It starts with a short, catchy statement: 

‘Something horrible has happened.’ ‘I blame women for this.’ ‘Your breath smells like crayons and tequila.’

Then, I explain the premise. 

Those are the first two steps in writing a successful humor column — and you’re about to learn some more. You see, I will graduate from Syracuse University in two months, and when I do, someone will need to step up and entertain you every Wednesday. 

It’s a fun job but extremely difficult to do. 

Just kidding. This crap is easy. What, you’re surprised? Each week, I spew 600 words of verbal diarrhea and you people call it ‘comedy.’ It’s the literary equivalent to drunken gorillas hurling their feces at a wall and calling it a Jackson Pollock painting. 

Here’s the point: Anybody with half a dirty mind and a little too much time on their hands could take my place and this campus wouldn’t miss a beat. All you need is a little guidance. (Stunning good looks and a steady supply of special brownies are helpful, too, but guidance is the real key.)

In that spirit, I’ve compiled five bits of wisdom that’ll tell you all you need to know to become a new and funnier (albeit less handsome) version of me.  

1. Make a list. People love lists. From David Letterman to Schindler, our heroes have long used them for urgent matters of comedy and beyond. From a humor columnist’s standpoint, lists are a great way to use the same setup for a gazillion different punch lines without ever letting your audience know you just completely mailed in a column. 

2. Say outrageous things. The world is full of serious, important people whose opinions matter. I am not one of them. So when I write something like, ‘It’s a good thing baby seals don’t know the difference between powdered sugar and crack, otherwise feeding them would be a pain in the ass,’ I can get away with it because nobody takes me seriously. God bless the First Amendment. And crack. 

3. Use short paragraphs. People have short attention spans. Say, anyone wanna go ride bikes? Oh, right. The column. I almost forgot. On that note …

4. Stay on message. My columns have covered a wide range of topics, from sex to sports to gambling and everything in between. And crack. Still, I explore one common theme throughout each column. Pick a good topic, and then rant about it until the piece has enough inches of length to satisfy every reader. I’ve been told my column is a nice, meaty eight inches long. In good lighting. If I haven’t been drinking.

5. Never, ever, ever let your parents read your work. Or your professors. Or the police, for that matter. Actually, if you can, try to avoid having your stuff published altogether. Employers tend to avoid hiring people whose names come up in search engines next to ‘crack’ or ‘crayon sex.’

Congratulations! You are now qualified to be The Daily Orange’s next weekly humor columnist. I hope this article has done away with your fears of filling my shoes. If nothing else, you should be able to write a list of funny jokes for a newspaper audience.

Or hurl gorilla feces at a wall. Same difference.