How I Write Scott Dikkers: 11 Ways to Make Your Writing More Funny | How I Write
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Jul 22, 2026 
Scott Dikkers, former editor-in-chief of The Onion and author of How to Write Funny, shares practical comedy craft from decades of satire. He explains comedy as a point of view. He urges quantity over perfection and committing to absurdity. He outlines 11 funny filters, using character archetypes, analogy, and framing to turn small observations into big laughs.
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Find One Obsessive Take And Escalate
- In short comedy the take is everything: choose one obsessive angle and escalate it to absurdity.
- Dikkers explains you must stay in a narrow lane and push one subtextual observation to its extremes.
Fully Commit To Absurd Exaggeration
- Commit fully to absurdity: partial commitment lands in the uncanny valley and fails.
- Dikkers and his colleagues urge pushing caricatures farther than you think so audiences recognize and laugh at the representation.
The 11 Funny Filters Blueprint
- There are 11 reproducible funny filters that pro writers use to generate humor reliably.
- Dikkers lists filters like irony, character, hyperbole, madcap, and metahumor and recommends stacking them carefully.
