How to be funny

Demitri Martin is a comedian who has appeared on Comedy Central, on the Daily Show and in a series of quirky online ads for Microsoft Vista, which you can see here.

In an article in New York magazine, he describes the process by which he writes his jokes. It's a method that could easily be applied to writing headlines for ads.

For example, once he has established the topic of the joke, he says that he, "(will) identify the elements of the joke and wonder about how those elements go together. It means taking nothing for granted, which makes the world much more interesting to me."

You can read his Anatomy of a Joke here.