Mindy, The Muppets Take Manhattan, Duck-man, Police Squad!, Saturday Night Live, Funny: The Book), presents a class which comes with an ironclad guarantee that it will impart no usable skills. Okay, that could be an exaggeration, but Davids given the same guarantee at the Smithsonian Institute, Austin Film Festival, Actors Studio, Yale, Columbia, Oxford Univer-sity, American Film Institute, the University of Sydney, VIEW Cinema Conference (Torino, Italy) and the Burbank Comedy Festival. The seminar has no direct instruction but is a criti-cal, and serious (though funny) exploration of comedy as an art form. How Comedy Works gives actors, writers, directors, producers and Crafts Service personnel a closeup of comedys innards, the idea being that understanding how comedy works will help you work in comedy. Anyway, thats my story and Im sticking to it. Topics include the Rule of 3 (Why are things funnier in threes? Really, why? I mean, why?); the relationship between Comedy and Logic (spoiler alert: theyre bitter enemies); the calculations involved in timing; comedy cues, and why withholding them is sometimes the best way to get a laugh; why your body is hilarious; the evil of punchlines; comedy pla-cebos; and how the mechanics of jokes tension and resolution, pattern recognition, misdi-rection and surprise provide a template for all humor. As for practical applications, the presentation includes copious comedy clips from TV and movies which show how these principles translate into actual laughter. So forget all that stuff about no usable skills. Satisfied and/or Paid-Off Customers A sell-out crowd, lots of laughing and learning about why and how comedy works; both grad students and faculty got a lot from the evening. Alan Kingsberg, Columbia University It takes a serious mind to analyze comedy. It takes a funny mind to appreciate it. David Misch is of two minds. Jason Alexander Anyone who can engage and hold the attention of my jaded Advanced Screenwriting class knows