We sat in a circle trying to make each other laugh. The tent at the Yard in Chilmark provided a writers’ den for the 11 fledgling or developed comedy writers who signed up to take Anne Beatts’s comedy workshop last week.

Powerfully intelligent, Anne Beatts has been around comedy writing since before it was something you could study in school. As a twentysomething she was the only woman on the editorial staff of the National Lampoon magazine, and she later became one of the original writers on Saturday Night Live. However, being a comedy writer was not something she expected.

“It wasn’t a field that people could choose as a career in those days. It was more something that people fell into. It was an accident,” said Ms. Beatts.

From that fortunate beginning, her career bloomed. She wrote a television pilot that became a series called Square Pegs staring Sarah Jessica Parker, and now she teaches comedy and writing as an adjunct professor at Chapman University and the University of Southern California.

Workshop students arrived at the Yard on Wednesday morning with varying degrees of knowledge about her history. Some knew her as the influential comedy writer who paved the way for other women writers such as Tina Fey, and others had only seen on a poster that she was an original writer on SNL.

The idea was to become funnier people and have a meaningful writing experience. Unexpectedly, on day one we spent most of our three-hour session getting to know each other. Anne explained that to be funny around people, it helps to know who they are. At the end of the day we pitched ideas.

Day two, we came to class with the ideas written out — a range of sketches, monologues and scenes. Topics ranged from menopause to the devil plotting to a monologue of a bitter stoner speaking to her employer, a rich landowner. Some scenes were well developed, well on their way to being comedic sketches, while others were too long, others more dialectic than snappy. We all gave each other feedback.

Day three, we returned with our edited writing. The pieces that needed the most work had come back vastly different. It was incredible to hear how people had absorbed the suggestions of the group and employed them thoroughly. But there was no time for group critiques; the pieces needed to be morphed into performance-worthy material by the next day, so Anne stepped in with expert suggestions for each writer.

On performance day we showed up at a later time because our performance was in the evening. We met at the house of one of the workshop participants to begin staging our pieces. Anne switched gears into director and we began to see how the pieces would take form with all of us as the actors. Everyone was frantically memorizing.

At 3 p.m., after we had moved back to the Yard to work in the theatre space where the performance would be, we had a lunch catered by the Scottish Bakehouse (one of the participants had connections). Then came the final crunch where we put the pieces to the test of staging them. Everyone got a little bit of time on stage, but time ran out during our final dress rehearsal because a group of children who would be performing before us needed to stage their piece too.

At last, the performance. It ran well, with people responding to all of the pieces.

“The show in general seemed to be pretty well received,” said Ms. Beatts. “I would say that some of the broader pieces went over best in terms of immediate audience response, but I know people thought that the other stuff was very thought-provoking and they liked it for that reason — that it was something to chew on.”

In terms of the pieces that were more to be chewed on, Sam Barrow thought the performance was not entirely a comfy affair.

“I don’t think my piece was laugh-out-loud funny, and that was weird to be up there and be like ‘I’m expecting laughter this time’ rather than it being a nice bonus,” she said. Ms. Barrow is a self-proclaimed poet who has traveled and read many times.

“I don’t think performing is always comfortable and I don’t think that necessarily means it doesn’t go well,” she said. The difficult thing about performing comedy is the judgment that laughter brings onto a piece’s success or failure, she said.

Although the laughs were loud for some and less so for others, the process of the workshop was generally well received.

One workshop participant, Jesse Gordon, who has had extensive sketch comedy experience while at college, wrote in a text message, “I thought it was actually really fun to workshop my piece with people who were looking at it from more of an audience/writer perspective as opposed to an audience/comedy writer perspective.”

For another participant, Julie Eilber, the experience was an excellent process of revision. She was impressed, she wrote in an e-mail, about how well Anne helped everyone convert fledgling ideas into ones that were stage worthy.

“I got to experience firsthand the sheer panic of needing to find a workable idea, mine it for laughs and get ready to perform it in four days,” she wrote. “Without Anne’s professional guidance and editing talents (along with her tough yet encouraging style), we all would have ended up bombing.”

Many people in the group, though not all, are writers of one form or another. Four people had acting experience, at least five or six people would have considered themselves writers, although perhaps only one person from the group, Mr. Gordon, would have considered himself a comedy writer.

What Ms. Beatts wants is for the people who take her classes to get the comedy bug.

“What happens with a lot of people through either performing or seeing their work performed and hearing the audience respond to their work is it becomes addictive. They go ‘Mmm! This is fun! I want to do more!’ and they get sucked into that world,” she said.

For Ms. Beatts, it’s the eclectic quality of the groups that keeps teaching comedy writing interesting. The writing pieces each group produces, she said, are as different as the people who penned them, ranging from the broad pieces that bring about big guffaws in the moment to pieces that are more subtle and touch people emotionally.

“Not that you couldn’t have big guffaws and touch people,” she said. “That’s my favorite, when you have both of those things together.”