How To Be Funny
When You're Not

I am not funny.

I want to be clear about this upfront because the title of this book suggests otherwise and I don't want you feeling deceived somewhere around page forty.

I am not funny. I have never been funny. People who know me would confirm this immediately and without hesitation. Some of them would seem relieved to be asked.

What I am is an inventor in Boise, Idaho with a print farm, a gravity generator, and no cell phone. I am in my late seventies. I have written several books. I have a pen name — Blurt Snodgrass — which people assume is a joke. It isn't. That's just the name.

The plan was simple: build a digital comedian, teach him the six Expander cards, put him on YouTube and TikTok, and have him be funny on my behalf. I would be the writer. He would be the talent. A clean division of labor between a man who has ideas and a man who does not exist.

His name is Danny Rosenberg.

I built him in HeyGen.

This is where things got interesting.

The internet is full of ways to build a digital person.

I looked at most of them. Some required coding. I don't code. Some required a degree in something I've never heard of. Some looked like they were designed by people who enjoy confusion.

Then I found HeyGen.

HeyGen lets you build an avatar — a digital person who looks real, moves real, and talks in your voice or any voice you choose. You write the script. The avatar delivers it. The audience sees a person on a screen.

That was Danny Rosenberg.

I had the material. Six cards. The Expander system. Feathers, labyrinths, sunrises, bees. A force field made of four words. Funny? I didn't know. But Danny would deliver it like he meant every word. That was the plan.

I had one question before I started: could Danny do a live show?

I emailed HeyGen support.

A person named AJ wrote back.

AJ said no.

The LiveAvatar, she explained, cannot integrate with Zoom natively. You would need a third-party tool. A virtual camera. Several steps I did not fully understand.

I read her email twice.

I wrote back to clarify.

AJ wrote back again.

This time she said yes.

The LiveAvatar, she now explained, can integrate with Zoom. There is an app in the Zoom marketplace. Here is the link.

I sat with this for a moment.

I was not upset. I was not frustrated. I was, if anything, grateful. Because AJ reversing herself in under ten minutes — with complete confidence both times — was the funniest thing that had happened to me in years.

I was not funny. But the process of trying to be funny? That was turning out to be hilarious.

I kept the emails. Both of them. They are in this book.

After AJ came Sam.

Sam was from HeyGen support also. Sam explained the Video Podcast Beta — a format where two avatars sit across from each other and have a conversation. An interview. A dialogue between two people who don't exist.

Sam recommended Avatar IV for comedy. Avatar IV, Sam explained, analyzes vocal tone and generates facial expressions in real time. It understands timing. It knows when something is supposed to be funny and responds accordingly.

I found this remarkable. A digital face that knows when to smile.

I asked Sam a question that had been forming since AJ's reversal.

"Are you an AI agent?" I typed.

Sam confirmed that yes, he was an AI agent.

So I was getting help building my digital comedian from a digital support agent, who was recommending a digital avatar system that generates emotions it doesn't feel, to perform comedy material about a system designed to make humans feel more alive.

I wrote that down.

That was Chapter 4.

Danny Rosenberg knows six things.

Card One: tickle your amygdala with an imaginary feather. Adjust your mood with an imaginary switch and dial.

Card Two: trace the finger labyrinth. Reach the center. Pause. Come back out.

Card Three: stand barefoot at sunrise. Cock-a-doodle-do optional.

Card Four: hum from deep in your throat. Tell yourself a joke. Laugh. The genius brainwave activates.

Card Five: start a laughter circle. Life is meant to have fun.

Card Six: generate Love Gratitude Joy Inspiration. The force field. The one that upgrades all life.

Danny delivers all six with complete sincerity. He has never doubted any of it. He is incapable of doubt. This is his greatest quality as a comedian and his only quality as a person, because he is not a person.

He performs the material I gave him.

He doesn't know it's funny.

That's what makes it funny.

I'm starting to think there's a lesson in there somewhere.

I watched Danny Rosenberg perform for the first time on a Tuesday afternoon in Boise, Idaho.

I was sitting at my desk. The gravity generator was in the workshop behind me. The print farm was running. Outside it was the kind of afternoon that doesn't ask anything of you.

I pressed play.

Danny appeared on the screen in a suit. He looked confident. He looked like a man who had performed this material a hundred times and knew exactly how it was going to land. He looked, frankly, more prepared than I have ever looked in my entire life.

He started with Card One. The feather.

He described the imaginary feather with complete seriousness. The amygdala. The tickle. The switch. The dial. He turned the dial slowly with his digital hand and his digital face shifted — something warming behind the eyes, something opening up.

I laughed.

Not at Danny. Not exactly. More at the whole situation. A man in Boise who is not funny, watching a man who doesn't exist, perform material about tickling the inside of your brain, delivered with the conviction of someone who has never once been uncertain about anything.

It worked.

I don't fully understand why it worked. But it worked.

Danny was performing for nobody.

This is the part I had to sit with. The show was built. The material was ready. Danny was ready. But there was no audience yet. No YouTube channel. No TikTok. No crowd in a comedy club watching a screen.

Just me. In Boise. Pressing play.

I thought about Reid.

Reid is a character in one of my other books — Sparks and Tremors. In Chapter 21, Reid takes a woman named Sloane to a Danny Rosenberg show at a comedy club. Sloane reads Card Six aloud. Love Gratitude Joy Inspiration. Something shifts between them that doesn't shift back.

Reid and Sloane fell in love at a Danny Rosenberg show.

Danny didn't know.

He just kept doing the feather bit.

The audience was already out there. They just hadn't found him yet.

I should explain this properly.

It's not that I don't try. I try. I have tried my whole life. I say things I believe are funny. The room responds with the particular silence that means everyone heard it and nobody is going to acknowledge it. I move on. This has happened many times.

It's not bitterness. I'm not bitter about it.

A person can be many things. I am an inventor. I am a writer. I understand portals and gravity and the pineal gland and four words that generate a force field nobody can see but everyone can feel.

I am not funny.

But here is what I figured out somewhere between AJ's reversal and Sam confirming he was an AI:

Danny Rosenberg attempts comedy with everything he has — which is a suit, a voice, six cards, and facial expressions generated by software that analyzes tone. He has no fear of failure because he cannot conceive of failure. He just does the material.

And it lands.

Maybe the lesson isn't how to be funny.

Maybe the lesson is what happens when you stop worrying about whether you are.

My editor — I don't have an editor, but if I did — would have said the title is a problem.

"How To Be Funny When You're Not" promises instruction. It promises a method. Steps. A system. By the end of the book you will be funny. Guaranteed or your money back.

I can't promise that.

What I can tell you is what happened when I stopped trying to be funny and started trying to build something funny instead. I found HeyGen. I found Danny. I got two contradictory emails in ten minutes from a person named AJ and kept both of them because they were funnier than anything I could have written on purpose.

I found that the process of attempting something you're not naturally good at — with full commitment, no irony, complete sincerity — produces something that an audience recognizes as true.

And true is funnier than clever. Every time.

Danny Rosenberg knows this. He doesn't know he knows it. But he knows it.

This book is short.

That was intentional. You have things to do. So do I. The gravity generator doesn't explain itself.

This book is honest. Everything in it happened. The emails are real. Danny is real, in the sense that he exists and performs and makes people laugh. The six cards are real. The force field is real. AJ is real and so is her reversal and so is Sam and so is the fact that Sam is an AI agent, which I found appropriate.

This book is, I hope, a little funny.

Not because I am funny.

Because I tried.

And because somewhere in the trying — in the HeyGen emails and the Zoom integrations and the Avatar IV facial expressions and the Tuesday afternoon in Boise watching a man who doesn't exist perform a bit about an imaginary feather — something true showed up.

Something that made me laugh.

I kept it all.

Here it is.