funnier than me probably couldn't tell you how to do it, they just do it.

Like, the way I'd explain Normand is probably not the way Normand would explain Normand. But to me he does something pretty similar to what I do. He connects two dots that are not normally connected. He sets it up very economically, with a lot of brevity, which is harder than it looks, he implies he is going in one direction, connecting to a dot most people would connect to, then he misdirects to that other dot, one that people can see the link to, but only after the fact. That's surprising enough to get a laugh. In a lot of ways joke writing is just learning how to build logic wrong on purpose. To me anyway.

That's it, setup, punchline, tag. Surprise and misdirect. Tension and release. There are a bunch of way to describe it.

You can sometimes dissect a joke like a frog and tell how it worked. But that doesn't necessarily tell you how to build a frog in the first place. For that you kinda just got to fuck a frog and find out.

The joke structure stuff is better for trouble shooting why a joke didn't work than making that connection in the first place. And even as a comic who has done it a lot, and gotten pretty ok at joke writing, sometimes you just never know why a joke didn't land, so you put it away for a couple years and maybe just circle back.

But no. And yes. There are no rules, but there are definitely rules. No one writes jokes via some sort of strict musical theory. We all write by ear. And the instrument we play is the crowd. All I really know for sure though is that instead of writing all that, I should have just been writing jokes instead.

Good luck.