First up, is the Iron Law of Comedy (according to the enigmatic mr wu), which is the punchline must meet or exceed the setup, which is to say the laughs your audience get from a bit, must be worth the time they spent waiting for you to get to the funny part. The longer and more involved the setup, the funnier the payoff has to be. This is why kids are terrible at telling jokes. They never get the setup right. They forget parts, mix things up, double back to fix the mistakes and by the time they get to the punchline 3 minutes later, the only funny thing is how cute a kid trying to tell a joke is.
Maybe you just aren't a naturally funny person, and comedy doesn't come easily to you. Don't despair, here is a quick and easy way to make something funny. Find two incompatible concepts and reconcile them. Betty White and Cage Fighting, James Bond in a seminar about how to meet women, Boy Band Commando Squads. The funny almost writes itself.
The third thing is timing. There are all sorts of comedy timings some of which I've talked about before. The two I want to talk about to today are timings where the comedy emphasizes the setup in a funny way...
and the reversal, where the comedy comes from something that immediately cancels out something that was just said before it in a funny way.
Both rely on getting just the right timing on switching the emotional tone from serious to ridiculous. These can be good for taking what could be a one note character and giving him some color. The inversion of this can be used to shock the audience when a seemingly easy going or funny guy does something horrible as we often see in Tarentino movies, but that's a topic for another day.
That's about it on writing comedy for now, I'm sure I'll get back to it at some point, Go forth and Be Funny.
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