This article describes work undertaken with a class of Scottish Primary Six children (aged 10) that encouraged them to write humorous stories. It reflects on the impact of different teaching approaches, in particular exploring how teacher-led input combined with opportunities for peer talk might serve to influence children's writing. The aims were first, to investigate whether, through "mini lessons," children's story schemas could be expanded to include ideas about incongruity, and second, to discover how independent talking in pairs might encourage children to take up and reformulate ideas given in the initial teacher-led input. During the sessions following the mini lessons, many opportunities for paired talk were offered. These were found to lead to a reinterpretation of ideas of incongruity, and to affect the selection and devising of voices for characters. The children's talk often gave evidence of a marked ability to describe humour and act it out orally, but analysis of the written stories reveals difficulties in writing down comic events. This has implications for the role of the teacher in finding ways to intervene sensitively to introduce new strategies.