Humor writing is the easiest thing to do in the world next to falling off of logs, feeling more intelligent than Dubya, and hitting the broad side of a barn with whatever you are shooting.

          I'll give you the key ingredient right here at the beginning of the article so you can pass over the rest and see what Readers Digest is paying other writers (not, unfortunately, you) or perhaps to read about a certain literary agent you have no prayer of working with.

          The key is simply this: just do it and send stuff out.

          I know there are hundreds of books, booklets, filmstrips, stone tablets; dry-erasable white boards, subway station walls, and bathroom stall interiors that will tell you how difficult it is to write humor of any kind and that are full of tips, ideas, suggestions and outright insults to your intelligence.

          These bathroom-borne essays, Writer’s Digest articles, and the ubiquitous number of books by the late Steve Allen will discourage you by saying that humor writing is something so difficult to do that only geniuses, mental giants and brain damaged savants like Dave Barry can type just the right kind of prose that will lead to guffaws, sniggers and snorts from the painfully low in numbers reading public.

          I’m here to tell you that writing humor is easier than Courtney Love.

          From the very first funny story you wrote for your Mom right up to today’s essay on boogers and their impact on the Italian Renaissance, humor can be cranked out by the most ignorant cretin in the writing universe and I offer myself as living proof. This is because with the possible exceptions of poetry, White House press briefings, and country music lyrics, the writing of humor requires no verifiable facts whatsoever.

          Even science fiction writers have to write things that are remotely possible and true. Humor writer suffer from no such restriction. In a galaxy far, far away a two foot high green wrinkled puppet could teach Jedi philosophy, but there is no way that a rabbit could walk into a bar with a turtle on its head and begin to speak.

          We humor writers make it look difficult to write our stuff because we are deathly afraid that you better talented writers will crowd us out of the business with your own essays about boogers and drunk rabbits.

          I shared in this fear of my betters until I realized that writing humor pays bupkiss and I’d be more than happy to share the literally dozens of dollars I have made over the years penning such classics as Monday Sucks and 100 & 1 Uses for a Dead Elvis.

          There are a few techniques you can use to make your humor writing easier to do and I’ll share two of them with you here at absolutely no charge.

          The first and easiest thing any humor writer can do in an essay is quote Mark Twain. Everybody thinks that Mark Twain was funny. I’m planning on reading some of his stuff someday. For now though, I’ll just make up the quotes I want from him that support whatever I am writing.

          How can I do this? Because the dude is dead, nobody really remembers all of the stuff he said over the years, and everybody thinks he was the wittiest SOB on earth even though they know absolutely nothing about him except that his made-up name has something to do with the Mississippi.

This makes our readers happy because when they were kids, Mississippi was the first (and probably the only) long word they learned how to spell.

          Mark Twain is a lot like Bill Cosby. Everybody thinks he is witty and they like him but nobody has any idea why.

          Twain once said: “only fools country dogs and congress people think Iraq has WMDs.” He was, of course, way ahead of his time and we can all laugh at his prescience.

          Quoting Twain using made up phrases puts you among the pantheon of humor writers and is a great way to fill space in your weekly newspaper humor column.

          The next method I recommend for humor writers is to free associate then write it all down and send it out to various editors, weekend shopping publications and humor blogs. In these exercises you shouldn’t restrict yourself to things considered nice or relevant or respectful of the beliefs of others unless they are fanatic Moslems.

          I would shy away from making fun of anything Moslem because they tend to take it the wrong way and kill you. Nothing will cut your humor writing career short quite like getting murdered because you felt the need to tease idiots who own bombs and thinks that doing a virgin is a great night of sex.

          Making fun of Christians is not only trendy and hip, but the only threat you’ll get from them is going to a place they call “Hell” but at a much later date.

          I have been relegated to Hell by my readers more often than Mark Twain crossed the Mississippi and so far haven’t actually gone there.

I remind my fervent readers that all the cool people I’d want to hang with are in Hell already. Would you rather spend eternity chatting with Jimmi Hendrix and Janis Joplin or spend it in that other place discussing the evils of huggy-bear dancing with a Baptist who thinks the Devil wrote “Stairway”?

Just let yourself go and use all of those sideways thinking free spirited ideas you've been hiding from your friends and family for your entire life.     There is no trick to humor writing; no magic feather, no three or ten step program. Just write down your weird thoughts, try not to be too mean and then send them out. You'll be surprised. Sure, some people will back away from you very slowly when they see you but others will send you checks.

          I’ll leave you with an example of the kind of writing that puts me among the Hell-bound:

          If Jesus was a carpenter, where is the work he did? You’d think if everything he did was, by definition, perfect, wouldn’t there be pieces of furniture, houses and cabinets he built still available, at least on eBay®?

          Then, I would put in a quote from Mark Twain saying something about how the other boys in shop class hated Jesus because he always got an “A” on his projects and how he mastered arc welding two thousand years ahead of the rest of the class.

          None of the above is true or even respectful but I think you can all see how using a Twain quote gave the piece exactly what it needed.

          Writing humor is the easy part. Next time we’ll cover the hard part – actually selling the made-up, off-color, heretical stuff your write.