This paper provides a new and accessible approach to establishing certain results concerning the discounted penalty function. The direct approach consists of two steps. In the first step, closed form expressions are obtained in the special case where the claim amount distribution is a combination of exponential distributions. A rational function is useful in this context. For the second step, one observes that the family of combinations of exponential distributions is dense. Hence, it suffices to reformulate the results of the first step to obtain general results. The surplus process has downward and upward jumps, modeled by two independent compound Poisson processes. If the distribution of the upward jumps is exponential, a series