Everyone loves a good joke, but what are the elements that make a joke funny? You may have experienced how some times an unintentional monosyllable utterance is enough to make your friends break into fits of laughter. At other times a carefully crafted joke will fall flat. Annoyingly, there seems to be no formula that can consistently predict what people will find amusing. If you are a comedy enthusiast, the author's credentials are enough to make you give this book a try. He is the founded the popular satirical news agency, The Onion New Network and served as its editor in chief. The books lays out a framework which anyone can use to make their content funny. Dikkers himself employs these techniques while creating content at work. He goes on to claim that he's never come across a joke that can't be explained by one of the categories in his framework. Apart from this, there's few other useful tips for the aspiring funny writer:1) Write a lot, and drop your standards: A common mistake committed by most amateur writers at the start of their career is to hope that everything they write be automatically hilarious. This seldom happens, which is why most of them can't seem to get any writing done. When you are facing writer's block, a good way forward is to drop your standards. As soon as you learn to turn off their overly critical internal self critic, you shall begin to enjoy the process. 2) Always punch upwards: Use comedy to restore the balance of power. Jokes are usually funny when they are cracked at the expense of the rich and powerful folks whom everyone fears/hates. Jokes are usually not funny when they mock and ridicule those who are already weak and suffering.3) Be consumer oriented: Sounds obvious, but not keeping the audience in mind while writing is an unforgivable mistake. Who are you really writing for? Can your work address a problem your target readers are dealing with? If you are only writing for yourself, why even bother publishing?4) Note the subtext: The subtext is the essence of any funny communication, interestingly the part that is left unsaid. By itself, the subtext doesn't need to be humorous at all. It's a bland fact/opinion which is the foundation on which you build your joke. Unless your audience gets the subtext, they will not be amused. Example: Consider the following joke: Your mama's so fat she lives in two cities at once. Subtext: Your mother is overweight. In Biswa's popular joke on extroverts v/s introverts, the subtext is that most festivals involve large number of people coming together to perform absurd rituals. In Abhishek Upmanyu's popular bit on Delhi v/s Mumbai people, the subtext is that aggressive behavior is considered normal in Delhi. 5) Pick a subtext and apply a funny filter to it: These are the tools which make when added to your subtext make it funny. The subtext is the actual meal, the funny filters are what make it palatable. The funny filters sort of made this book worth reading. If you set them aside most writing advice in this book is generic and already common knowledge.