Lessons Learned From The World's Shortest Humor Book
Part 9 of 30—"how to write a funny prose piece"
Short
Each short humor piece collected in Simon Rich’s first book, Ant Farm, averages around 100 words.
His publisher had to pad the book with enormous leading (the space between lines), liberal use of blank and half-blank pages, and margins squeezed practically to the center of the book.
They did everything they could to fluff the collection with enough pages to fit the title on the spine.
They barely made it.
How Short
The average Onion “News in Brief” is about 200 words.
Both McSweeney’s stories and The New Yorker’s “Shouts & Murmurs” columns are usually less than 1000 words.
Bob Einstein’s first and only short humor book, This Is My First Magic Book So I'm a Little Nervous, was barely 1500 words in total—that’s 1500 words in the whole book.
Short humor should be short—as short as it can be and still be funny, and not one syllable more.
How
Cut your headlines and titles to as few words as possible.
Example: a four-word and 15-character headline from The Onion: “Area Man Could Eat.”
In the body of a piece, trim words like you’re paying per word. Keep cutting until the joke is lost or the piece doesn’t make sense, and then add in only enough to do the job.
Keep your paragraphs short too, generally one joke beat per paragraph.