Funny Ha Ha: B.J. Novak Wants Your Humor Writing
Calling all young humorists: we want you to make us laugh! Studio 360 and the Scholastic Art &Writing Awardsare looking for humor writing by students who are about to start high school, in high school, orhave justgraduated. Writer and actorB.J. Novak(The Office, One More Thing) will pick a winner on the show later this summer.
We are accepting entries in prose, video and audio. But eachpiece must begin and end with these sentences:
FIRST LINE: The sun rose and everything fell.
LAST LINE: Alex stared at the door handle and slowly turned the knob.
What happens in between those two lines is up to you.
Enter Funny Ha Ha: The High School Humor Challenge here.
Novak admits his sense of humor hasn’t changed much since his teen years. “I notice more and more the patterns of what I write and what I’m drawn to in comedy tend to be what I’ve always been drawn to,” he tells Kurt Andersen, “which is using intelligence against the people who are supposed to be the smart ones.” But making people laugh doesn’t always have to be subversive — it just has to be surprising. “Great comedy is the same as a great mystery,” he says. “Something that is so obvious that you never would have thought of it.”