As already established, humor comes in all shapes and sizes, and there's something for everyone. Some of the most popular, and adaptable — as explained after the definitions and examples — are as follows.

Anecdotes

Anecdotes are short narratives about a humorous incident.

A few weeks before her fifth birthday, my niece Jemma ran through the room, picked up her mom's purse on the way, and grabbed the cordless phone. Her mother asked her, “What in the world do you think you're doing?”

Jemma answered: “I want to get you this mop I just saw on TV and the guy told me I only have five minutes to order it!”

Copyright © 1999–2007 Pamela Rice Hahn

Used by Permission

Cartoons

Cartoons are illustrated, single-thought jokes. They are among the most difficult types of humor to write, as it's quite a challenge to get your comedic point across in a single illustration accompanied by a sentence or two. Randy Glasbergen (www.glasbergen.com), whose The Better Half comic strip appears in many newspapers, is also well known for his cartoons, many of which run in corporate newsletters.

Comic Strips

Comic strips are similar to cartoons, but include more than one “scene.” The standard format consists of three panels, but this is by no means a hard and fast rule. Comic strips give the creator the luxury of building the humor slowly, setting the reader up for the punch line in the final panel. They also allow for a greater variety of characters in a single work; because there's more space, there's more room to put them! Examples of the more well-known strips like Charles Schultz's Peanuts and Scott Adam's Dilbert can be seen at www.comics.com. Other writer-artists publish their works on their own sites, like Squinkers at www.squinkers.com, Writing Woes at www.blueroses.com/writing/, and Chronic Illness Realities at www.chronic-illness.org/comic/.

Humor Columns

Dave Barry is probably one of the best known, and widest read, humor columnists working today. Whether he's writing about current events or one of his personal experiences, he blends phrases his readers now come to expect like “I'm not making this up” and “a good name for a rock band” with his exaggerated style of reporting to make people laugh. Many writers take advantage of magazines and Web sites that publish similar columns to establish publicity for their other works. Southern humor book author Ed Williams (www.edwilliams.com) self-syndicates his column to a number of Georgia newspapers. The Blue Rose Bouquet (www.blueroses.com) reprints the works of newspaper columnists like Randy Shore, who writes about his children, and others, like Ron Collins, who writes about the challenges of establishing a writing career.

Parody

A parody is a work of humor that imitates the style of a particular source. Writers for The Onion (www.theonion.com) and Scrappleface (www.scrappleface.com) combine satire and newspaper article-style parody. Parodies on these Web sites range from such things as a human relations story about tenants in a building too polite to ask their on-site elderly maintenance man to fix anything, to ones that have fooled members of the foreign press, like The Onion “article” quoted as fact in a Beijing newspaper about Washington bureaucrats who are threatening to move the Capitol building to another city if they don't get a retractable dome.

Puns

These dual meaning wordplay jokes aren't the source of laugh-out-loud humor. These subtle — and sometimes not-so-subtle — plays on words usually cause groans. (They can also be the source of disagreements: Some people absolutely hate them; others love them.) A pun takes a common word or phrase and skewers it enough to change its meaning such as a review for a bad German restaurant that tells the reader he or she should only go there for the “wurst of times” or the headline that proclaims “Udder Relief for the Dairy Industry.”

Puns can be one-liners:

Kiwifruit tart is a berry good dessert.

The answers to riddles:

Do you know what they call ushers at the Vatican?

Papal People Seaters

… or they can provide the punch line in a story:

From: The Blue Rose Bouquet

www.blueroses.com

Billions of dollars in research grants had already been spent for the studies conducted by the best and brightest physics, psychiatric, medical, and other scientific researchers across the country when a psychology professor at Harvard arrived at the conclusion that perhaps everyone was putting too much energy into the project. He argued that minds were too easily distracted by everyday life and other body functions. Therefore — at the conclusion of another grant-funded study, of course — it was determined that because extra bodies were unnecessary for the project, tenured professors everywhere severed the heads of all doctoral candidates, hooked them to life support systems, and assigned them the sole purpose of working on a solution to the problem. Still no one could arrive at the desired results. Finally, one scientist invited everyone to gather up the heads and bring them to a conference at Cambridge, because “I'm sure if we all put our heads together, we can come up with a solution.”

Copyright © 1999–2007 Pamela Rice Hahn

Used by Permission

Satire

Satire is humor that uses sarcasm, irony, derision, and a sharpened wit to lampoon human experience. The more seriously a segment of society seems to take itself, the bigger a target it becomes for satirical skewering. Certain subjects lend themselves particularly well to satire: educational systems, politics, pop culture, and religion. Many “articles” on The Onion (www.theonion.com) and Scrappleface (www.scrappleface.com) also fall within this category.

A nationally recognized teachers union announced today that they'd oppose any legislation asking for teacher certification testing, stating that tests are not a reliable and accurate way to gauge proficiency. Students across the nation welcomed this news, adapting that philosophy as they put in a bid to establish their own union.

Targeted Humor

Niche market humor features jokes specifically geared to make fun of or parody a specific topic, such as religion, pets, and sports. For example, knowing that one popular target is overweight women, one of the newer niche humor markets turns the tables on the usual, run-of-the-mill fat jokes. Instead, the authors make fun of themselves, celebrating their abundance, so to speak. Rather than be the brunt of fat jokes, Dee Adams makes the brunt of her humor those who, shall we say, celebrate size in an unconventional way. Adams also takes that concept a step further and derives humor from another struggle for many older women, as illustrated by the title pun for her domain: www.minniepauz.com.