Tips for funnier sentences

The fun of Consequences is that nobody knows the rest of the sentence. These tips won't write your piece for you: they help you find one of your own that lands, whatever the others wrote.

Write a piece that works anywhere

You never see the rest of the sentence, so a piece that is only funny next to one particular person or place will fall flat. Think of something odd on its own: a person nobody expects, a place nobody would choose, a strange thing to be doing. It will be odder still in company.

Be specific

A detail turns a word into a picture. Skip the first thing that comes to mind, and add the one detail that makes it yours: who exactly, which place, what kind. The table laughs at what it can see.

Play with scale

Put the grand next to the small: someone very important busy with something tiny, or an ordinary moment in a place far too grand for it. The laugh lives in the gap between the two.

Fit the question

Your piece slots into a sentence, so write it in the form the example under the box shows: Doing what? takes a word ending in -ing, and Where? and When? bring their own little word, in, on or at. A piece that fits reads straight through, and the sentence lands.

Keep it short

The box takes 80 characters, but the sentence is read aloud: a short piece lands harder than a long one. Leave the rest to the table's imagination; one odd word does more than a line of explanation.

Put the table in it

Under Who? and With whom?, the players' names are a tap away. A name everyone knows brings the biggest laugh, as long as it stays kind: the best one is a laugh the person named shares too.

When you're stuck

Look around you: the room you're in, what you ate today, the last thing that annoyed you. The best pieces come from your own life, which nobody else at the table could have written.