Harness the power of context, confidence, and a funny group of writers like the pros do on legendary TV shows like SNL or The Simpsons or at comedy institutions like The Onion. Scott Dikkers will show you how it’s done. He’s cofounder and longest-serving editor in chief of The Onion, the world’s most popular humor publication, and founder of the Onion Training Center at the Second City in Chicago. He’s also a number one best-selling humor author, comedy performer, and winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor.

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).

Author Scott Dikkers will tell you how to write jokes. He’s a master joke writer, founder of the world’s most popular humor site TheOnion.com, number one New York Times best-selling humor author, professional public speaker, and successful cartoonist. In this definitive joke-writing handbook, he'll teach you comedy writing and how to write a joke with a simple comedy-writing and joke-writing formula you can use right now to write your own jokes.

The Upright Citizens Brigade knows comedy, but more than that, they know how to coach aspiring comics and average joes alike on the ins and outs of how to create your own stand-out, unique voice. Led by UCB founders Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, and Matt Walsh, this series features conversations with experts in the field including Amy Poehler, Adam McKay, Ben Schwartz, Lennon Parham, Jessica St. Clair, Andy Daly, Bobby Moynihan, and Nick Kroll, among others.

From one of the world’s most celebrated humor writers, this easy-to-follow, step-by-step book lays out a clear system for producing living, breathing comedy characters that audiences will fall in love with.

An internationally bestselling novelist, Matthew Dicks has also spent ten years consulting with individual clients and organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. In Stories Sell, Dicks shows people in business how to get their message across without relying on cookie-cutter presentations or stodgy case studies

Every aspect of screenwriting is covered with an authority and credibility never seen in any book to come before. Told with honesty, humor, and vulnerability from the real-world perspective of a working, professional screenwriter, Kill the Dog reveals the secrets of what it takes to have a successful career as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Comedy is king. From multimillion-dollar TV specials to sold-out stand-up shows and TikTok stardom, comedy has never been more popular, democratized, or influential. Comedians have become organizing forces across culture—as trusted as politicians and as fawned-over as celebrities—yet comedy as an art form has gone under-considered throughout its history, even as it has ascended as a cultural force.

In Finding Your Funny Muscle, Mike shows you how to “flex” your ideas into funny, original, and relatable humor that gets big laughs—and makes you memorable for the right reasons.

Addressing the fundamental questions about how to live, Meditations for Mortals offers a powerful new way to take action on what counts: a guiding philosophy of life Oliver Burkeman calls “imperfectionism.” It helps us tackle challenges as they crop up in our daily lives: our finite time, the lure of distraction, the impossibility of doing anything perfectly.

Your inbox is overflowing. You're paralyzed because you have too much to do but don't know where to start. Your to-do list never seems to get any shorter. You leave work exhausted but have little to show for it. It's time to learn how to get the right work done. In the HBR Guide to Getting the Right Work Done, you'll discover how to focus your time and energy where they will yield the greatest reward. Not only will you end each day knowing you made progress—your improved productivity will also set you apart from the pack.

Step-by-Step to Stand-Up Comedy, written and narrated by Greg Dean, is a comprehensive guide for people who are funny, want to be funnier, or have dreams of being a stand-up comedian. This first-of-its-kind audiobook demystifies the craft of comedy by breaking it down to the fundamental skills used by professional funny people. Dean lays out these skills in simple-to-understand lessons that are easy to practice and master.

From the Thurber Prize-winning author of New Teeth, hailed as “a triumph of sustained humor” (Sarah Lyall, New York Times Book Review), comes a hilarious and powerful collection of short stories chronicling the plight of aging millennials. ​

Customers, followers, subscribers. It's easy to just look at the numbers. How many likes? How many purchases? How many email subscribers? But as entrepreneurs, we have to remember that there are people behind all that data. People who are looking to us to be a leader, to give advice, and to care. In this dog-eat-dog world, these are the people who are looking for someone who they can trust and who they know have their best interests in mind.

If you're looking to make a career move from programmer to AI specialist, this is the ideal place to start. Based on Laurence Moroney's extremely successful AI courses, this introductory book provides a hands-on, code-first approach to help you build confidence while you learn key topics.

Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and pad thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone? Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.

Separated by 10 years, 3,000 miles, and the unrelenting stresses of adulthood, best friends Janet and Serena plan a 40th birthday girls’ trip to reconnect. But after a massive crash, they’re the only survivors to wash ashore on an uncharted Caribbean Island. Armed with only the clothes on their backs and zero survival skills, they fight to overcome hunger, thirst, deadly wildlife—and most terrifyingly—decades of accrued resentment. Can they find their way home, or will they kill each other first?

In this award-winning Audible Studios production, Trevor Noah tells his wild coming-of-age tale during the twilight of apartheid in South Africa. It’s a story that begins with his mother throwing him from a moving van to save him from a potentially fatal dispute with gangsters, then follows the budding comedian’s path to self-discovery through episodes both poignant and comical.

A bad best man’s speech can ruin a wedding. Why do we plan every detail of a perfect day and then give the groom’s idiot best friend five minutes of total power? Enter Nate (Glen Powell), a speechwriter-for-hire who helps people write incredible best man speeches. To keep the best man from embarrassing himself (and the newlyweds), Nate uses his list of don’ts: Don’t mention the exes, don’t be rated R, and don’t bum everyone out. Nate’s system never fails. That is, until he meets Dan (Nicholas Braun).

Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).

Alice's journey begins as all good journeys do: hitting on the sales guy at REI. After a tumultuous breakup, a quick career transition, family upheaval, and a sobriety journey that didn't fix her life quite as much as she expected it to, Alice decides that the only way to solve all her problems is to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. But as she begins preparing for the months-long quest, she realizes the answers she's seeking might not be on top of a snow-covered mountain. Especially since she just learned there was snow in California.

The True Story of The Coward Brothers follows two musical brothers – one English, one American, both the illegitimate sons of dubious parentage who may, as they claim to be, "one and half-brothers" – perhaps a reference to the disparity in their height and relative talents.

When two childhood best friends blow up their respective romantic relationships, they make a time-sensitive pact: serial-cheater Chuck cannot sleep with anyone as she attends a three-month-long recovery group for cheaters, while sex-deprived Sofia vows to hook up with as many people as possible before recommitting to monogamy and tying the knot with her long-time fiancé. To keep things interesting, Chuck and Sofia decide to revive a past tradition from their summer camp days—also known as the dawning of sluthood.

Superstar comedian and Hollywood box-office star Kevin Hart turns his immense talent to the written word by writing some words. Some of those words include: the, a, for, above, and even even. Put them together and you have the funniest, most heartfelt, and most inspirational memoir on survival, success, and the importance of believing in yourself since Old Yeller.

Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.

Somewhere out there is a beautiful girl just waiting for a guy like you to talk to her. Unfortunately, most men rely on luck and have no idea how to start an an attractive conversation. This book introduces a new proven method to help you talk to women with ease, without pretending to be someone else.

Author Scott Dikkers will tell you how to write jokes. He’s a master joke writer, founder of the world’s most popular humor site TheOnion.com, number one New York Times best-selling humor author, professional public speaker, and successful cartoonist. In this definitive joke-writing handbook, he'll teach you comedy writing and how to write a joke with a simple comedy-writing and joke-writing formula you can use right now to write your own jokes.

From one of the world’s most celebrated humor writers, this easy-to-follow, step-by-step book lays out a clear system for producing living, breathing comedy characters that audiences will fall in love with.

Can you learn how to write comedy? Absolutely - anyone can. Scott Dikkers will tell you how. He's co-founder and longest-serving editor-in-chief of The Onion, the world's most popular humor publication, and founder of The Onion Training Center at the Second City in Chicago. He's also a number one best-selling humor author and winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor. In How to Write Funnier, he tells you everything you need to know to start writing funny stories, how to write funny scenes, and how to write funny sketches.

School taught us specific subjects, like maths and history. But the most important situations we face as adults were never discussed with us when we were students. We weren't taught these skills in school, and this makes all the success stories we hear about seem out of reach; it makes us feel dumb. We aren't dumb, we just don't know how to work the system.

Harness the power of context, confidence, and a funny group of writers like the pros do on legendary TV shows like SNL or The Simpsons or at comedy institutions like The Onion. Scott Dikkers will show you how it’s done. He’s cofounder and longest-serving editor in chief of The Onion, the world’s most popular humor publication, and founder of the Onion Training Center at the Second City in Chicago. He’s also a number one best-selling humor author, comedy performer, and winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor.

Young married couple Heidi and Freddie just moved to Huntington Grove. All the neighbours see they are friendly and polite but why is one door in their house always locked? Across the street, Willow tries not to argue with her teenage daughter – even as her marriage is falling apart. And where does her husband really go each night, leaving the bed beside her cold?

Skyrocket Your Sales Through the Power of Compelling StorytellingIn "The Story Selling Secret," author Jim Edwards presents a straightforward, 5-step blueprint for using personal stories to powerfully connect with your audience, differentiate yourself from competitors, and ultimately increase sales. In today's crowded marketplace, it's no longer enough to simply promote your products or services. You need to engage and resonate with your target audience on a deeper level, and there's no better way to do this than with compelling personal stories. Tell Personal Stories That Connect and Sell ...

If you’re seeking deeper love, friendship, or community, The Magic of Tiny Moments offers a transcendent path to high-trust, meaningful connection. In a world where we're lonelier than ever before, artist and researcher Jared Matthew Weiss has uncovered the hidden architecture of human connection. Drawing from behavioral science, neuroscience, and psychology, plus his groundbreaking research spanning 26 countries and 10,000 participants, Weiss offers a simple solution to cultivating better relationships.

Steve Martin met his good friend Adam Gopnik three decades ago, and in that time, Gopnik has always marveled at Martin’s ability to flourish in a wide variety of artforms: magic, comedy, art collecting, writing, and music. In So Many Steves: Afternoons with Steve Martin, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik creates a new type of profile: a year’s worth of conversations with Martin where Gopnik pulls back the curtain on his friend’s illustrious career.

In Bad Mormon, Heather Gay pulled back the veil on her orthodox adolescence and marriage in the Mormon Church, and the painful process of leaving it all behind. Becoming a successful business owner and reality TV star gave the single mom of three a second lease on life. After years of living in an insular bubble, Heather emerged bright-eyed, eager to take on the world…no matter how ill-equipped her upbringing may have left her. Now, in this provocative and laugh-out-loud funny book, the mother of three proves that she isn’t just a Bad Mormon; she’s also a Good Time Girl!

A few years ago, David Alvarez had it all: a six-figure book deal, a loving boyfriend, and an exciting writing career. His debut novel was a resounding success, which made the publication of his second book—a total flop—all the more devastating. Now, David is single, lonely, and desperately trying to come up with the next great idea for his third manuscript, one that will redeem him in the eyes of readers, reviewers, the entire publishing world…and maybe even his ex-boyfriend.

Romans! Madrigals! The Dark Ages! Revolutions! Trumpets! The Oranges of The First World War! All of this (except trumpets) and more, is covered in this definitive, easy-clean history of all world history so far, written by the 21st Century's leading historian, philosopher and thinkerer Philomena Cunk.

Most people think the way to write a best seller is to have a lot of talent and even more luck. As you will learn, there is a recipe for success, and luck may be the least important ingredient in creating a best seller. No one has cracked the code better than James Scott Bell. A best-selling author himself, and the author of the number-one best seller for writers, Plot & Structure, Mr. Bell has been teaching the principles of best-selling fiction for over 20 years, principles that apply to any genre or style.

Filled with empowering, easy-to-follow tips for crafting stories that forge lasting bonds with friends, family, and colleagues alike, this book will help you connect authentically with the world around you and unleash the power of story in your life.