• How to Write a Joke: the 7 basic joke forms
  
• Editing Your Comedy or Serious Speech into an Act

• How to Tell a Joke: on stage, during a speech and in the work place
  
• Delivery: Vocal Tricks that Sell Your Ideas
  
• Improvisation: Thinking on Your Feet

• Topical Monologue: Joke Formats
  
• Social Commentary: Joke Formats
  
• Taking Advantage of Hecklers: Joke Formats
  
• Roasts: Joke Formats
  
• Cross-roasting: Joke Formats
  

• Acting for Comics and Speakers
  
• Choreographing the Joke: learning how to move around the club stage or speaker's platform, aesthetics that affect the audience emotionally

• Narrative Character (your stage persona)
  
• How to Create Funny Characters--a character may complex, hip, warm and wonderful. But your character will never gain high visibility unless it can be easily caricatured
  
• Making the Audience Like You a Lot

• Ideal
  
• Simple: Classic Tirade Routine

• Observations Routine
  
• Relationship Satire Routine
  
• Wit Routine
  
• Humor Routine
  
• Three Dimensional Premise
  
• Two Situation Premise

• "Business" Side of Show Business--marketing your character locally, nationally and internationally
• For a fast overview, see Jim's example of a quickie approach to interviews at the Fundamentals level using only the 7 basic joke forms: Selling Yourself During Media Interviews by: Newspapers, Radio & TV Interviews at the advanced level would involve both cross-roasting and premise routines. Contemporary examples will be updated on a separate web page, available to current clients with password accounts.

Sample update to my home study materials, kinda hints you'll keep finding on this web site:

• "The Maltese Falcon" (1941)
  --Bogey as witty detective;
  director: John Huston
• "The Big Sleep" (1945)
  --Bogey as humorous detective;
  director: Howard Hawks
• "In a Lonely Place" (1950)
  --Bogey as a screenwriter,
  alternately witty and humorous;
  director: Nicholas Ray

You will find a further discussion of wit vs. humor, and how it is central to any legitimate understanding of comedy in Jim's home study materials.