Showing results for "comedy" in Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

While other books give you tips on how to “write funny,” this book offers a paradigm shift in understanding the mechanics and art of comedy and the proven, practical tools that help writers translate that understanding into successful commercial scripts. The Hidden Tools of Comedy unlocks the unique secrets and techniques of writing comedy. Kaplan deconstructs sequences in popular films and TV that work and don’t work and explains what tools were used (or should have been used).

Why is every film or tv programme a sequel or a remake? Why are people so f***ing hung up about swearing? Why do the asterisks in that sentence make it okay? Why do so many people want to stop other people doing things, and how can they be stopped from stopping them? These and many other questions trouble David Mitchell. Join him on a tour of the absurdities of modern life - from Ryanair to Richard III, Downton Abbey to phone etiquette, UKIP to hot dogs made of cats.

Every novelist dreams of it--writing the book that rockets to the top of the bestseller lists. Now, they can see how it's done, up close, in an audiobook by an agent who has sold manuscripts that turned into hits. Here Albert Zuckerman covers the essential elements of the blockbuster novel and...

In Joke Farming, Kalan explains that it’s easier to write jokes when you have a dependable method for doing so. All jokes, he argues, are built from the same elements: structure, premise, voice, tone, wording, and audience—and these elements can be applied to any comedic genre, from stand-up to sitcoms to satire.

David Mitchell’s 2014 best seller Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse must really have made people think - because everything’s got worse. We’ve gone from UKIP surge to Brexit shambles, from horsemeat in lasagne to Donald Trump in the White House, from Woolworths going under to all the other shops going under. It’s probably socially irresponsible even to try to cheer up.

He spent his earliest years in post WWII–refugee camps. He came to America and grew up in Cleveland—stealing cars, rolling drunks, battling priests, nearly going to jail. He became the screenwriter of the worldwide hits Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge, and Flashdance. He also wrote the legendary...

Now a Major Motion Picture titled Whiskey Tango Foxtrot starring Tina Fey, Margot Robbie, Martin Freeman, Alfred Molina, and Billy Bob Thornton. From tea with warlords in the countryside to parties with drunken foreign correspondents in the “dry” city of Kabul, journalist Kim Barker captures...

Written over 700 years ago, Dante’s Divine Comedy remains a classic of the Western literary canon and one of the most masterful poems ever written. Join Italian literature expert Alan Perry to discover why its commentary on the human condition still resonates strongly today. In this powerful audio course, you’ll learn why The Divine Comedy is profoundly meaningful not only to Christians but to anyone grappling with the big questions of existence and morality.

The “Fox Mole”—whose dispatches for Gawker made headlines in Businessweek, The Hollywood Reporter, and even on The New York Times website—delivers a funny, opinionated memoir of his eight years at the unfair, unbalanced Fox News Channel working as an associate producer for Bill O'Reilly...

One of Faulkner's comic masterpieces, The Reivers is a picaresque that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi. Eleven-year-old Lucius Priest is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck, one of his family's retainers, to steal his grandfather's car and make a trip to Memphis. The Priest's...

A pioneer of the long-form sports story, W. C. Heinz wrote with a freshness of perception, a gift for characterization, and a finely tuned ear for dialogue. Here is a first of its kind audio edition of some of his finest work, selected and read by Bill Littlefield (NPR's "Only a Game")...

Unabridged 6 hours An entertaining and eye-opening look into the new frontier of idea making...