Gag-a-Week advice

We are always delighted when we receive lots of entries to our weekly joke writing competition. Some members have even taken the trouble to tell us how much they enjoy the challenge.

That said, we do hear from subscribers who are less satisfied - usually because they keep entering but have never won.


Firstly, all entries are judged completely blind - we have no idea who sent in the jokes.

We also set no rules about whether the jokes should be rude or clean. What we are looking for is structurally sound, complete jokes: not just funny ideas, but gags that would get a laugh from an audience.

On a fairly recent occasion, we received a complaint from a member who never won despite judging their material to be funnier than the winning gags. We were in those circumstances able to call up that member's submissions - and found little evidence to support their judgment.

As we say, we are looking for jokes: punchy, funny and original gags.

On that note: anything that is a funny or amusing idea, but which doesn't concentrate into a proper joke will be out.

Anything that is a "public domain" joke - i.e. a joke you might hear from a wag in the pub - will be out. Everybody involved with Pro is a comedy industry professional - we'll have heard it before. Probably many times.


Anything that assumes a political or social perspective (of any type) but which doesn't have a funny idea at its core will not make the grade. "Aren't the Tories evil?", "Isn't Keir Starmer boring?" - political jokes are fine, but they need to be jokes, not simply personal statements that assume the audience's sympathy.

We like puns - but we get a lot of them - and most of them tend to be groan-inducing.

Really clever puns are good. Audiences enjoy puns. But, given the choice between a clever pun and a clever joke utilising a different structure, we would pick the different structure.

We get, frankly, too many puns - and it's not possible to establish a comedy writing career simply from puns. We want this competition to be a challenge that will improve our members' abilities and help them reach a professional standard. Entrants will increase their chances of success by offering jokes that are not puns.

We deliberately make the weekly subject matter as random as possible - to try and make the challenge more interesting. This also reflects the need for a professional writer to be able to generate material in a wide range of circumstances, responding to changing briefs.

We'll be honest: some weeks yield better results than others. Some weeks we receive a glut of good, original jokes. Others, we have to stretch ourselves to find a winner.

We often receive jokes that feel very obvious: for example, when the subject was the stock market we received an awful lot of material pivoting around the simple observation that "stock" is also something you cook with.

We urge our members to go beyond these obvious ideas. If it's your first thought it's probably everybody's first thought.

It can help to get those obvious jokes out of your system - writing them down - before pushing on into more imaginative material.

Remember: we can't see who submits each joke, so a member that really takes this advice to heart could potentially win multiple times. Indeed, entering every week is probably a good idea for anybody serious about improving their joke-writing ability - practice really does make perfect: you will get better.

We would like the overall standard of the material we receive to increase. As we say, we are serious about our members - we want to help them develop into fully-fledged professional writers - and it would be nice to see more jokes that meet that standard.

Good luck!

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Enter Gag-a-Week here