Melvin Helitzer (October 18, 1924 to April 11, 2009) was an American advertising executive, journalism professor, and the author of Comedy Writing Secrets (Writer's Digest, 1987), the best-selling humor writing textbook of all time. He was born in Glens Falls, New York, started his career as a newspaper reporter on the Glens Falls Post-Star and Times in 1940, and spent thirty years in advertising before becoming a professor.
His advertising career included roles as public relations director of the Toy Guidance Council, advertising director of Ideal Toy Corporation, executive director for four children's television programs on ABC and NBC, and president and CEO of Helitzer Advertising from 1963 to 1979. He won the Clio Award and the Public Relations Society of America Golden Anvil and was a member of the Friars' Club in New York and the Young Presidents' Organization.
In 1980 he joined the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University in Athens, where he taught for twenty-nine years until his retirement in 2008. He developed and taught Humor Writing for Fun and Profit, one of the first university courses on humor writing in the world. The course famously required every student to perform a five-minute stand-up set as their final exam, became so popular that students audited and signed up a year in advance, and was nicknamed Mel's Hell by generations of OU students. He wrote humor material for Sammy Davis Jr., Shari Lewis, Art Linkletter, Ernie Kovacs, and presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, and authored seven books including the unproduced musical Oh, Jackie! Her Father's Story.
Comedy Writing Secrets has run to three editions, the second co-authored with his former student Mark A. Shatz and the third authored by Shatz with Helitzer's name retained on the byline. The book breaks comedy into teachable mechanics, the rule of three, surprise, exaggeration, incongruity, reverse, the construction of one-liners, the writing of sketches, stand-up structure, and the business of selling humor, and is widely cited as the standard humor writing textbook in American universities.
