Session #16

16.4 – Write Unique Comedy Like Maria Bamford

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Course Objectives

Create memorable characters using act-outs, mimesis, vocal shifts, physicality, and rapid character switching.
Turn stories into comedic micro-scenes by replacing exposition with dialogue, dramatization, flashbacks, and externalized inner thoughts.
Use contrast and surprise through bathos, tonal whiplash, absurdism, emotional misdirection, and diegetic interruptions.
Develop a more distinctive comedic voice by combining vulnerability, character, rhythm, sound, surrealism, and theatrical performance.
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Instructor:
Jerry Corley

Lesson information

🎭 16.4 – Write Unique Comedy Like Maria Bamford

Maria Bamford doesn't just tell you about the characters in her life—she becomes them.

Her comedy can shift from her mother to a therapist to an intrusive thought to an entirely different version of herself—sometimes within the same joke. Through voices, act-outs, surrealism, vulnerability, tonal shifts, and theatrical performance, Bamford has created one of the most distinctive comedic voices in modern stand-up.

In Write Unique Comedy Like Maria Bamford, Jerry Corley breaks down the writing and performance techniques behind Bamford's unconventional style and shows you how to adapt those techniques to make your own comedy more original, expressive, and uniquely yours.

You'll explore Bamford's three major comedic pillars: Character Multiplicity, Micro-Dramas & Surreal Scenes, and Radical Vulnerability Wrapped in Absurdity—along with techniques including mimesis, polyvocality, bathos, diegetic interruptions, emotional misdirection, meta-comedy, musicality, and tonal contrast.

Through writing and performance exercises, you'll learn how to stop simply describing characters and start embodying them, turn ordinary stories into theatrical micro-scenes, use your voice and physicality as additional comedy-writing tools, and find laughs by colliding serious emotional truth with unexpected absurdity.

Because developing a unique comedic voice isn't always about finding something completely new to say.

Sometimes it's about discovering a completely different way to say it

Talk about accents & voices! If you liked this class,  DON'T MISS THIS ONE!

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How to Write Like Robin Williams

A La Carte 12.5 How to Write Comedy Like Robin Williams 

Robin Williams may have looked completely spontaneous—but underneath that lightning-fast delivery was years of training, preparation, character work and structure. Discover how Williams combined characters, accents, incongruity, act-outs and improvisational thinking to turn ordinary ideas into explosive comedy—and learn exercises that can help you develop those same skills in your own unique voice.

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