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Workshop: Secrets of Writing Topical Two-Line Jokes with Howard Johnson
March 26, 2022 @ 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM CDT
Great topical two-liners are treasured by SNL’s Weekend Update and late-night talk shows, and writers who can come up with a page of these are in demand. Longtime SNL head writer Jim Downey once said “I can tell everything I need to know about a prospective writer from one page of two-line jokes.” This one-hour workshop teaches the Comedy Lab’s Four-and-a-Half-Step method of ripping stories from the day’s news, and processing them into succinct, well-observed jokes. By the end of this class, students will understand the two-line joke process, and how to use it to develop a daily regimen of writing a page of jokes.
Kim “Howard” Johnson teaches thecomedylab.net methods taught to hundreds of students across Chicago and around the world, through his classes at The Annoyance, Second City, nearly a decade at the iO Chicago, London’s Nursery Theatre, along with classes at UCSB, and his studies with Del Close in the early 1980s. He has also worked closely with John Cleese over the years, and written a screenplay with Jonathan Winters. He is co-author of Truth in Comedy, The Funniest One in the Room: the Lives and Legends of Del Close, and numerous books on Monty Python. He is the only human being to perform on stage with The Committee, the Baron’s Barracudas, and Monty Python (not all at the same time). Learn more at www.thecomedylab.net
