Joel Morris is a British comedy writer (That Mitchell and Webb Look, Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe, the Paddington movies) and the host of two of my favourite podcasts: the sadly defunct Rule of Three (with Jason Hazeley) and Comfort Blanket. So when I learned that he was writing a book about how comedy works, I was all in. It’s a great read, and goes through the history and theories of why humans laugh and how comedy evolved from a sociological standpoint. It also dives into how comedy works on a structural level. I could have done with an exploration of how this plays out in practice using some of Morris’s own scripts, but I guess on a subject this big he had to draw the line somewhere. I am fascinated by the mechanics of comedy, and have Adam Bloom’s