The Tears of a Clown: Understanding Comedy Writers scott barry kaufman and aaron kozbelt

Humor is an important part of the human condition. A world without laughter would be a world without a soul. Indeed, comedy serves many key purposes in life – reducing stress, defusing social tensions, revealing the absurdity of human behavior, and generally increasing the quality of life (Martin, 2007). One main vehicle by which funny thoughts are conveyed is through creative writing, which can blunt the edge of potentially controversial topics, evoke feelings of mirth in the reader, and contribute to increasing the audience’s health through laughter. Comedy writing takes many forms: stand-up comedy writing, sitcom writing, political satire writing as seen on The Daily Show, comedy screenwriting, comedy writing for Web sites like Cracked or The Onion, and literary fiction writing with a humorous bent. It varies from the attempts of a novice short story writer to the aesthetic achievements of Cervantes, Rabelais, and Shakespeare. Indeed, nearly any form of creative writing can be enhanced by humor. But behind every punch line is a person generating that line. What do we know about comedy writers? What are they like? Humor has been the subject of a great deal of speculation and, more recently, a rather impressive array of empirical research (Martin, 2007) on a variety of humor-related topics. For instance, research has examined the link between humor and psychological well-being (Kuiper & Martin, 1998; Martin & Lefcourt, 1983; Ruch, 1997), the link between humor and physical well-being (Cogan, Cogan, Waltz, & McCue, 1987; Lefcourt, Davidson-Katz, & Kueneman, 1990; Martin & Dobbin, 1988; McClelland & Cheriff, 1997), defining characteristics of funny jokes (Attardo, 1997; Koestler, 1964; Raskin, 1985; Wyer & Collins, 1992), social aspects of humor (Apter, 1982; Long & Graesser, 1988; Mulkay, 1988; Robinson & SmithLovin, 2001), the psychobiology of humor and laughter (Bachorowski, Smoski, & Owen, 2001; Coulson & Kutas, 2001; Goel & Dolan, 2001; Provine & Yong, 1991), the development of humor in children (Barnett, 1990; Johnson & Mervis, 1997; McGhee, 1980), the evolutionary emergence of the human capacity