How do you become funnier? That is the question I began with when I first started the journey to figuring out how humor works. Surprisingly enough, a lot of scientific work has been done on humor — yet no one has been able to crack the code so that anyone can become funnier.

One of the challenges to getting better at humor is that it is such a creative and unconscious skill — kind of like drawing or painting or writing songs. It doesn’t seem to fit any sort of pattern and there are dozens of different kinds of humor. Plus, what some people find funny is not funny to other people.

Whenever I come up against a difficult skill, I first break it down into the smallest pieces possible so I can understand each step in the process. I also wasn’t interested in becoming the best comedian ever, but instead I wanted to find out what are the kinds of humor that get the biggest laughs AND are the easiest to learn.

Thirdly, I wanted to create a blueprint for humor that connected all the different techniques and organized them in an intelligent way so that I could start noticing the patterns I saw in everyday life.

The result of my journey is this course.

Any creative skill requires a lot of practice, not just intellectual understanding. The challenge is to practice in a way that is efficient and builds your skills as quickly as possible. If you just practice drawing stick figures, for example, you will never get good at drawing. You have to get a book or take a course on drawing, find the patterns, strategies and techniques that go into drawing something, and then practice each one of those techniques until you just “get it” and it becomes part of how you naturally draw and you don’t even have to think about it.