By Scott Winfield Sublett Note to the reader: When I decided to take on teaching this class, I assumed there would exist a good textbook for it. I was wrong, so I have had to write one myself, and this is it. In its current form, this text is intended as a course reader for “TA 13: The Great Comedies.” Its aim is to familiarize you with the nature and techniques of comedy writing so you can better analyze comedies and understand why they’re funny. My ultimate goal is to continue to develop this text until it becomes a viable “how to” book for those who intend to write comedies for stage and screen. (It will be a companion volume for my screenwriting text, Screenwriting for Neurotics, published in 2014 by University of Iowa Press.) This material is copyrighted and you may not share with it others legally. Please help me protect the value and copyright of my original material by not sharing with anyone outside the class. Thank you. Let’s start laughing.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Are You Funny?/ Comedy vs. “A Comedy”/A Little About Me/Prepare to Be Funny/Definitions of Comedy/Better Living Through Comedy/A Warning Chapter One: Principles of Comedy The Comic Moment: That’s Wrong!/Deviation From Norms and Standards:Criticism and Forgiveness/Deviation#1:Cultural Norms/The Stereotype and Deviation From the Norm/Airplane! Playing With Norms and Racial Stereotypes/Is Comedy Inherently Unkind or Politically Incorrect?/Deviation #2:From Human Norms/Deviation#3: From Norms of Physical Possibility/Physical Impossibility and the Acton Hero/A Digression About Comic Tension and Comic Relief/Back to Action and the Comedy of Physical Impossibility/Deviation#4: From Artistic Norms/The Forth Wall/Asides and Direct Address of the Camera/Examples of Characters Acknowledging They’re in Fictions/Genres That Depend on Deviation from Artistic Norms/DEVIATION #5:FROM LINGUISTIC NORMS/Non-sequiturs, Mangles Word Choice and “Goldwynisms”/Non- sequiturs and Nonsense/Misunderstanding/Mispronunciation/Puns and Wordplay/The Voices of Performers/Impersonating a Voice and Mimicry/The Linguistic Deviation Expresses Character/Changing Norms and Crossing Borders: A Digression”/Topicality/WHY DOES THE COMIC CHARACTERS DEVIATE FROM NORMS?/Henri Bergson and Automatic Behavior/INAPPROPRIATE Behavior: Comedy, Context and the Fish Out of Water/Selecting a Setting for the Fish Out of Water: Places of Solemnity, Propriety and Theatricality/Proper, Fancy, Rule- bound/Environment/Human Types/ Chapter Two: Comic Characters and Their Behaviors Identifying, Understanding and Creating Comic Characters/Characterization and Comedy: Shharp and Defines/The Single-Mindedness of the Comic Character/ Surprise! The Comic Character’s Mind is Elsewhere/The Moment the Audience Realizes, “So That’s What He’s Thinking!”/Setting Up Comedy With Character/Putting It Together: Mastery and Delight/Obliviousness/Dishonest and Misrepresentation: Lying, Disguise, False Identity, Trickery, Hypocrisy and Pretension/Acting “As If”: Intentional and Unintentional/Pug/The Mask: Hiding the Unacceptable/Misperception and the Pleasure of Perception/Types pf Dishonesty/The Moment of Comedy: The Mask Slips and the Mystery Is Solved/Comic Flaws/The Dark Side of Comic Character/How Bad Can a Comic Character Be? When is It OK to Laugh?/Why Do I Laugh Instead of Slapping You/Likable Characters, and Characters That Make Us Laugh/Show Your Character’s Pain/Tragedy Plus Time and the Question of Black Comedy/Creating Comic Character: Hybridization of Type/Overreaction and Underreaction/Deadpan/Pauses/Back to Overreaction and Underreaction/ Chapter Three: Comic Types The wit and the butt/Wit, Sarcasm and Snark/The Witty Charater: Wit is Surprising, Daring, True, Agile, Clever and Definitely Knows “How Things Should
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Be”/Snark/Sarcasm/A List of Comic Types/Comic Types in History/Commedia dell’arte/Mture Artists Steal…Inspiration/ Chapter Four: The Comic Character Worksheet Analyzing and identifying Comic Character/Comic Character Worksheet (with commentary)/Comic Character Worksheet Chapter Five: The Moment of Comedy: Behavior and Dialogue Putting It Together: Comedy Happens in the Head/Not Too Much Information—But Enough/It’s Funny Because It’s True/One the Nose and Not on the Nose/The Comic Moment May Be Complex/The Butt Reveals Himself Inadvertently/The Wit Reveals Himself Intentionally/Obscure References/Comic Relief: Tension Precedes Release/ Chapter Six: Comic Dialogue Comic Lines: Short, Crack Like a Whip, The Last Word Assembles the Meaning/Great Lines/Some Like It Hot/Reveals His Crazy Thinking/Ends With the Word that Trigers the Laugh/Specific/Building Tension Before the Punch Lines/”K” Sounds (and snappy words)/Voice-over narration: Incongruity Between Image and Sound/Catchphrase/ Chapter Seven: Comedy Techniques Identify the Funny/Collapse of Dignity/Mistaken Identity/Signaling Comedy/Turn on a Dime/ Chapter Eight: Styles and Genres Satire/Parody/Patiche/Burlesque/Farce/Bedroom Farce/Slapstick/Camp/Intentional Camp/Shock Comedy/Genre: Romantic and Screwball Comedy/The Romantic Comedy: The Five Situations Chapter Nine: Pulling it All Together and Planning a Comedy
INTRODUCTION There’s a story about a Hollywood mogul giving notes to writer. The mogul said, “Make it funnier.” The writer replied (presumably deadpan), “Do you want it 15 per cent funnier or 30 per cent funnier?” Which shows that the mogul picked the right writer because first, the writer is funny, and second because the writer knows that comedy is a way speaking otherwise unacceptable truths, the truth in this case being, “That’s not a very helpful note and it shows that you know nothing whatsoever about the process of writing a comedy.” Good comic lines do convey truths, or at least rely upon them for their meanings. And it is our recognition of the truth behind the comic behavior that provokes the laugh. The truth in what the writer said to the mogul is that comedy can’t be dependably manufactured in precise, calibrated, measurable quantities because it relies on the inspiration of the moment. It is an art. However, writers of comedy can benefit from a greater understanding of the principles and techniques of comedy, and can write funnier screenplays, stage plays, skits and sketches if, in the planning stage, they give some thought to finding and developing comic characters, and if they give some thought to the situations in which those characters will find themselves. Put a comic character in the right situation and, if you know that character, he will be funny. Some writers say that their characters “come to life” and behave outside their control, which of course isn’t the case, they’re fictional constructs, but if you have a thoroughly imagined comic character, comic lines and behaviors will pop into your head. Furthermore, later in the process, you can hone the lines so they’re funnier—land the joke. No book can make you funny, but you can learn to be funnier within the context of “dramatic writing,” which is to say, the construction of narratives of varying lengths to be seen on various screens and stages. A Broadway musical comedy and a silly webisode you shoot in your back yard are both dramatic writing, and embody the same principles. And skills. This book is essentially a practical approach to building those skills—and for creating opportunities for inspiration. This isn’t a book on standup comedy per se, but I think a lot of it would be of interest to standups. The great standup comedians create comic personas, which is to say characters. Standups say funny things, but those things are funny because they reveal the character, sensibility, and thought processes of the comedian. They come out of his persona, and even if the standup bases that persona on himself, it’s shaped, edited and heightened into a character that, in the end, is somewhat fictional. A mask, if you will. The standup can benefit from this book’s discussion of character, and also from the discussion of overall principles of comedy, not to mention the book’s advice on sharpening comedy. Gosh, come to think of it, this book is great for everybody on your holiday gift list. Put it down, run out, and buy ten more copies right now. Not kidding. Do it. Are You Funny? Do You See Life as a Comedy?
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But, as I said, all the advice in the world won’t do you any good if you’re a humorless bore. Are you funny? Someone (either Horace Walpole or Jean de La Bruyère, there some controversy over it) once said, “Life is a tragedy to he who feels and a comedy to he who thinks.” If you have a great sense of humor, it’s possible that you live not so much in your heart as in your head, which is to say you’re a rationalist, which of course would mean you see that life isn’t rational. It doesn’t make sense. It’s full of absurdities and contradictions, but instead of crying about you laugh, because you take delight in your ability to identify the contradictions and absurdities of the world—and of the people—the characters—in it. If you’re funny, you already know it. You probably demonstrated the ability and desire to make people laugh at an early age. The psychology of how you got that way, whether you needed attention, or wanted a safe way in which to vent hostility, or wanted to be liked or to prove you were cleverest little girl in the room—none of that matters here. What matters is that you developed a sense of humor. If you have no sense of humor you will be better off not trying to write comedy. If you do have a sense of humor, then you might want to try writing a comedy. Writing humorously is fun, puts one in marvelously good humor, and affords many hours of pleasure. Comedy Versus “A Comedy” Being funny doesn’t make you better than other people and it doesn’t make you worse— but it does make you more able to write a comedy. Note, I said write “a comedy,” not “comedy.” This book isn’t about stand-up or humorous essays, though I like to think that big chunks of it would indeed benefit people who want to do those things (the material on creating a comic character would be enormously helpful to stand up comedians, for example so buy more copies of the book and give them to standup comedians, and don’t buy used copies, that money doesn’t come back to me as royalties). But I’m mostly here to help you write “a comedy.” A comedy is a piece of dramatic writing, for the stage or any of the many screens that we watch: the movies screen, the TV screen, the computer screen or the smart phone screen. If you’re writing funny graphic novels specifically designed to be seen on a smartphone, this is your book. Nowadays, with YouTube, anyone can create sketch comedy and potentially be seen by millions and millions of viewers. If you want to write “a comedy,” be it a sketch, a play or a feature-length screenplay, or if you write those already and want to get better, you will get a lot out of this book, and even more out of multiple copies scattered around the house. A Little About Little Old Me I wrote my first comedy in junior high school. It was a musical, basically a parody of musicals I had seen and a satirical take on the goings on at school. It was fun to write and fun to put on, but I didn’t write any more comedies for a long time. I spent years as a newspaper film critic and feature writer, then got my MFA in screenwriting at UCLA and went back to writing comedies (among other things). It is striking how little really good instruction on writing comedy exists. Therefore, as a screenwriting professor at San Jose
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University, I was forced to create a “course reader” because the text I wanted simply didn’t exist. This is that course reader. Prepare to be Funny The central truth of this book is that writing a comedy requires thought and preparation. Earlier in my career—and maybe this will sound familiar to you—I was under the misconception that comedy was something you added or sprinkled on top of a dramatic narrative, like a spice or a sauce. I’d write scenes that included, in brackets, the words, “Insert joke here.” I thusly showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the comedy. What I didn’t understand was that comedy wasn’t something that one added to the script later. Comedy is something that arises spontaneously out of the script when you have created comic characters and comic situations. Just by being themselves, comic characters, when propelled into action within the right situation or context, will make us laugh. So the trick is to come up with comic characters and to put them in comic situations. The most important thing is character. Create a character with the right kinds of flaws and he will be funny. By being himself the comic character is funny. His behavior will be funny. His lines will be funny. (This book, while it inevitably touches on issues of plot construction, is not a guide to screenwriting and playwriting. If you want to know more about that, your first stop should be my book Screenwriting for Neurotics, which has been responsible for many contest wins and many produced films, and embodies a precise, systematic approach to planning and executing a screenplay. My publisher gives discounts when you buy them by the case, so do.) Edison supposedly once said, “Invention is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.” That is certainly true, in my opinion, of the art of dramatic writing. Inspiration is important, but so is the learning of techniques of composition, planning, and thoughtfully, deliberately, carefully thinking through your characters and situations so that you can be as funny as possible. All this may sound inartistic to some of you, but if you weren’t hungry for guidance in this endeavor you wouldn’t have picked up this book, which is based on the assumption that, like dramatic writing, comedy can be taught. The main purpose of this book is to help you understand the principles of comedy—why things are funny—but also to create a system for the application of that understanding to the creation of comic characters and comic situations. This book is meant to teach you how to make a comedy that is as funny as possible, and to that end I have tried to create a systematic approach. It assumes you already understand the rudiments of dramatic construction and means to take you further, to add another layer, though “layer” is misleading because it’s all integrated and organic. As for inspiration, like poetry, comedy writing is heavily dependent upon it, but don’t worry about inspiration. Worrying doesn’t help. Relax and assume you’re funny. Comedy is more dependent upon inspiration than drama, admittedly (the same can be said of
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poetry, another literary genre where inspiration is key), but the methods in this book are meant to create a context in which you are likely to experience useful inspiration. Ultimately, this is a practical guide, and all the theory about comedy is simply there to help you recognize why your inspirations are inspired. At the very least, if you have written a comedy that is not funny, or not funny enough, the principles in this book enable you to realize why it isn’t funny, which is the first step to fixing it. Don’t expect to understand all these concepts right away. Just keep reading, and sooner or later it will all come together. Maybe we’ll even have some laughs along the way. I’m not promising. [Insert joke here.] But, as I said, if you’ve never written a comedy before, you’re in for a wonderful journey. Writing comedy is lots of fun. When I’m writing scenes I make myself laugh all the time. It isn’t the easiest task in the world, but it isn’t the hardest, either, especially if you you’ve taken the time to think through your plot and characters in advance (which is why you’re reading this book). Furthermore, writing comedies is a noble profession. As I said at the beginning of this introduction, and I said it because it’s the most important thing I’ll say: jokes are a way of telling truth—a delightful way—that brings insight to the audience while also providing them with great pleasure. Comedy deepens our understanding of human nature, the world, and the life we all share in it. It’s astounding it doesn’t get the attention and respect it deserves. One more thing: comedy is not a formula. Understanding the techniques in this book will not enable you to make funny if you’re not. A moment of comic explosion is usually two or more of these principles coinciding in a surprising way—as surprising to you as to the audience, usually. However this book will teach you to construct characters and situations much more like to result in said explosions, and to recognize them when they work, and thus enable you to play variations on them and make them work elsewhere in the narrative. Repetition with variation is a key technique, and it’s easier to do when you know why something was funny in the first place. Another note: my references and examples will be all over the map, from low comedy to classic theatre, from Moliere and Oscar Wilde to YouTube videos, to classic screwball comedies from the Golden Age of American Film, to TV sitcoms of all stripes and eras. I strive to provide a lot of examples in hopes that at least one rings a bell. Obviously, we haven’t seen all the same movies, plays and cat food commercials, so no need to feel bad if a particular example is outside your ken. Definitions of Comedy There are a lot of definitions of the comedy out there. Perhaps most often, it’s said that a happy ending is the defining characteristic that makes a dramatic narrative a comedy. Fair enough.
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Lord Byron said that all comedies end in marriage. Lots do, especially “romcoms” (romantic comedies). But for me, comedy serves a practical purpose: that of provoking laughter. I rate comedies on how often they make me laugh. I define a comedy as a dramatic narrative that aims to provoke laughter—and I’m not embarrassed to say it. Better Living Through Comedy To “write funnier movies” is no joke. Mind/Body Health by Hafen has a chapter on the mental and physical health benefits of laughter and they’re amazing. Comedy relieves pain, stress, fear, anger and depression. It enhances self-esteem and broad-mindedness. It prevents industrial accidents. No—really! So to write funnier movies is indeed to serve humanity. This is something Woody Allen understands. One of his finest comedies, “Hannah and her Sisters” (1986) has the depressed hero (played by Mr. Allen) on the verge of suicide, but wandering into revival house and watching “Duck Soup”—and deciding that life is worth living after all. Then there’s “Starlight memories,” his parody of Fellini, which ends with the filmmaker hero (again played by Mr. Allen) encountering aliens and asking what he can do to make the world a better place: “You wanna do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes.” A Warning I have done my best to organize the subject of comedy and break it into bite-sized pieces, but that’s always going to be a little bit forced and artificial because character and plot (which is to say the comic situation) overlap and even, arguably, are the same thing. A dramatic character lives because he does things and says thing, and those things drive the plot forward—they are part of the plot. If what he says and does is part of the plot, where do you draw the line between character and plot? What that means is, chapters that concern themselves with one thing will inevitably touch on other things, because we are dealing witn an organic whole: a piece of dramatic writing that contains plot, character, theme, style and—one hopes—comedy.
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CHAPTER ONE: PRINCIPLES OF COMEDY
THE COMIC MOMENT: THAT’S WRONG! Dr. Seuss, who sold a lot of children’s books, once explained that comedy, essentially, is a child’s reaction to being told something that’s “not right.” You’re tucking them in and you say, “I know you’ve hidden an elephant under those bed sheets.” And the child giggles because she knows that it is impossible to hide an elephant in a twin bed, or even a queen-size. It’s the same for grown-ups: how far is that from the famous Groucho Marx line, from Animal Crackers, “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I dunno.” As a child, your most important task is to understand how the world works: how things are supposed to be. When things aren’t as they’re supposed to be we have a sudden, flashing thought: “That’s wrong!” And there’s a certain delight in that mastery of our ability to identify successfully that which is wrong. The wrong thing might be morally wrong, physically impossible, or just impolite, but something is not as it should be and I have identified it. It’s a little triumph. It makes me feel good. You’re busted! I’ve busted you, or I’ve busted the world, but in any case I know that an elephant can’t hide in my bed. A spider could, and if you want the child to cry, substitute “spider” for elephant, but don’t blame me when crawls in your bed at 3 A.M. Our delight in figuring out the working of the world and characters in it never goes away, no matter how old we get, but as we grow up we more finely hone our sense of what is right and wrong. For a sophisticated adult, hearing someone order “a nice mare-lotte” might be hilarious, whereas it would fly right over a little kid’s head. But essentially, it’s the same thing the child experiences: something is wrong and I’ve spotted it, figured it out, which makes me smart—and better than the person or thing I’ve identified as wrong. No wonder I laugh. I won. Most often, the “wrong thing” comedy shows us is human bad behavior, misbehavior, or inappropriate behavior. The opposite of that doing things the right way. When we do things the right way, we adhere to “norms” or “standards”: the rules and expectations that govern life. But real people often deviate from norms, and comic characters deviate as often as possible depending on how many laughs the guy who wrote them wants to get. They behave in ways that are “not right.” Their behavior is inappropriate, naughty or incongruous. Their behavior may in some way be unacceptable or inappropriate. They are not acting they “should” given the circumstances. As you will see, the comic characters inappropriate behavior in some way does not fit in, and is a function of their interaction with the world—their context.
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“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be,” wrote William Hazlitt, in Lectures on the English Comic Writers, “Lecture I: On Wit and Humour” (1819). Isn’t he, arguably, saying that the human being is the only animal that can recognize the inappropriate—and laugh at it. DEVIATION FROM NORMS AND STANDARDS: CRITICISM AND FORGIVENESS We deviate from these norms usually, but not always, in harmless ways, and usually (but not always) as a result of common, normal human weaknesses that we all share to a greater or lesser degree. We’re all selfish, greedy, dishonest or stupid at least some of the time, but we also see that to be selfish, greedy, dishonest or stupid is against the rules— the norms. It is usually said that laughter is about enforcing these norms—an expression of disapproval. Maybe. Another way to look at it is that laughter is an expression of our forgiveness of the deviation from the norm. We’re not demanding that the character be jailed or horsewhipped—we’re laughing, which means we don’t approve, but we probably don’t hate him. We don’t think he’s less than human. We recognize our common humanity. When Shakespeare’s Puck says, “What fools these mortals be,” there’s a contemptuous edge to it that makes it not such a funny line. Laughter says, “What fools we mortals be.” But I digress. What laughter “means” is really a subject for psychologists and philosophers. For now, our goal is create laughter in the context of a dramatic narrative— that is to say, we want to write a comedy—and to do that it helps to understand norms and how people deviate from them. Let’s identify the kinds of norms from which we deviate, keeping in mind that borders are porous, and these categories bleed into each other, coincide, and synergize. DEVIATION #1: FROM CULTURAL NORMS Within any given culture, there are norms. Cultural norms are the norms of behavior that a particular culture imposes on its members. A Baptist church in Harlem has one set of norms, a saloon in Dodge City another. To burp at the dinner table is abnormal in one culture, mandatory in another. Manners, etiquette and customs are good examples of cultural norms. What is normal in a village in Africa might not be normal at a Rotary Club in Kansas City, Kansas. What’s more, cultural norms change over time. What’s not OK in 1850 may not raise an eyebrow 200 years later. That is why comedy has a shelf life: the norms change and therefore the comedy disappears. This is also why the timelessness of the greatest comedies, such as those of Moliere, is so amazing.
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An example of deviation from cultural norms would be the character Archie Bunker on the classic sitcom “All in the Family.” Archie was a racist, and his outspoken belief in racial stereotypes was a deviation from social norms even back in the 1970, when the show was a big hit. People of all races laughed and laughed at Archie, but they also liked him and forgave him, because in that era his ignorance was understandable. A few decades later that ignorance is less understandable, so his character seems less likeable and forgivable. Today he wouldn’t get the laughs he got then. Times change, references change, comedy fades. That’s why your old Uncle Carl’s jokes aren’t as funny as yours. Another character who deviates from cultural norms is Rodney Dangerfield in the film Caddy Shack. He’s vulgar, bluntly outspoken, and wildly deviant from the norms of the strict subculture of a snooty golf club. In Victor/Victoria, when Toddy puts a cockroach in his dinner to get out of paying, that’s a deviation in multiple ways. First, stealing is not OK in most cultures, nor is putting insects in food. Flatulence is a deviation from a cultural norm, for example the farting scenes in The Nutty Professor and in Blazing Saddles. (How dare you fart before my wife?” “I didn’t know it was her turn!”) In Trainwreck, even in our post-Germaine Greer, post-Madonna western culture, Amy Schumer’s over-the-top promiscuity is a deviation from cultural norms (though perhaps not the cultural norms of Bonobo monkeys, among whom her character would be popular and admired for her social skills). Later, when we talk about the concept of “fish out of water,” you will see that when characters that embody one set of cultural norms are plopped into a completely different culture, their deviations become funny, for example the Sasha Baron Cohen character in Borat. The comedy stems from his ridiculous, over-the-top deviation, but also from the reactions to it by members of the host culture. In deviation from cultural norms, the deviant behavior might be where the laugh is, or the reaction to it might be where the laugh is: the “shocked observer” character. Or the observer trying not to react, but we know they’re reacting. The Stereotype and Deviation from the Norm In the past, and to some degree today, one way in which comedy enforced cultural norms was by employing unflattering stereotypes. Women, Latinos, blacks, Asians, LGBT people and so on were thought all to behave in certain stereotypical ways—and those ways were at odds with the way a ruling class white, heterosexual male behaved, and he was right and they were wrong. His behavior was the norm by which the behavior of the “out” group was judged; the stereotypical behavior was the subject of mockery. In early cinema, stereotypical depictions of African American men were often employed to supposed comic effect, with lazy, shuffling servant characters who were always quite afraid of ghosts (though, to add nuance to the analysis, very often they turned out to be
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right within the context of the narrative—the ghost they believed in and the white people didn’t was real). The point is that the member of the out group is not acting “right” because they’re not acting like the white, heterosexual males who are the norm. Many years ago there was a very popular one-act play (by the great George S. Kaufman, by the way), often done at high schools back in the day, entitled If Men Played Cards as Women Do. The boys got together for cards, but acted the way women supposedly did when they played cards— jumped up on the table because they were afraid of mice and so on. (Neil Simon’s play The Odd Couple has card-playing scenes in which fussbudget Felix deviates from the norm in similar ways, and it’s hard to imagine that Neil Simon wasn’t influences by Kaufman’s one-act). Not only did the play mock stereotypical female behavior, but also such behavior, when performed by men was incongruous (later, we’ll discus the concept of “hybridization of type”—one thing at a time). The play would seem offensive if performed now (and it won’t be) because it deals in stereotypes that we no longer accept, but that were widely accepted at the time—if they weren’t, the play would not have been as popular as it was or have gotten the laughs it got. Airplane! Playing with Norms and Racial Stereotypes (a digression) In the bad old days, the stereotypical behavior of the “out” group is a deviation from the norm that is laughable. More recently, though, the stereotype can be the norm. It depends on the point of view of the writer. He’s the one who decides what the norm is. In the very funny disaster movie parody Airplane!, there’s a famous scene in which two black men on the plane speak only “jive.” One of them is sick but he and his friend can’t make themselves understood to the stewardess because of their dialect, which deviates from the “norm” of so-called “standard” English, and deviating in a way that is a racial stereotype (which is underlined by their stereotypical costumes—one wears a purple suit). It looks like the joke is going to be at the expense of the stereotypically depicted black men. But that’s just the set-up—there’s a clever twist. As the stewardess (that’s what they were called back then) struggles to understand the jive-talking black men, a middle-aged white woman politely interrupts: “Oh, stewardess—I speak jive.” Now, this isn’t just any white woman. She’s played by Barbara Billingsley, who was June Cleaver, the housewife mom on Leave It to Beaver, a sitcom that epitomized bland, oppressive, 1950s-style whiteness. The show was unbelievably fake treacle (faker and treaclier than even The Cosby Show) and June Cleaver became herself a stereotype: a stereotypical post-war, white, American, cookie- baking, pearl-and-high-heel-wearing stay-at-home mom. And this whiter than white woman proceeds to explain to the stewardess what the black man has said—to “translate” it from jive into English. The stereotype of the white ‘50s housewife, who would certainly be too provincial in her suburban purdah to pick up a ghetto patois, by speaking it deviates from what is expected of her. The norm of the 50s housewife has evolved into a stereotype of the 50s housewife and now she deviates from that stereotype. Dizzying, and a classic scene of comedy that isn’t over yet.
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The gag plays out further when the stewardess says she’ll go get some medicine, and the white woman proceeds to “translate” it into jive for the benefit of the black men. They’re outraged that she assumed them to be so ignorant as not to understand the stewardess. At this point we expect the white woman to apologize meekly and slink away—but instead she raises her voice and “sasses” the men in the manner of a stereotypical black woman who’s not going to take any of their guff. Throughout the course of the gag she’s gone from being the stereotype (the white woman) to deviating from the stereotype (she speaks jive) to becoming another stereotype when she seems to slip into the persona of a stereotypical black woman. She seems to a black woman in the body of a white woman (later we’ll discuss hybridization of type, which this scene touches upon). One more example: Queen Latifah and Steve Martin co-starred in Bringing Down the House (2003) about a black woman who breaks out of prison and moves in with a very conventional, white, middle-class man. It’s a fish-out-of-water comedy (she doesn’t fit into his neighborhood) but the modern twist is that her stereotypical black behavior is seen as better, more authentic, more normal, than his uptight stereotypical white behavior—so the black stereotype, in that way, becomes the norm against which the behavior of the white people is judged, and the white behavior that used to be the standard or norm, is now itself transformed into a stereotype. A Quick Digression: Is Comedy Inherently Unkind or Politically Incorrect? While some kinds of comedy are unkind and cruel, comedy doesn’t have to be unkind or cruel. It’s a matter of norms. Different people have different norms and will find different things funny. My preference is for comedy that evinces what one psychologist called an “adult” sense of humor, which he described as free of meanness, accepting of human imperfection (“foibles,” they used to be called), and demonstrating an understanding of life’s absurdity. But comedy is often critical and even hostile under the surface. It’s not always politically correct or kind. Of course, political correctness and kindness are norms, and if deviating from norms is the basis of comedy, unkind and politically incorrect people can be funny—but we’re laughing because we know that they’re wrong. DEVIATION #2: FROM HUMAN NORMS As we’ve seen, comedy is not always politically correct by today’s standards and not always kind. Sometimes the norms enforced by comedy are outdated, oppressive or even cruel. Remember that in Elizabethan England, animal baiting was acceptable entertainment: put a chimp atop a horse, set loose the mastiffs, and guffaw hysterically as the terrified chimp screeches and clutches the steed as it bucks and neighs and snorts in horror, and both animals end up with chunks of flesh torn off by the ravening dogs. Now that’s comedy! Queen Elizabeth loved it, and perhaps the next night would take in a performance of Shakespeare and relish it just as much. Go back a bit further, to medieval times: throwing rocks at schizophrenics and watching their amusing cries of anguish and herky-jerky dodging—to Medieval Guy (and some modern junior high kids—talk about savages), that’s rich comic amusement. Times change but humans are still a little bit savage and comedy still isn’t always nice (Mean Girls). That I include an example of
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comedy in this book doesn’t mean I necessarily approve of its deeper meanings, I certainly don’t think it’s nice to make fun of people physical differences. That said, here’s an example of deviation from human norms: if we were at a very fancy pants cocktail party and saw basketball great Michael Jordan chatting with the actor Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones), who is a very little person, most of us would probably at least smile. And if they started dancing together we would guffaw. Both of these men deviate from the “normal” height of an adult man. To be physically different is to deviate. The giant prosthetic penises in ancient Greek comedy and Dolly Parton’s more-than- ample bosom both got laughs. The mere presence of the physical difference isn’t usually enough to get a laugh—one has to put it into action. Andre the Giant is a big, scary man, but he’s a funny big man if we have him visit the home of a little old Japanese lady who is four-foot-nine and whose house has been built to her scale not his. His physical difference becomes inappropriate and he’s “a fish out of water” (much more on that concept later). In the Monty Python sketch “The Ministry of Silly Walks,” gentlemanly government officials stroll about demonstrating wildly ridiculous and impractical ways of walking that grossly deviate from the normal gait of human beings. The exaggerated hip swiveling of Mae West and Marilyn Monroe were erotic but also comical. Both actresses were primarily comediennes. On Saturday Night Live, The Coneheads were a family of people with conical heads. The norm is a head more roundish, and the resemblance to dunce caps was no doubt intentional. In the film Dumb and Dumber, the deviation from human norms is right in the title. To be stupider than others is funny, but also it’s funny to be “too smart,” hence the success of that sitcom about all the smart nerds. Back to Dumb and Dumber, when they triumph over people of normal intelligence there a lovely, surprising irony. It’s “wrong” that they should do so. DEVIATION #3: FROM NORMS OF PHYSICAL POSSIBILITY These are the norms that deal with what is possible in the real world. When characters do things that are physically impossible, that’s “wrong” in a funny way. The world of cartoons is the most vivid example of this. When Wile E. Coyote runs off the edge of a cliff, keeps going, stops in midair, and only plummets to the canyon floor because he looked down and understood his plight, that is deviation from physical norms. When said coyote paints the entrance to a train tunnel on a canyon wall in hopes that the Road Runner will smash into it and thus become dinner, only to see the Road Runner nonchalantly (as nonchalant as one can be and 150 miles per hour, and for Road Runner that is pretty nonchalant) zoom into the faux tunnel as though it were real, that’s deviation from physical possibility. Of course, the expert Warner Brothers cartoonists know to repeat and vary the gag, so when the coyote tries to pursue the Road Runner into
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now-real tunnel—we saw the Road Runner enter it—it’s suddenly not real anymore. Wile E. Coyote smashes into it. That last is an example of how a great comic moment usually contains more than one principle in operation simultaneously: yes, its physical impossibility, but it’s also character. We know that Wile E. Coyote never has luck and that the Road Runner always does, so both are in character, and even the physical universe distends itself to keep them there. All cartoons do similar things. In Up, a man travels in a house held aloft by balloon. Physical Impossibility and the Action Hero Very often, this physical impossibility principle is embodied in an action hero whose moves are so athletic, agile and over the top as to defy physics. Watching Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan elude villains as he crashes, dodges and leaps his way through a chaotic urban setting (street vendors beware!), helped along by vigorous editing, is as excitingly suspenseful as it gets but funny at the same time. So, too, was a Douglas Fairbanks swordfight, especially as parodied by Gene Kelly in The Royal Rascal: the faux silent film embedded in Singin’ in the Rain. Even at the end of Unforgiven, where Clint Eastwood outdraws, like, twenty guys and kills them all, some of the exhilaration and release of tension we feel over the impossibility of his feat tips over into a kind of comedy—I laughed. A Digression about Dramatic Tension and Comic Relief In all those cases, the dramatic tension of the situation creates an emotional excitement conducive to laughter. The action and jeopardy build tension that is then released. The great British farceur Alan Ayckbourn advises that even a drama should have laughs, and that the writer should know where are they are and nurture and make them intended (even if they weren’t intended in the first place). Why should a drama have laughs? Because, according to Ayckbourn, the tension will make the audience laugh at some point, so might as well be control of well so as to avoid laughs where you don’t want them. Back to Action and the Comedy of Physical Impossibility: A Neat Segue Silent movies used this principle extensively: Charlie Chaplin, George Méliès and Buster Keaton in The Cameraman all defied physics. Advances in computer graphics have enabled filmmakers to take that in new directions that encroach on the bailiwick of animation, for example the Jim Carrey vehicle The Mask, in which his face transmogrifies into a series of, well, scary masks. The great Frank Tashlin, who directed Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope vehicles, in his classic western comedy Son of Paleface, provides a chase scene (again, the excitement of action creating fertile tension) in which the hero, chased by Indians, driving a buckboard, loses a wheel. He just reaches over from within the buckboard and grabs the axel, thus (impossibly) holding up the speeding vehicle. Then he urges his companion, rootin’ tootin’ cowgal Jane Russell, to hurry up, as what he’s doing is impossible. He acknowledges the impossibility of the action!
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Remember what I said about more than one thing going on at once in most great comic moments? Yes, he’s defying the rules of physics, but then he’s also deviating from artistic norms—the norm being that, when the impossible thing happens, the character on the screen, being part of a screen world, a reality where impossible things do happen, does not acknowledge the impossibility. Bob Hope acknowledges the impossibility of his action, which neatly segues into our next form of deviation. DEVIATION #4: FROM ARTISTIC NORMS Artistic norms are the conventions of cinema, theatre and storytelling that we mostly only notice in their absence. The rules of filmmaking, the rules of storytelling, the conventions of genre—all the myriad ways of presenting dramatic narrative that have accumulated over the centuries, are things we take for granted—for example the “fourth wall.” The Fourth Wall In plays and movies, a centuries-old convention going back to the Greeks is that the characters within the story are unaware of the audience. They exist in spaces that have four walls and those walls exclude us, the audience. Three walls are solid, but the fourth is like a two-way mirror: the audience can see and hear the characters, but the characters can’t see or hear the audience. They don’t know we’re there. To defy that convention is to “break the fourth wall.” When Bob Hope mentions that his actions are impossible in “Son of Paleface,” in a sly way he’s breaking the fourth wall. Who could he be talking to but us? Obviously, the people inside the narrative aren’t surprised that he can perform his physically impossible action, they aren’t reacting to it, but Son of Paleface knows that we will be surprised. He’s talking to the audience—telling them what he’s doing is impossible, that he knows it’s impossible, and that he want us to know he knows it’s impossible. When Ferris Buehler narrates the adventures that occur on his day off, he’s breaking the fourth wall. Once you’ve broken the fourth wall, al hell can break loose. On the old Burns & Allen TV show, George Burns would watch TV to see what his zany wife Gracie Allen was up to, and he’d share it with the TV audience. Is that breaking the fourth wall? Sure— because was acknowledging to the TV audience that he and Gracie were on TV and he knew it. In Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, the characters in a 1930s adventure movie suddenly become aware of the movie house audience and then the leading man (Jeff Daniels) realizes that he can step off the screen and into the real world (which, being within a movie, is just as unreal as the film-within-a-film), and have a love affair with one of its inhabitants (Mia Farrow). (Once he’s in the real world, his norms collide with its norms and have the “fish out of water,” which we’ll get into later.) For more of this
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kind of playing with the fourth wall and deconstructing narrative conventions to comic effect, see Mr. Allen’s comic masterpiece Deconstructing Harry. Speaking of The Woodman, there’s also a wonderful moment in Annie Hall where Woody Allen, standing in line for a movie ticket, get stuck listening to a pontificating media studies professor who loudly shouts opinions that Allen loathes. So Allen turns to the camera, breaking the fourth wall, to complain to the audience in the movie house about his boorish line-mate. No one in the line hears him—except The Pontificating Professor, who starts arguing with Woody about Marshall McLuhan, and to bolster his side of the argument Woody says, “I happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here,” and pulls him into the scene, the real Marshal McLuhan, and McLuhan sides with Woody Allen, who then turns to the camera and says, “If life were only like this.” (Ironically, I sort of agree with what Allen has the pontificating professor say about Fellini. But of course, I am a pontificating professor.) Asides and direct address of the camera Breaking the fourth wall is nothing new. When the maid in a 17th century Moliere play speaks a tart “aside” to the audience, pointing out the foibles of someone on stage, she’s breaking the fourth wall. But is it really she who is breaking it—isn’t it the author of the play? Wait—who’s being naughty? Who’s transgressing? The author, the character, or the work of dramatic fiction itself? The question is an interesting one that can probably be untangled differently in every instance—or maybe, like so much in comedy, can’t quite be untangled at all (but we’ll keep trying). It’s an issue I think about when I watch one of my favorite comedies, Wayne’s World, where the artistically underrated (but commercially successful) auteur Mike Myers ingeniously repeats and varies his assault on the fourth wall. In cinema, one form of breaking the wall is “direct address of the camera,” the cinematic equivalent of the theatrical “side.” Wayne does this, directly addresses the camera, and then exits the scene. But the movie, the camera, instead of cutting to the next scene as it normally would (right? The hero is done talking to the audience so we move on), instead, when the hero is done directly addressing the audience, the camera just… keeps running, “forgets” to turn off, which of curse is itself a deviation from a norm of filmmaking: when the point of the scene is over, the film cuts away from the scene, right? Stay with me here. Now, the running camera is generating what amounts to an empty frame, since no dramatic action is there to be captured. There’s a void—into which steps another character, seemingly an extra (played by Ed O’Neill from Modern Family and Married With Children), who sullenly “hijacks” direct address of the camera with his irrelevant complaining about his insignificant life. Multiple artistic norms are being mangled here. First, a dramatic narrative is not supposed to contain irrelevancies. Second, when the camera is directly addressed, it’s almost always the main character or a character from whose point of view the story is being told who does it—and certainly not a mere extra. After all, directly addressing the camera establishes a privileged bond between the character and the audience, and it makes no sense to have an extraneous character do it.
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Later in film there’s more such horseplay around direct address of the camera. Garth, Wayne’s dim sidekick, seated at a table in a restaurant, decides he has something to say to the audience and wants to address the camera directly but he seems not to know the conventions of how it works. The convention is that the actor turns to the camera and talks, and the people in the scene don’t notice. But Garth is seemingly afraid he’ll be noticed if he does that, so beckons the camera to come under the table with him and talks there. As in so many comic moments, more than one thing is going on at once: the narrative is deviating from a norm by disobeying the rules of direct address of the camera, and Garth is violating a human norm—his actions reveal his subnormal intelligence. The fourth wall is the narrative convention most often disobeyed to comic effect, but any convention (or another term for convention might be “artistic norm”) will do. Exposing the narrative convention by deviating from it is called self-reflection, self-reflexivity, or in Russian, “ostrenanie.” There’s an example at the end of the musical Singin’ in the Rain. The film is about characters who make a talking picture, and it ends with them embracing before a billboard advertising the movie they were making. Examples of Characters Acknowledging They’re in Fictions Sometimes breaking the fourth wall is accomplished when a character acknowledges to the audience that he knows he’s in a movie. Daffy Duck did this in the legendary cartoon Duck Amuck, wherein he argues with an animator who kept putting Daffy’s head on silly bodies, or arbitrarily changing the background in ways that discomfited Daffy. (At the end of the movie the puckish animator is revealed to be Bugs Bunny himself, whose character had supplanted Daffy as the most popular one in the Warner Brothers stable.) Another example of a character acknowledging that he’s in a fictional narrative involved Bob Hope. Movies are corporate products—in fact, legally, the corporation is the author—but it is not normal to acknowledge that, nor for the characters to acknowledge they are in a fictional construct, nor do they acknowledge that they are being paid and paid well for their acting. But in The Road to Utopia, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby have an exchange that transgresses all those norms. It goes like this: Hope: “Hey, get a load of that bread and butter!” There’s a shot of a mountain. Crosby: “Bread and butter? That’s a mountain!” The mountain morphs into the Paramount Pictures logo, which is a mountain. Hope: “Maybe a mountain to you, but it’s bread and butter to me!” Another clever example is in Austin Powers, where Michael York plays a character named Basil Exposition. As you may know, “exposition” is the name we give to the information in a narrative that allows us to make sense of what’s going on: where are we,
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who are there people and what do they want, what’s their relationship to each other. Basil Exposition is the spy boss who gives the spy his marching orders, sort of the way “M” would give James Bond his assignment and along the way give us all kinds of exposition. By naming the character Basil Exposition, writer Mike Myers exposes the bones of dramatic structure in a way that deviates from the norm. Playing with conventions a la Mike Meyers is nothing new, take for example Moliere’s play The Miser (first performed in 1668). In it, Harpagon the Miser’s hoard is missing. The police magistrate asks whom he suspects and Harpagon replies, “Everybody! I wish you to take into custody the whole town and suburbs,” which he says while indicating the audience in the theatre. Elsewhere in the play, when characters deliver asides to the audience, other characters ask them whom they’re talking to. So, by all means, play with and break the convention of the fourth wall for comic effect, but no need to imagine you’ve invented the wheel. Other examples of playful deviation from aesthetic norms can be found in the brilliant Italian film The Icicle Thief, the cinematic satire of television The Groove Tube, and on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Genres that depend on deviation from artistic norms Parody, camp and intentional camp are all comedic genres that depend on deviation from artistic norms for their comedy. “Parody” is, according to Merriam-Webster, “a literary or musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule.” In other words, the original work becomes a set of norms, and those norms are exaggerated, twisted or subverted to get laughs. The great filmmaker Mel Brooks parodied Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein in Young Frankenstein; Star Wars in Space Balls; the Western film genre in Blazing Saddles; and the works of Alfred Hitchcock in High Anxiety (arguably Brooks’s best parody). There’s a long history of parody in the cinema: Méliès’s early silent film A Trip to the Moon parodied Jules Verne. On cable TV, Amy Sedaris’s series Strangers with Candy, in which she plays a slutty, drug-addled grown woman who goes back to finish high school, parodied primly sanctimonious After School Specials (and was a prime example of fish out of water). More on parody later, and also camp and intentional camp. For now… DEVIATION #5: FROM LINGUISTIC NORMS This is an easy one, because it just means people don’t “talk right” Humans (and even cartoon animals) are expected to have a certain mastery of language. Mispronunciation, odd voices, foreign or regional accents and speech impediments (the last two maybe not so politically correct) all have been sources of comedy.
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Foreign accents: Apu on The Simpsons. Latka Gravas on the classic sitcom Taxi, Bugs Bunny’s Brooklynese. Speech impediments: Porky Pig’s stutter. Daffy Duck’s spraying of saliva. Non-sequiturs, Mangled Word Choice, and “Goldwynisms” When people are ignorant, in a hurry, or just don’t care, they’ll grab the nearest word whether it fits or not. This creates malapropisms and non-sequiturs. There was once a Hollywood mogul, San Goldwyn, so famous for his mismatched way of putting words together that the term “a Goldwynism” arose to describe it. Here are a few of the more famous ones, some undoubtedly apocryphal: “Include me out.” “We can get all the Indians we need at the reservoir.” “A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.” “I’ve been laid up with intentional flu.” Mrs. Malaprop and her isms The term “malapropism,” refers to the mistaken misuse of words out of ignorance or whatever, was named after the character comes from a fictional stage character “Mrs. Malaprop” in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals. Mrs. Malaprop was the most famous example of malapropisms and she gave them her name. Here are a few of hers: “I have since laid Sir Anthony’s preposition before her.” Surely she meant “proposition.” “I am sorry to say, Sir Anthony, that my affluence over my niece is very small.” Do you mean “influence”? “Illiterate him…from your memory.” I think “obliterate” is the word she forgot. “If ever you betray what you are entrusted with…you forfeit my malevolence for ever.” Ummm…benevolence? “She might reprehend the true meaning of what she is saying.” Well, she might indeed, but she might also “comprehend” it. And figure this one out for yourself: “Sure, if I reprehend anything in this world it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!”
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John Ford directed a remarkable 1930 prison picture, Up the River, which has a group of female inmates looking over the most recent arrivals. One of them points out a new girl and confides that she’s an “extortionist.” Causing another inmate to bustles over and asks, beaming with excitement, “Honey, was you in the circus?” Of course, there aren’t many circuses left anymore, so you might not have gotten the joke’s implied reference to “contortionist.” Malapropisms turn up in politics, too, as when President George W. Bush solemnly intoned, “We cannot let terrorists and rogue nations hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile.” It’s “hostage,” W. With a “G.” Non-Sequiturs and Nonsense Closely related to the malapropism is the non sequitur. Webster’s Second defines non sequitur as, “In logic, a conclusion or inference which does not follow from the premises.” Theatre of the absurd, for example the plays of Ionesco (for example, The Bald Soprano), deal in this, but so did Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland. Groucho Marx was often called upon to deliver nonsense lines, such as, “Last night I shot in elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I dunno.” The non sequitur is a form of “misdirection” more on that later: the audience is led in one direction and then suddenly a discordant or contradictory element is introduced. Misunderstanding The 1940s movie comedy team Abbot and Costello were famous for their routine, “Who’s on First?” In it, there’s a baseball team of idly named fellows. The first baseman is name “Who,” the second baseman is named “What,” and the third baseman’s name is “I Don’t Know.” Other players are gentlemen named Why, Because, Tomorrow and I Don’t Give a Darn. Costello: “I want you to tell me the names of the fellows on the St. Louis team.” Abbott: “I’m telling you. Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know is on third—“ Costello: “You know the fellows’ names?” Abbott: “Yes.” Costello: “Well, then who’s playing first?” Abbott: “Yes.” And on and on, spiraling through misunderstandings. Trust me, it’s funnier when they do it. Find it on YouTube.
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By the way, a few years, at the university where I teach, a fellow named Dr. Hu was appointed president. We had a lot of fun with that. It never got old. Mispronunciation: You Drink Too Much, Pop A kind of linguistic deviation related to misunderstanding is mispronunciation. A friend mine still chuckles about going out on a date with a guy who said to the wine steward, “Do you have a nice mare-lotte?” Related to mispronunciation would be “misinflection.” Is that a word? Inflecting something wrongly, in a way that indicates you don’t understand it. Here’s a true story that illustrates the point: If you did high school theatre (and if you’re reading this book, there’s a good chance you might have) reminds me how in high school, if you were a boy, just showing up at the auditions meant you could get cast, which reminds me of someone I’ll call Angus, who was just a terrible actor, the worst, but who always got some kind of part because not enough boys auditioned. Just a terrible, terrible actor. Undeterred by lack of aptitude or training, Angus competed in the forensics league, in the “dramatic interpretation” category with an excerpt from the play I Never Sang for My Father, which contained the line, “You drink too much, Pop!” Only Angus inflected it, “You drink too much pop!” Of course, pop is terrible for you, and maybe he was just way ahead of his time, but I somehow think that wasn’t the playwright’s point. By the way, that’s an example of deviation from linguistic norms.) Puns and Wordplay Merriam-Webster defines pun as “the usually humorous use of a word in such a way as to suggest two or more of its meanings or the meaning of another word similar in sound.” In All About Eve, Margot Channing, played by the incomparable Bette Davis, is a Broadway star about to give a cocktail party at which she fully intends to make a scene and perhaps several. As she ascends the stairs, very dry martini in hand, she growls, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” Of course, the word that usually sits where “night” does is “flight.” She plays on the fact that night and flight sound alike. The difference between a “pun” and a “malapropism” seems to be that puns are intentional and malapropisms are mistakes. Writers of newspaper headlines love puns excessively. So do the people who make up movie titles: Legally Blonde, Bee Movie, and Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit would be unfortunate examples. The voices of performers
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Some of you may be actors. From the point of view of performance, a distinctive voice can bring a new comic dimension to a script or enhance an existing dimension, for example, big, fat 1930s character actor Eugene Palette’s gravelly bass in My Man Godfrey and The Lady Eve, Stan Laurel’s careful prissiness and whining, and Jim Carrey’s adolescent honk. A distinctive voice is most often an arrow in the quiver of a character actor, but there are examples among stars, too: Marilyn Monroe, Judy Holliday and Jean Arthur had little- girl voices that enhanced their delivery of comic lines. These are things the actor brings to role and come into play when they chose a part or when a director casts him. Grown-up voices on children and vice versa are often funny: apart from Monroe (and the grown-up voice of the very little boy who has a crush on her in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) there’s classic cartoon flapper Betty Boop, the high squeak of Mickey Mouse, and Warner Brothers cartoon canary Tweety (a name that seems to refer to the character’s voice, by the way), who could read a menu and make it funny. Peter Lorre (Rick, Rick, save me!” in Casablanca) had a distinctive accent that worked for serious heavies (Huston’s The Maltese Falcon), unintentional camp (the demented surgeon in Mad Love), intentional camp (Beat the Devil) and pure comedy (Silk Stockings). Impersonating a Voice and Mimicry Lorre’s evergreen voice even tuned up a movie I wrote, Pizza Wars. The director didn’t think my lines were funny (they were, Babak) and had the actor deliver them in a Peter Lorre voice. Impersonating, mimicking or mocking someone’s voice to cruel comic effect is a technique known in every schoolyard. It’s a form of disguise and misrepresentation—I’m pretending to be you. Doing impersonation used to be a very popular form of standup comedy, though one sees little of it anymore. Katharine Hepburn successfully sued when her distinctive voice was impersonated in radio ads for Vita Herring. The linguistic deviation expresses character Almost always, the deviant way of talking is an expression of character. Warner Brothers cartoon fowl Daffy Duck sprays saliva when he speaks because he’s so overexcited and outraged. Foghorn Leghorn shouts in a Southern accent because it expresses his impatience and exasperation—his Southern traditionalism is offended by the by the Chicken Hawk’s ignorance of the rules of the game, and the voice comes out of his overreaction. W.C. Fields mumbles just loud enough for you to hear because he’s seething with passive aggression—the passive aggression just bubbles over in his mumbled invective. CHANGING NORMS AND CROSSING BORDERS: A DIGRESSION
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Let’s us take a moment to discuss a problem associated with deviation from norms: norms change. If comedy results deviation from norms, the changing and forgetting of norms means that the reference point is gone, so—so is the comedy. This is something that has been known for centuries, and gone on for centuries. There was a time when throwing rocks at the village schizophrenic, or mocking the hobbling gait of a slave after a good whipping, was a source of great mirth. However our times are slightly less ignorant and those things aren’t so hilarious anymore. Comedy is only as strong as the standard or values that provide the benchmark for the deviations. Before we laugh at “that’s not right,” we have to know what is right, and that changes from time to time—and also from place to place and from culture to culture. That’s why comedy usually doesn’t travel as well as well as drama and action (believe me, that’s what studio executives will tell you), or it usually doesn’t last as long. This can be sad. For example, when I was in college and was first exposed to classic screwball comedies at the Film Society at Northwestern University, the first example of the screwball genre I saw was Twentieth Century, a howlingly funny farce about a ruthlessly egotistical Broadway producer and the lingerie model he discovers, bullies into stardom, and tries to win back after she leaves him. I cannot overemphasize what a revelation the film was to me. It launched a love affair with ‘30s and ‘40s comedy that’s still with me today. I saw Twentieth Century (released in 1934) on television recently. It was like seeing an old lover you no longer fancy. I didn’t laugh once. The acting seemed shrill and loud, the plot developments and pacing felt forced and fake. I thought, “Who am I not to laugh at this? It’s John Barrymore and Carole Lombard directed by Howard Hawks!” But you can’t make yourself laugh. Later that day, I watched What’s Up Doc?, Peter Bogdanovich’s take on the genre 38 years later. I chuckled, I chortled (OK, I have no idea what chortling is), and I even laughed. But I don’t think I laughed as hard as I did when the move came out in in 1972, and I worried, “Will I laugh 15 years from now?” Who knows? It’s getting so I’m afraid to see beloved comedies for hear that the thrill is gone. Topicality The question of topicality is related. Topical humor, humor that refers to the day’s events, such as one sees on The Daily Show, The Tonight Show monologue, or in political cartoons, seems sharp and fresh and funny because not only are the norms up to the minute, but also the references. WHY DOES THE COMIC CHARACTER DEVIATE FROM NORMS?
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In order to construct a dramatic narrative in which the deviation from norms is consistently accomplished, it is necessary to construct characters who will habitually deviate from the norms. Why? Why do they deviate? Maybe they’re perverse, it’s just their nature to oppose or rebel, so it’s not so much intentional as second nature (Dr. Evil in Austin Powers). Maybe they’re naughty and do it intentionally to amuse themselves, feel superior, feed their own egos or just get attention (characters with sharp, biting wit, like Roseanne in her sitcom, or the maid in a Moliere play). Maybe they’re ignorant of the norm (Dumb and Dumber or The Three Stooges), so they’re doing it unintentionally. The deviation may be intentional or unintentional, but almost always, even if it is intentional, they can’t help it—it’s their character. It’s their character and they never learn and never change, and that’s a good thing for us because if they did they’d stop being funny. The comic character’s nature is obsessive, relentless, and inflexible. He has a one-track mind. He is what he is and can’t be anything else. He’s too something. Too greedy, too horny, too loud, too stupid, too clumsy, too blunt, too mean, too angry, too selfish, or too hungry for cookies. And he’s always himself, even when he doesn’t fit in. Always. Always. Henri Bergson and automatic behavior One of the greatest essays on comedy was Henri Bergson’s 1900 essay “Laughter,” in which he wrote that comedy comes from automatic behavior. Human beings are supposed to be flexible and spontaneous. That’s how we learn and grow—it’s how we evolved into the magnificent creatures we are! We are “supposed” to react to every new situation with a fresh, appropriate response. Comic characters don’t. Their reactions are automatic—kneejerk, if you will. They always react the same way. They don’t calibrate their response to the specific situation at hand. They’re like the handyman who only has a hammer, so everything looks like a nail (which could be an amusing skit). Obviously, if your response to every situation is the same, much of the time your response is going to be inappropriate. INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR: COMEDY, CONTEXT AND THE FISH OUT OF WATER The expression “fish out of water” simply means placing a comic character into a situation in which he doesn’t fit: a situation where his behavior will be inappropriate.
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There are characters whose behavior would be “out of place” anywhere, so they are always fish out of water. There are other characters that are perfectly at home when they’re at home, but transplanted into a new setting or context or world, their behavior is suddenly inappropriate. A comic character acts like a “fish” whether he’s in water or not. His behavior, ingrained by his customary environment (water) persists even in his new environment (out of water), where the behavior wrong, strange, or inappropriate, and therefore risible. The key is the inflexibility of the comic character. They stay themselves whether that’s the best way to cope or not. A classic film example from film is the fantastically successful Beverly Hills Cop, which advertises its fish-out-of-water premise right in the title: it’s about a streetwise cop who behaves recklessly and cuts corners because he’s operating in Detroit, a city on the verge of chaos, and has to do whatever it takes to survive and succeed there. In Detroit, his not- by-the-book, corner-cutting methods are arguably appropriate. But when the character becomes attached to the buttoned up, by-the-book Beverly Hills police force, in a city that’s as high-toned as Detroit is down and dirty, he’s a fish out of water and his methods, in a new place, become out of place. Interestingly, the part was written for Sylvester Stallone, who’d have played streetwise New York cop, and would have still been a fish out of water but a different flavor of fish. The fish hero’s differentness can be a difficulty and disadvantage, obviously, as it is for Tim Hanks in Big, where he’s a little boy magically placed in the body of a grown-up and forced to cope with the adult world. Ironically (and in comedy irony is good), the out-of-water fish’s fishiness can be an advantage, as it is in Beverly Hills Cop, where the hero’s ignorance and disregard of Beverly Hills ways helps him cut through the clutter and solve crime in a way the milquetoast Beverly Hills officers can’t. The classic sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies might have been the screenwriter’s inspiration, because the show ran for years on the rich comic premise of a hillbilly family striking it rich and moving to Beverly Hills, bringing with them their quaint mountain ways. Take care in your selection of a setting. In general, the comic character works best when his setting or behavior is selected to highlight the disparity between his inappropriate behavior and the setting. The Three Stooges are out of place most anywhere, but most of all at a black tie ball, to which they seem to be invited inexplicably often. Who are these people who know the Stooges and invite them to these parties? And apparently rich people like nothing better than pies because there’s always a whole tableful. Mmmm. Selecting a setting for the fish out of water: places of solemnity, propriety and theatricality
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Comedy is so often a clash between the context and the character. The deviation from norms is starker and more striking in settings where norms are strict or extreme. In places where the range of behavior is narrow and highly proscribed, even slight deviation can seem wildly comic. At an amusement park or a baseball game people generally act any old way and it’s OK. But at a library, a funeral home, a Sunday school classroom or a five-star restaurant—places of solemnity, ritual, snobbery or great propriety—you have to behave and even a little deviation is noticed. And a big deviation… Eddie Murphy, in Beverly Hills Cop, plays a black man in a white world, and he’d do so again in Trading Places, the brilliant fish out of water comedy in which, as the result of a bet between heartless plutocrats, an African American street hustler (Murphy as one “Billy Ray Valentine”) trades places with the pedigreed white director of a commodities brokerage (Dan Ayckroyd as Louis Winthorpe III). Just as in Beverly Hills Cop, the streetwise ways of his fish out of water character ironically lead to success. Quite a few other comedies have hinged on the fish out of water situation of a black in a white world such as Houseguest, Distinguished Gentleman, Bringing Down the House and BAPS. It’s a pattern that provides African American writers and performers with an opportunity to satirize cultural politics. The term “theatricality” refers to settings where there might be an audience—not just a theater, but the crowded waiting line outside, a ballpark, or the rubbernecking mob that gathers when a potential suicide stands on a ledge. Behavior that deviates from the norm has more kick when there’s some kind of audience to watch it. Maybe the crowd is there to disapprove (shocked observers), or maybe they’re there to egg the hero on (Dog Day Afternoon), but having the comic behavior watched by a lot of other members of society heightens the tension, the embarrassment and the consequences of the behavior. The concept of fish out of water is tightly tied to the concept of rigidity of character. Comic characters have a hard time changing and learning, so if you take them out of their accustomed environment and plop them in a new and different one, they’ll keep acting in the old ways—as if they were still back in the old setting. The fish out of water pattern can work for an entire feature film, a sitcom that runs years, or can be applied to a single scene. Your story may not have an overarching fish-out-of- water premise, but that doesn’t mean you can’s select settings for individual scenes that heighten the inappropriate behavior of your comic characters. To make the comic characters’ flaws and rigidity pop, you put them where they don’t fit. In class, I use myself as the example of a comic character. I have a booming voice, so let’s call my character “Loud Guy.” Now let’s take the fish out of water. What about a lecture hall? No. Because it’s appropriate for Loud Guy to project—to keep the back row awake. What about a baseball game? No. Everybody’s loud there. We’ll need settings where he’s out of place, where his behavior reads as inappropriate. OK, then, how about a library? Better! A funeral home? Better still! The waiting line for international customs at an airport, Yikes!
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Proper, Fancy, Rule-bound In general, the fish will come from a less privileged setting, and will be transplanted in a setting that is fancy, serious, sober or rule-bound. If comedy is inappropriate behavior, it makes sense to take someone from a setting where standards of behavior are different and perhaps looser, and put him or her in settings where the standards are stricter. Rodney Dangerfield is funny in Caddy Shack because the golf club is so stuffy and he’s a parvenu slob. The go-to setting for the fish out of water is, hands down, the fancy restaurant. Preferably the poshest restaurant in town. It’s no coincidence that, in When Harry Met Sally, when Sally demonstrates, loudly, how women fake orgasms convincingly, it’s in a really nice restaurant. By the way, that’s Rob Reiner’s mother who puts the button on the scene when she tells the waiter, “I’ll have what she’s having.” (A lovely example of misperception—she thinks Sally is reacting to some delicious dish, when she’s really faking an orgasm.) In The Beverly Hillbillies, the fish are a colorful hillbilly family—who could be les privileged? In Bringing Down the House, Queen Latifah plays a woman from an urban ghetto. Let’s play a game: I’ll supply a list of environments, and a list of characters. Can you put together three situations with fish out of water potential? Environment: Police station Writer’s retreat Spooky motel Antebellum plantation house A psychiatrist’s office A beauty parlor Indie film set Backstage at rock concert A gynecologist’s waiting room Vet’s waiting rom Italian grocery store Italian bakery A cop car On stage, Broadway Synagogue Cathedral Mosque A naval destroyer, American A naval destroyer, Italian The oval office Turkish bath
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Turkish prison Disco in the 70s Disco, gay, today Biker bar White Castle A street race English country house French restaurant Tiny taqueria Convent An airplane cabin An airplane cockpit Seminary Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Ancient Egypt The faculty lounge Human Types: Motel clerk Serial killer Plantation field slave House slave Butler Choreographer, closeted Choreographer, out Indie filmmaker Leonardo Da Vinci African tribesman A dog (not human, but can be funny) A cat Career woman Backup singer Opera diva Evil slave master Ghost Playboy Flight attendant, female Flight attendant, straight male Flight attendant, lesbian Flight attendant, gay male Doctor A Latin American dictator A psychiatrist A painter Idi Amin
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Movie star Porn addict Elderly movie star of another era Censor for the ratings board Dominatrix Marquis de Sade Steamboat captain The President The Queen of England 12-year-old boy Tech billionaire Dirty old man College professor Film noir private eye Trophy wife High school girl with kinetic powers Songwriter Ambitious secretary Belittling dad Fop Alcoholic Supervillain Superhero Voiceover actor Chess prodigy Advertising man Elderly woman Little boy Hooker Speed freak 19th century French psychiatrist Latin dance instructor Tango instructor Tango champion New Age Guru Dalai Lama Beat poet French intellectual Oscar Wilde Chinese detective Corny old stand-up comedian Old maid schoolmarm Washed up rock star Drug lord Lounge singer Suburban dad
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Suburban mom Shakespearean actor Stoner Skateboard boy Chinese detective of the 40s Silent film star Old Irish priest Young nun Stalker Handsome star Nazi commandant Hollywood producer Tai Chi instructor Jay Gatsby Bogart Lincoln Thomas Jefferson Yoga Instructor
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CHAPTER TWO: COMIC CHARACTERS AND THEIR
BEHAVIORS The comic characters you create will move through the world, interact with the world—try to master the world, as we all do. They will take actions—say things, do things, pursue goals. They will do these things in ways that reveal their comic nature. In other words words, comic characters are funny because they interact with the world in a certain way. Characters “are” what they do. So, if character, behavior and plot (which is another way of saying “situation”) are intertwined, we have to talk about them together. Therefore, this chapter starts by talking about comic character. IDENTIFYING, UNDERSTANDING AND CREATING COMIC CHARACTERS We know that comic characters are characters that consistently—automatically—do and say things they shouldn’t. They are inappropriate. They are driven to their inappropriate behavior by some comic flaw, or set of flaws (there’s often more than one). CHARACTERIZATION AND COMEDY: SHARP AND DEFINED The question of comedy leads us into the question of characterization. The number one way to get laughs is to assign every character a characteristic or a constellation of characteristics that characterizes his every response. For instance, Moe of The Three Stooges is always the angry authoritarian. Alex Keaton of Family Ties is always the selfish capitalist. W.C. Fields is the cynical old reprobate. Those moments when they are most themselves (especially when those selves are at odds with society or what the world expects) are the moments we laugh at them the hardest. What is funny? Funny is strong, distinct, characters in conflicts that bring out their main characteristics. And when you think about it, all drama is about character, conflict and desire. Comic characters are obsessed. They are often after one thing, and their manner of pursuing it manifests one characteristic or a small set of characteristics. Let me give you an example from one of the greatest scripts ever written, a film that works as an adventure, a comedy, and a romance. Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen is obsessed with booze and selfish expedience. All he wants is to nip his whiskey and stay out of the way of harm and inconvenience. Katharine Hepburn, on the other hand, is a moralist who is obsessed with doing what’s right. So, just about every time they come into conflict, we see her rigid, prissy rectitude, and his sloppy, whining attempts to evade responsibility. In
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the end, they soften their attitudes. Love has softened them. She becomes loose enough to make to love to him, and he becomes responsible enough to go along with her plan to blow up the German ship. But even at their softest, they are still defined in terms of their ruling characteristics or passions. The writer of comedy needs to design characters so that they naturally fall into the kind of conflict you have chosen. Or, conversely, you need to define your characters and then see what happens when they come into conflict. It’s a which-came-first-the-chicken-or- the-egg situation. It’s often said in dramatic writing that you can start with character and come up with plot, or start with plot and come up with character. In other words, if my idea is a story set at a Sunday school, then I probably needs to come up with a character who doesn’t fit in there—a shameless libertine. On the other hand, I might start with character—say, a shameless libertine. Now I have to come up with a plot—for example, he’s mistakenly hired to teach Sunday school. In either case, comic characters need a comic flaw, which is to say a “lantern” that, when you light it, we laugh and say, “That Joey—he’s always so…so Joey!” And the better you know your character, the funnier your writing will be. Comic characters are single-minded, or have some part of their character absurdly over- developed. They have one goal or one characteristic that overwhelms everything else about their personalities, and we laugh at that. Take the hit late 1940s play Born Yesterday: Billie Dawn is dumb. Take the classic screwball comedy His Girl Friday: Walter Burns is high-handed. We laugh when he’s being high-handed because we disapprove of it (yet at they same time he charms us and we love him, which is a difficult balancing act to pull off but wonderful when it’s done successfully). Hildy Johnson is On To Walter. Her on-to-Walterness is what’s funny about her. She’s so on-to-Walter, so wised up, yet not quite on to him enough to beat him. Her fiancé, the guy played by Ralph Bellamy, is gullible—over and over again. One thing. One characteristic. Even a hero needs a distinct comic flaw. A mistake writers often make is not giving every character comic flaws. Very often when we write, we base our main character or hero on ourselves, and of course few of us see what’s funny about us. Every character should be a fully imagined comic character. It is comic always to see the world in a single way and to respond to it in a single way (see Henri Bergson’s essay “On Comedy” for a full explanation of why this is so, but basically Bergson says that laughter is a form of disapprobation that is nevertheless accepting, loving and socially acceptable). So let’s talk about your characters and how one might take the seeds of comedy within them and develop those seeds into full-blown comic characters. And by the way, I’m certainly not insisting that you develop the characters the way I recommend. I’m simply
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giving illustrations of how to find the central comic characteristic that will bring life to your characters and bring them strongly into conflict with the other characters. The single-mindedness of the comic character Often, that flaw has to do with how they perceive the world. The comic character behaves in inappropriate ways because he has some habitual way of looking at reality—a lens, if you will. A filter, perhaps, or an obsession, but be careful how you perceive the word “obsession.” It’s not necessarily an obsession in the sense of a romantic obsession or an obsession about a goal—“I have to reach the top of the mountain or die trying”—it’s rather an obsession with something like doughnuts, or a single-mindedness to do with some topic. The comic character is single-minded. He has a one-track mind. Surprise! The comic character’s mind is elsewhere If we are to succeed in the world, we need to be paying attention to what’s going on now. We need to be in the moment. The comic character isn’t. The comic character is somewhere else, in his own little world. If he thinks about something or other too much, if it’s always on his mind, then of course he’s thinking about it even when it’s inappropriate to do so. Life is changing, evolving, moving forward, but the comic character is “stuck” in his head, stuck in his own thoughts. He’s not with everyone else, he’s thinking about the thing that obsesses him. We don’t know that because we don’t know what’s in people’s heads (especially in dramatic writing, where we’re not privy to internal processes the way we are in prose fiction), so when it pops up in his dialogue or pops out in his behavior, it’s surprising. The comic character is thinking about his own obsession when he should be paying attention to the matter at hand. So his reaction to the matter at hand, what he says and what he does, is wrong—and wrong in a way that specifically characteristic of the comic character. The comic line or action comes as a surprise, because that line or action reveals a mental state—a mental state is that is not appropriate, not what the normal person would be thinking at the time. The moment the audience realizes, “So that’s what he’s thinking!” And that surprises the audience. Surprised that the comic character is thinking something that a normal person wouldn’t be thinking at this moment. Because we don’t expect the person to be thinking what he’s thinking—we expect him to be thinking something appropriate. So when he says or does something that expresses his messed up mind, we realize, “Oh! He’s thinking that at a time like this!” Here’s an example: two people, say a brother and sister, rob a bank. The writer has established their characters. She’s lusty and boy crazy, obsessed with men and sex. Her brother is a dandy, obsessed with clothes and appearances. As they flee across a sloppy,
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Florida swamp, pursued by a posse with a pack of hounds, she remarks appreciatively, “Did you see the shoulders on that deputy?” But he doesn’t seem to hear her, and instead remarks, ruefully, as looks down toward his feet, “These loafers are ruined.” Obviously, our hero and heroine are not present in their circumstances. They’re being pursued across a swamp, but their minds are on their obsessions. She’s thinking about men and he’s thinking about apparel. We’re surprised that these people, given what’s going on, would be thinking about anything besides escape, danger, and the terrible consequences of their situation. And of course, on one level, by continuing to flee, they acknowledge the reality of their outer world, but as comic characters they’re living too much in their inner world of a mistaken reality. Setting up comedy with character If we didn’t know the sister was boy crazy, we wouldn’t find her remark about the deputy’s shoulders funny. We have to know her character and understand her single- mindedness to realize that her remark is part of a pattern. If we don’t know she’s boy crazy, her remark is just random weirdness. If we do, it’s evidence of her single- mindedness and rigidity, and therefore comic. The job of the writer, then, is to create characters who have an inner life. Then, the writer lets that inner life “pop out” at the right moment, which is to say the inappropriate moment, and since it’s inappropriate we don’t expect it. The audience is caught unawares. The audience is taken by surprise. Putting it together in our heads: mastery and delight The meaning of the comic moment isn’t immediately apparent. We weren’t expecting the comic line or action—it’s inappropriate, it doesn’t fit, so why would we be expecting it?—and therefore it’s a surprise, and we don’t get it right away. The audience has to work a little bit to catch up. For a millisecond we pause, and maybe we think, “Huh? What did that mean?” And then you put it together. You’ve had this experience yourself. Have you ever listened to the punch line of a joke and you don’t laugh right away because you have to figure it out? Of course. And suddenly you do—bingo! The delight. The laugh. Just like the pleasure the little child felt when she figured out that no way can that elephant hide in a twin bed. We have figured it out! We have cracked the code of this person’s character! We’ve got their number. Busted! We have seen inside their heads, and it’s a mess in there. In a small, momentary way, we have mastered the world. We have proven to ourselves our ability to understand it. And maybe we feel a little superior to the person we’ve figured out.
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It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that humans are hard-wired to want to figure out other people. Among social animals, there’s tremendous evolutionary value in understanding others. If we have social intelligence, maybe we’ll get more status, or bananas, or a smokin’ hot mate. Perhaps our delight in mastering the character of others has something to do with that. I don’t care. I just want to write funny. Obliviousness The comic character always acts in a certain way because he always sees things in a certain way. And because he always sees things his way, he misses other things. He either misperceives the situation, perceives the situation in a skewed way, or doesn’t notice certain things at all. The word for not noticing what’s right under our noses is “obliviousness.” Comic characters are often oblivious. Notice the role that obliviousness plays the in the preceding example about the bank robber siblings. If a character is obsessed with his inner thoughts, then the corollary to that would be he’s somewhat going to miss, going to be oblivious to, some of what’s going on around him. Her remark about the deputy’s shoulders shows that she’s at least a little oblivious The comic character isn’t oblivious to everything that goes on around. That would be unconsciousness. Out cold. He’s selective. He notices what fits in with his prejudices and obsessions, but misses other things, either because they don’t fit in with his rigid notions, or because he’s busy noticing something that does fit. The bank robber brother is oblivious not only to the import of his dire circumstances, but also to his sister’s preceding remark. All he cares about is shoes. He’s oblivious to some things because he’s preoccupied with others. We have seen that comic characters have a flawed way of seeing the world, and that they behave in inappropriate ways because of some habitual way of looking at reality—some filter, or obsession, or single-mindedness. Something about the comic character is absurdly overdeveloped or wrong—flawed—and dishonesty is perhaps the most common comic flaw a character can have. DISHONESTY AND MISREPRESENTATION: LYING, DISGUISE, FALSE IDENTITY, TRICKERY, HYPOCRISY AND PRETENSION Of all the kinds of inappropriate or naughty behavior in which a comic character might engage, by far the most common are dishonesty and misrepresentation. Why do we take such delight in that? Understanding the characters of others in the tribe enables us to predict their behavior, thus giving us a social advantage, so perhaps it is natural we should be pleased when we uncover deception. That’s my theory, anyway.
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Comic characters are always misrepresenting themselves. Lying, hypocrisy, disguise, trickery, scheming, pretentiousness, pomposity—all of these forms of misrepresenting the self are kinds of dishonesty. Academic treatises on comedy always talk about the “trickster” character that pops up in so many primitive cultures, and the trickster is obviously someone who misrepresents himself or misrepresents a situation. Shakespeare’s Puck is a trickster, and so is Oberon, Puck’s master. Ultimately, misrepresentation is a kind of trickery and we take delight in uncovering it or being “in” on it (which, the audience, being in the “confidence” of the trickster, is). Here are just a few of the thousands of films and plays that demonstrate the principle: My Fair Lady (based on Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion). Eliza Doolittle, a flower girl, is “disguised” as an upper class lady and thrust into various situations where she has to carry off the ruse at various fancy pants functions, including the races at Ascot. Tootsie. An out of work actor dons drag to land a part in a soap opera. Of course he falls for his female co-star and can’t come out to her. Mrs. Doubtfire. A divorced man dresses up like an English nanny and works for his ex wife, so he can send more time with his kids. Some Like It Hot. On the run from gangsters, two jazz musicians dress up like dames and join an all-girl band, only to fall in love with the girl singer. Big Mama’s House. Martin Lawrence plays an FBI agent who dresses up as a fat, older woman to catch a bank robber. The Nutty Professor. Jerry Lewis as a nerdy scientist who takes a potion that turns him into a suave, lounge-lizard loverboy. The Lady Eve. A woman impersonates a British aristocrat to seduce her ex and teach him a lesson. Sister Act. Whoopi Goldberg plays a singer who disguises herself as a nun to hide out in a convent when gangsters put out a hit on her in this 1992 film. Dark Habits. In this 1983 film, a singer hides from the cops in a convent, where she discovers the nun are, variously, secret drug addicts, lesbians, and the authors of lurid literature. Fletch. Chevy Chase plays a reporter who wears various disguises to uncover crimes and corruption. Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion. Two underachieving women decide to attend their 10-year high school reunion pretending to be fabulously successful business moguls.
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Acting “as if”: intentional and unintentional A key to understanding dishonesty and misrepresentation is the phrase “as if.” When characters act “as if” they’re something other than they are, and we can see through it, it’s funny. I call it “the mask slipping.” Back in the Golden Age of Hollywood, they produced a series of comic shorts featuring chimps dressed up as people in various situations, and the shorts were popular. (Chimpanzees dressed as big game hunters has levels of comedy and creepy mixed together in an unforgettable way.) Cartoon cats and mice act as if they were people (living in furnished dwelling, speaking English), cartoon teapots and candlesticks in Disney cartoons act “as if” they’re human by singing and dancing, and more recently, the respected artist William Wegman has made buckets of money selling postcards of his Weimaraner dogs dressed up like people, bringing high art cachet to a tried and true comic trope. Why is it art when Wegman does it and kitsch when it comes out of a poverty row studio, or when it’s a painting of dogs playing poker? Anyway, those Weimariner dogs are not only misrepresenting themselves as human—we have a sense that they’re unaware that they’re not human. So, as they misrepresent reality, they also misperceive, adding another level to the humor. As is so often the case, a funny moment embodies two or more comic principles at once. Pug Which reminds me of my brother’s pug dog, “Pug.” Theirs is a perhaps no more comic breed of dog in the world, which you would know if you subscribed to Pug Talk magazine. I know I do. Pugs love to dress up in costumes. Far from being annoyed if you put her in a tiara and tutu, you pug will obviously relish it, and it’s more than just the attention. I believe they actually have a sense of humor, or at least an understanding that misrepresenting one’s identity is somehow interesting and maybe more. One day my brother took his pug—Pug—and wrapped a white dinner napkin around her neck and set her on her plump hindquarters in a dining chair so that she looked like she was actually sitting at the head of the dining table. It’s funny enough that she’s dressed up like a human, but her reaction—the way her little pug eyes darted around expectantly—she knew—KNEW—that she was finally in The Big Show—sitting at the dining table where the humans eat—and now she was a human and any second now a big standing rib roast would arrive at that table and she would be eating it. I laugh even now, though this must have been over 20 years ago. My actor friend Charlie once told me that one of the keys to performing comedy was that comedy was failure played with the expectation of success. That was Pug. She was not staying to dinner, but you couldn’t have told her that. The mask: hiding the unacceptable We all wear masks. Marlon Brando, whom Elia Kazan said was the only actor he could call a genius (a category in which Kazan undoubtedly includes himself) said everyone is acting all the time.
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We’re always hiding he parts of ourselves that we think will be unacceptable to others. Many years ago, there was something called a “cordless phone.” It was a great invention. It used to be that when you talked on your landline, the headset was tethered to the base with a cord. The newfangled “cordless” phone allowed people roam about their dwellings, cooking, cleaning, peeing, and pooping, as they chatted. But the cordless phone had a flaw: the transmission between the base and the headset was unencrypted. A friend of mine bought a scanner—a device that scanned for radio waves and stopped when it found some—with which he could overhear the conversations of the residents of the West Hollywood apartment complex where he lived. It was a terrible invasion of privacy, but enormously fascinating and instructive. It was like an ongoing radio soap opera. My favorite character was the gay porn star who was getting an operation on one of the, um, shall we say tools of his trade. Another of the neighbors on who my friend eavesdropped, a beautiful blonde, appeared to have everything: looks, money, and a handsome boyfriend. However, when my neighbor started listening in on her telephone conversations, he discovered that all was not as it seemed. Her boyfriend was cheating. Her bank was anxious about her debts. Her relationship with her controlling mother was fraught and contentious. The conversations with the each person in her life revealed what she wasn’t telling the rest of them. And who she was on the telephone was different with each person. She wore a different mask for everyone, and don’t feel superior because so do you I. It was grim, dark comedy, mixed with melodrama: think Almodovar as the showrunner for Beverly Hills 90210. Comic characters wear masks. It’s the norm. It’s normal. But when we see behind those masks—when the mask slips—we feel the pleasure of perception. Misperception and The Pleasure of Perception The flip side of misrepresentation is misperception. The misrepresenter is sending a message, the misperceiver is receiving it. If I lie to you, I’m misrepresenting. If you believe me, you’re misperceiving. Both are flaws in thinking, and both are potentially funny. The liar is funny because we realize he’s a scoundrel. The person he takes in is funny because we realize he’s stupid, or gullible, or naïve. Here’s another example from real life. Many years ago I spent Christmas with close friends from college, Michael and Carolyn. Their son, my godson, a toddler, had a big, inflatable Tyrannosaurus rex that he took everywhere. He brought it to the breakfast table and perched it on a seat, and it sat there as if it were having breakfast with us. “That inflatable dinosaur ‘thinks’ or is ‘pretending’ to be a human breakfast guest.” Already funny. Then, as we all continued our lively conversation, Michael circled the table with a pot of coffee, wordlessly offering everyone a second round, with a questioning cock of his head. Those who wanted more coffee would nod and those who didn’t shook their heads. Then, Michael gets to the Tyrannosaurus–and cocks his head questioningly as if asking the Tyrannosaurus, waited a moment as though listen, then looking at the
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Tyrannosaurus directly, shook his head as if the Tyrannosaurus had just said, “No thank you.” Wow. There’s a lot going on in that simple moment. First, the inflatable toy is acting “as if” it were human. The toy Tyrannosaurus is misrepresenting itself as a breakfast guest. And Michael believes it—he’s misperceiving—he’s been taken in by the trick. But ultimately we know Michael is kidding. He’s pretending to have misperceived the toy as real. He’s a trickster, too! It’s a demonstration of how seemingly simple comic moments are actually quite complex, and in the moment it was pantomime worthy of Chaplin. Let us dwell for a moment on the complexity. Just as the misrepresenter (I’m not sure that’s a word but now it is) is misrepresenting himself, another character, in accepting the misrepresentation, is also behaving in a comic way by being gulled—misperceiving. He has been tricked. In the case of Michael and the Tyrannosaurus, Michael pretends to have been tricked—in other words, tries to trick us into thinking be has been tricked. But of course, we see right through it and he wants us to see right through it—he’s misrepresenting himself as having misperceived. In two quick gestures—the questioning cock of his head with which he “asks” the dinosaur if he wants coffee, and the shakes of his head with which he says, “Are you sure, Mr. Dinosaur,” he’s doing two things at once—misperceiving, and acknowledging that his purported misperception is actually in itself a trick. As you see, this “simple” comic moment from real life is in fact a complex structure of ironies, but at base is the sturdy, timeless concept of misrepresentation: trickery, pretending, misperceiving and pretending to misperceive. The misrepresenter is pretending things are not as they are, which is being “naughty,” which is to say “inappropriate.” TYPES OF DISHONESTY There are many brands of dishonesty, and keep in mind that a comic character often embodies more than one: Trickery. The character creates confusion and chaos for his own amusement (Bugs Bunny, certain moments in Chaplin, Shakespeare’s Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. Jerry the mouse in Tom & Jerry cartoons. Cons and Hucksterism. The character is out to cheat someone or gain an advantage through dishonesty (a used car salesman). The Wizard in The Wizard of Oz: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon. Scheming. When Lucy on I Love Lucy came up with various ruses to get into Ricky’s show or meet celebrities, she showed herself to be a schemer. Hypocrisy. The character pretends to be moral, virtuous or religious, but is in fact self- serving or a sinner, for example Molière’s Tartuffe in the play of the same name. In real
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life, when we laugh at the right-wing senator who gets caught soliciting a cop in an airport men’s room, we’re laughing at hypocrisy. My favorite examples of this are in Casablanca, for example where Captain Renault says, “I’m shocked—shocked!—to find that gambling is going on in here.” At that instant, the croupier hands him a pile of bills: “Your winnings, sir.” Renault: “Oh, thank you, very much.” Pretentiousness. The character pretends to be more wealthy, learned or upper crust than he really is. Characters who try to “act cool” when really they aren’t might be included in this category. Pretentiousness is closely related to the concept of “collapse of dignity,” which is classically illustrated by the banker in a black suit and top hat walking down the street, acting very grand, and suddenly slipping on a banana peel. The idea is that his dignity collapsed. He’s a banker, he’s thinks he’s all that and a bag of chips, and somebody who thinks he’s better than everyone else has more dignity to collapse—the bigger they are, the harder they fall. So, the banker’s collapse of dignity is, in a way, an unmasking of his pretentiousness: he was pretending to be better than we are, with his high hat and snooty airs, which is sort of the definition of pretentiousness, but the banana peel revealed him to be human just like us. The pretentious one-percenter jerk. I hope he broke his coccyx. Is it still funny if he breaks his coccyx? Fake sincerity. When Bill Murray used to do his lounge singer shtick on Saturday Night Live, acting as if he cared about the audience, it was an example of this. Tab Hunter in Polyester is another example. Cross-dressing. In Elizabethan theatre, when boy actors played the female roles, there were often plots involving female characters dressing as men, for example in As You Like It (Rosalind dresses as a shepherd to test Orlando’s love and escape the Duke), Twelfth Night (Viola disguises herself as a eunuch to snag the Duke), The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Julia dresses as a man to pursue a man) and Cymbeline (Imogen dresses as a man so she can visit her lover). When female characters disguised themselves as men, the audience was treated to the gender-bending (and perhaps erotically charged) spectacle of a boy playing a girl pretending to be a boy. Meanwhile, men disguise themselves as women in The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor. THE MOMENT OF COMEDY: THE MASK SLIPS AND THE MYSTERY IS SOLVED Remember the little child’s delight at “busting” her parent for trying to trick her into believing that elephant might be hiding in her bed? How she felt a mastery of the world— of her ability to apprehend reality? The comic moment happens in the child‘s head when she puts it together: when she realizes what’s wrong, what doesn’t fit, what’s inappropriate. That’s the moment of comedy. The laugh comes when the watcher puts together the meaning of what happened. It’s like solving a mystery.
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What do we need to solve a mystery? Clues! The comic line or behavior is a clue to inner life or mental processes of the character. We see the clue, we solve the mystery, and we laugh. Daddy’s statement that he thinks an elephant is hiding under the covers is a clue to his character. He’s pretending. I know that elephants don’t hide in beds and I know that daddy knows it—ha! I’ve penetrated the mask. I’ve seen behind the mask. The mask slips, I get a glimpse of what’s behind it, I laugh, because now I on to him. That remark about the elephant in my bed was a clue that helped me solve the mystery of Daddy’s character. Daddy is so silly, or tricky, or chowderheaded, or whatever, but I’m on to him. Daddy is so…something. Daddy is too…something. COMIC FLAWS If the moment of comedy is the moment in which we figure out what’s “wrong” with the character, then it stands to reason a comic character has to have something wrong with him. There are many ways to be flawed. People can be greedy, lustful, petty, mean, selfish, self-absorbed, condescending, cowardly, gauche, stupid, childish, naïve, persnickety, sloppy, pretentious, eccentric, dotty or dimwitted. However, even virtues can be comic if they are taken to extreme, thus defying reason and the norm. Everyone’s favorite mom Marge Simpson is a perfect example—she’s sweet, forgiving, generous, trusting, conscientious and loving to a fault. Piety is good, I suppose, but when people are too pious we find it comical. Generosity is a virtue, but to be too generous can be too much. One can be too friendly, to trusting, too moral, to disciplined, and even to beautiful. I don’t mean to disrespect a saint, but I actually think Mother Teresa could inspire a good comedy. In fact, the title would be “good.” You pair an Indian nun with a selfish slob (Jack Black, John Belushi, whomever is playing slobs this year) and the joke is that she’s so loving that she even loves this loathsome guy, but he’s got street smarts and helps her with the thuggees who are out to steal the collection plate. She’s “too” loving, which of course can never be (can it?) but is certainly within the loving, forgiving spirit of comedy. But I digress. And I intend to digress further. The too-much-ness of the comic character, and the idea that too much of even a good thing is potentially comic, bleeds over into casting. It is not a coincidence that the greatest light comic leading man in the history of motion pictures, Cary Grant, is too handsome, and much the same can be said Joel McCrea, George Clooney, Ryan Reynolds, and Hugh Grant. (Someone once said of Elizabeth Taylor, “She’s so beautiful you want to laugh,” but interestingly, I can’t think of a single comedy in her filmography, though there must be one.) There’s something comically excessive about being too attractive. Let’s put that on the list of Problems We Want to Have. THE DARK SIDE OF COMIC CHARACTER
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How bad can a comic character be? When is it OK to laugh? A comic character is one that habitually, rigidly exhibits some comic flaw. They speak or act in a way that expresses some character trait. That trait is their comic flaw or comic foible. The word “foible” is defined in Webster’s Second Unabridged as “a small, moral weakness, a slight frailty in character.” However, different kinds of comedy have characters with flaws that vary in degree. In Chekhov’s comedies, the characters aren’t usually bad or malevolent, just a little weak or deluded. Other kinds of comedy feature more extreme flaws. Dr. Evil in Austin Powers wants to take over the world and to that end feeds people to sharks. Feeding people to sharks is pretty unforgivable. It’s horrific. But you laughed. Anyway, I did. Of course, Chekhov is realistic and Austin Powers is fantastical and exaggerated, so we don’t take Dr. Evil’s extreme flaws as seriously as we do Uncle Vanya’s weaknesses. We are signaled how to react by the style of the comedy. If the piece is highly stylized, we are to understand that we aren’t “really” laughing at people who feed people to sharks, we’re laughing at the “naughtiness” of the writer who makes comedy out of it. The writer has gone “too far,” the too-muchness resides in the stylization of the piece (which is why comedy is so often stylized—it’s easier to get laughs that way). Murder isn’t really very funny in most cases, but Austin Powers is broad parody and so far from reality, so exaggerated and theatricalized, that brutal murder becomes an abstract idea—it’s been aestheticized and therefore distanced (a little the way Hitchcock stylizes the brutal strangulation in Strangers on a Train by shooting it reflected in a pair of glasses). Why do I laugh instead of slapping you? It’s interesting. A character in a drama might make a stray, cruel remark, and we’ll instantly hate the character, yet Dr. Evil throws people to the sharks and we laugh and say, “Oh, that Dr. Evil, he so evil—I just love him!” That prompts the question, what is laughter expressing? I have said that laughter is an expression of the delight we take in figuring out people and the world, but another theory holds that it is an expression of disapproval. You do something wrong; I laugh at you so that you know it’s wrong. But why do I laugh instead of slapping your face or calling the police? Usually, it’s because your transgression, your deviation, is not that harmful, or is in some way typically human and therefore forgivable. A condition of our laughter is that we are able to forgive the thing we are laughing at—if we didn’t forgive it, we’d have some reaction other than laughter. There’s a difference between a foible and moral failing. To avoid a social engagement with someone who has a cold and lie to him or her about it is a foible. To infect someone with a horrible disease intentionally is a serious moral failing and to make comedy out of it would be impossible. Then, somewhere in the middle, are gray areas: characters whose behavior is ugly, as in the sitcoms Curb Your Enthusiasm and
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Arrested Development, or the last episode of Seinfeld. Some people find those shows hilarious; others find it hard to laugh at that kind of humor. Then there’s Nelson, the character on The Simpsons who points and laughs when something bad happens to someone else. Laughter can be a putdown, and to use it that way is a character flaw, and that why we laugh at Nelson’s laughing. A great acting teacher once advised a performer vis-à-vis the difference between playing tragedy and playing comedy, “Tragedy is like a storm cloud a little above and a little behind the crown of your head. Whichever way you turn you can’t see it, but you know it’s there. Comedy is a lot of little things nibbling at your ankles.” That advice has something to do with the scale of the problems typical of comedy (often, in a television sitcom, for example, the problems are small and domestic), but it also says something about the comic sensibility: annoyance at the problems of life, yes, but not taking problems overly seriously—or maybe overestimating the importance of small problems, and underestimating big ones. In any case, putting them in their places. Having perspective. Making them small—perhaps even if they are big. Taking things lightly. Christopher Morley was quoted in An Enchanted Life: An Adept’s Guide to Masterful Magick )2001( by Patricia Telesco as saying, “Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.” The Dowager Countess (aka Violet Crawley) played by Maggie Smith on Downton Abbey once sagely remarked, “My dear all life is a series of problems which we must try and solve, first one and then the next and then the next, until at last we die.” It’s a brilliant line because, first, it’s something sensible people know about life, and it expresses acceptance of that truth—but does so wittily, in a way that expresses the comic sensibility, and it demonstrates the sense of “intellectual perspective” to which Morley refers. Likeable characters, and characters that make us laugh When it comes to “getting away with” humor that’s edgy, two tricks are useful. First, we are inclined to forgive someone we like. So, if we a character is likeable, it’s more OK to laugh as his misbehavior. What makes a character likeable? Maybe the character has charm. Maybe the character he possesses some redeeming characteristic. Often, that redeeming characteristic is that the character makes us laugh. Characters we find funny are giving us pleasure. Moreover, the witty character, as he gives us pleasure, is also providing us the service of educating us about the world, for what are his witticisms but revelations, exposing some truth about people or life. Again, Violet Crawley on Downton Abbey is the perfect example of this—she’s bluntly critical of others, but we like her so much we take delight in it. Even if such a character is rude or even verges on cruelty, he is giving us fun and valuable insight, helping us out in two ways simultaneously, so we’re inclined to forgive.
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(Of course, there are writers who break the rule. Not only are the characters in the characters in the films of the Coen Brothers often not likeable, one also gets the idea that the authors themselves don’t like the character—or much of anybody.) Personally, I generally (but not always) prefer movies to have an “adult” sense of humor, by which I mean free of meanness, accepting of human imperfection (“foibles,” they used to be called), and an understanding and acceptance of life’s absurdity. On some level, isn’t laughter an admission that we can’t or needn’t do anything about the thing we’re laughing at? Show Your Character’s Pain One of the many things we can learn from Chaplin is that an admixture of sadness improves comedy. Comedy is ultimately, at its best, about understanding, loving and forgiving humanity. Love and forgiveness follow understanding—when we understand others, we get that they, too, suffer as we do. It therefore follows that if we see the secret heartbreak of a character, their sadness and longing, it will make the character more human and sympathetic. That’s why Chaplin, in constructing his immortal comic persona the Little Tramp, made him homeless, friendless and bullied. We saw his wounded vanity and his loneliness. Find the sadness in your character and it will make him not only more likeable, with more rooting interest, and more profoundly human but, ironically, funnier. Our flaws come out of need. What need of your character is unfulfilled? What makes him have to act the way he acts? Life is made of suffering and comedy, like tragedy, comes out suffering. Søren Kierkegaard, in Stages on Life’s Way (1845), wrote, “The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. “It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.” The Little Tramp famously suffered, but he wasn’t a dreary, wert victim, and in fact, the wonderful thing about Chaplin’s Little Tramp was that his vulnerability and generosity were counterbalanced by a mean streak. He wasn’t above getting in the last kick when his opponent had been beaten. Tragedy plus time and the question of and black comedy Getting back to the question of stylization in comedy, perhaps the key is that stylization—getting away from realism—creates a distance that makes it safe to laugh. An aphorism commonly repeated by writers of comedy (sometimes attributed to Carol Burnett) is, “Comedy is tragedy plus time.” When Princess Diana died in 1997 there were indeed people who made jokes about it, but it was too soon to write a comic play about the tragedy for general audiences because not enough time had passed. Monty Python and the Holy Grail depicts the horrid cruelty and suffering of medieval life, but it’s so distant in time that it’s OK to laugh. Other kinds of distance make laughter more possible as
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well, which is what Mel Books was getting at when he said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” Comedy that’s cruel, callous or freezing cold is called “black comedy.” If the comic sensibility tends to put thinking above feeling, then the black comic sensibility is the extreme of that—a little, or a lot, heartless. That’s perfectly fine with me now and then, but it’s not to everyone’s taste. Arguably it’s getting more common, and some people would say that says something about society. Fashions in comedy change over time as society’s norms change. When norms get looser, comedy gets darker and wilder. In Victorian England, where norms were strict and proper, comedy was more genteel. Under repressive regimes or in highly religious societies, the range of the comic is considerably narrowed. The clash between the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo and the Islamist extremists who slaughtered its writers is exactly the clash between those two cultural attitudes toward comedy. Human beings do like to see what they hold sacred mocked, but in a world where nothing is sacred everything is fair game. The 2015 documentary film Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon argues that American humor started changing when the satirical magazine The National Lampoon came on the scene in 1966. The doc traces the magazines influence to movies like Animal House and to the hugely influential television sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live. The magazine’s most famous cover (January 1973) depicted a dog with a gun aimed at its head and the caption, “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.” CREATING COMIC CHARACTER: HYBRIDIZATION OF TYPE The point of this chapter is to learn how to create comic characters, and one of the easiest is to combine two contradictory types in one person. When two disparate or contradictory human types co-exist or combine in one character, that’s hybridization of type. It’s often the basis of a Hollywood “high concept,” with the hybridized type right there in the title: Beverly Hills Ninja: I have no idea what the picture was about and I don’t want to know and if I were you I wouldn’t admit to having seen it. Spy Kids: they’re spies, they’re kids—they’re spy kids. In Kindergarten Cop, Arnold Schwarzenegger is a cop and a kindergarten teacher. He acts like a cop when he’s teaching kindergarten! He’s two mints in one. Zany! In Rookie of the Year, an old man plays baseball. In Grosse Pointe Blank an analysand is a killer—a conceit that also turns up in The Sopranos. In Sean of the Dead an electronics store clerk is a zombie fighter, and in Malibu’s Most Wanted a white boy wants to be a rapper (which brings to mind Barbara Billingsley speaking jive in Airplane! I have said that constructing comedy and comic characters can’t be done via a formula— it requires inspiration—but hybridization of type might the exception. Anyone can do this, and in my advanced screenwriting class I demonstrated that by having students come up with “types” of human beings, and then writing the list on the board. Then we proceed
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to combine the types, sometimes at random, sometimes intentionally, and we invariably come up with wonderful ideas for characters. This technique is especially helpful in coming up with premises in sketch comedy. In the early days of Saturday Night Live, John Belushi played Samurai Tailor. He’s a samurai warrior who has a tailor shop, and cuts the cloth with his big samurai sword. More recently, the online sketch comedy show Funny or Die featured a character named Space Baby. He’s a precious baby who has cliché adventures in space—piloting a spacecraft, fighting space monsters, the usual—but he’s a cute, clumsy baby, and it’s adorable, hilarious, and pretty much writes itself. You just watch old episodes of Flash Gordon and add infant. Hybridization of type is related to the comic idea of incongruity—two things that don’t go together. In hybridization of type, two types that don’t fit together make up one character. For example, a student in the department where I teach came up with the idea of Satan as a talk show host. A devil is one “type,” a talk show host is another. That brings to mind Dana Carvey’s wicked “Church Lady” sketches on Saturday Night Live, where a pinched, judgmental, small town churchgoer who wouldn’t rate so much as a guest shot on The 700 Club nevertheless has her own, full-fledged talk show. She’s a talk show host and a sanctimonious small town busybody. Two mints in one. Overreaction and underreaction The principle of underreaction and overreaction is obviously related to deviation from human norms. To react to the world in proportion is normal. For one’s reaction to be disproportionate is a deviation from human norms. To care too much about something small is very common among comic characters. Think of Homer Simpson and bacon, or the Cookie Monster and his cookies. The principle extends to goal of the comic hero in the narrative. A screenwriting student of mine once wrote a script about two billionaires who were collectors of vintage, classic sneakers, and battled with all their billionaire might, including helicopters with machine guns and paramilitary operations, to acquire one, smelly sneaker. Deadpan You have probably heard comic performers admired for their “deadpan” expressions. That is to say their faces—pans—are immobile, or mask-like, or intentionally inexpressive. They’re poker faced. They give nothing away. The great silent star Buster Keaton was nicknamed “The Great Stone Face.” The standup comedian and sitcom star Bob Newhart, who probably had as many hit sitcoms, as anybody in history, was famous for his deadpan. Jack Benny, Joel McCrea, Walter Matthau, Harry Langdon, Bill Murray, Eve Arden, Peter Sellars, Jaques Tati, Woody Allen, Chevy Chase and Tommy Chong all were deadpan to a certain degree. Even Groucho Marx, eyebrow wagging aside, employed the deadpan more often that you might remember.
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One advantage of a deadpan is that it doesn’t “telegraph the joke.” We don’t want to see the joke coming, and maybe we don’t even want know that we’re on our way to a joke at all. To “telegraph the joke” is to give it away before the precise moment it should detonate. A facial expression that signals that a joke is coming might undermine its effectiveness—undercut its surprise and suddenness. Pauses Deadpan performers don’t telegraph the joke. They don’t give away what the character is thinking before the Moment of Comedy, when the audience puts it together in their heads. Also, they are capable of creating “negative space”: long, blank pauses where the audience can anticipate the joke, wait for the joke, or supply their own. The long pause forces the audience to ask, “What’s he thinking?” And of course, finding out what people are thinking, figuring them out, seeing behind the mask, is at heart what comedy is about. Rubber Faces On the other hand, there are comic performers noted for their expressiveness. They express what they’re thinking on their faces. The great Cary Grant was a master of popeyed reactions. Lucille Ball, Jack Nicholson, John Cleese, Harpo Marx, Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis, Don Knotts, Moe Howard, Phyllis Diller, Tom Ewell and Rodney Dangerfield all had marvelously expressive faces. Any aficionado of classic film comedy can conjure in his head right this moment the face of Stan Laurel as he gets set to bawl. Bert Lahr’s face was so expressive you could read it even under all his makeup as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. Back to Overreaction and Underreaction In many cases, the deadpans are underreactors and the expressive faces are overreactors. Both are deviations from human norms. It is normal for a human being to take big problems seriously, and to take little disappointments in stride. But the overreactor, because of some obsession or character flaw, takes much too seriously things that are not really serious. Suppose I fly home for Thanksgiving and say, “Pass the stuffing,” and Mom says, “Oh, I didn’t stuff the bird this year, it’s too much trouble.” And I say, “What?! No stuffing! I take two days off from work that I can ill afford to take, schlep through holiday traffic to the airport, sprint through the terminal and get a middle seat between the two fattest, loudest people who ever traveled, because I wanted stuffing, and you have the effrontery to tell me you were too lazy and stupid to make it?!?” It’s even funnier if it’s not Mom—it’s Grandma—sweet, old Grandma. Anyway, I’m overreacting. It is not normal to become unhinged over a side dish. My reaction is out of proportion to the size of the setback. However, suppose I’m at Thanksgiving dinner and the news comes that Grandpa’s just died of a sudden heart attack, and I react by saying, “Uh-huh. Pass the stuffing. It really is
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extra great this year.” That’s a bit of an underreaction. The passing of a human being is very serious and warrants a commensurate reaction. Overreaction and underreaction are useful concepts for creating comic characters, but there’s also a profound truth at the heart of this. Remember the quotation from Christopher Morley earlier in the chapter: “Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.” A rather apt explanation of the profound truth underlying overreaction and underreaction.
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CHAPTER THREE: CHARACTER
TYPES In poet Randall Jarrell’s marvelous novel of academic life Pictures of an Institution, a cosmopolitan older woman remarks, “Sometimes I meet people and think, I’ve met you seven times on seven continents.” Human beings run to type. Any psychologist can tell you that, and will point at the Myers Briggs test, Enneagrams and the personality disorders in the DSM as illustrations. Some types are more comic than others. The wit and the butt When F. Scott Fitzgerald was working on the script for the saucy, pre-code Jean Harlow picture Red-Headed Woman, the studio bosses told him, “We have to laugh with her, not at her.” They were drawing the distinction between the wit and the butt. We laugh with the wit, we laugh at the butt. In general, comic characters can be divided into two types: the wit, and the butt. The wit is the character who points out flaws in the world and in other people. The butt is the flawed figure: the “butt of the joke.” The wit is funny because he means to be. The butt is funny because he is the joke. The wit makes fun; the butt is made fun of. (Of course, the author of the work is ultimately the master wit, putting the witticisms in the mouth of the the witty character.) Henry Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion, Violet Crawley on Downton Abbey, Carla on Cheers, Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, John Gielgud as Hobson in Arthur, George Sanders as Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, and Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye in MAS*H are all wits. When wit becomes more overtly hostile we call is “snarkiness,” but the equation is still the same: the wit points out the flaw, while the butt exhibits the flaw. Seldom are these types pure. For one thing, the wit, as someone who points out the flaws of others or of society, is quite often clever at someone else’s expense. That’s not nice. It may well be unkind, and unkindness is a character flaw. Furthermore, the wit, in his haste to be witty, will very often make his remarks at inappropriate moments. He is too witty. He is inappropriately witty. Cleverness and perceptiveness are pushed beyond the boundaries of the appropriate. They are exercised to such a degree as to transgress social norms. The wit might be petty, cruel, insulting or frivolous. Those are character flaws, and so, ironically, the wit reveals himself to be the butt—with his wit.
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Standup comedians are very often examples of the wit and the butt all rolled up in one, in that they make fun of their own flaws. They often make themselves the butt of their own joke. They bust themselves. Much of Louis CK’s comedy is based on revealing his darkest thoughts—busting himself for everything from seething hostility to compulsive masturbation. Meanwhile, the butt of the joke can make an observation that is inadvertently witty. WIT, SARCASM AND SNARK The Wit is the character who points out the flaws of others and the flaws in the world, but there are various ways to do this. It’s somewhat a matter of tone, but it also goes deeper. The Witty Character: Wit is Surprising, Daring, True, Agile, Clever, and definitely knows “How Things Should Be” Aristotle said that the point of drama is to “please and instruct,” which conforms nicely with what wit does: wit is a form of “instruction” which is pleasing because it expresses the opinions of the instructor in a clever, articulate, surprising way, often with a pleasingly tart edge. The witty character is usually one with strong opinions about How Things Should Be, and the witty character is not afraid to express those opinions. Whether he’s scolding someone in particular, or just holding forth on how you and the rest of the world should be (he’s often the ultimate social critic), he has an opinion about everything, and it’s free of cant and hypocrisy—the wit is often the one who sees that the emperor is wearing nothing at all, and points it out. It is no coincidence that people are said to have “A rapier wit,” as opposed to, say, “a blunderbuss wit.” Wit is agile and surprising. Wit startles. It’s a surprise attack. Sometimes the surprise results from irony—the wit says things that are in some way true and maybe on some level we already know them, but it’s surprising because the human behavior that the wit is observing is, ironically, contrary to what one expects, or to How Things Should Be. The wit is pointing out an ironic situation. He’s pointing out that things are not How They Should Be. The opinions expressed in wit are often unexpected and even inappropriate, while at the same time true, and therein lies irony—in that contradiction. (In Singin’ in the Rain, Gene Kelly plays a big star in silent film, and he meets an aspiring actress played by Debbie Reynolds. When he tries to put the make on her, she decides to put him down by criticizing the acting in silent films—basically, that it isn’t acting at all. Then Kelly finds out she’s never even been in a play! Wait a minute, here I am a big star in the movies, and you act like you’re so much better than I am because you’re a stage actress, only you aren’t? That’s not How Things Should Be. So he says, “Fear not, sweet lady! I will not molest you. I am but a humble jester. And you. You are
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too far above me. Farewell, Ethel Barrymore! I must tear myself from your side.” Oh, he definitely won that one—only he catches his tuxedo in the car door as he exits and it rips half off. That’s “collapse of dignity.” Collapse of dignity is when you’re on top, but you topple. More on “collapse of dignity” later.) Wit’s element of surprise also results from the fact that wits are saying out loud something they think, which is surprising because people don’t always say out loud the things that that they’re thinking—the things that are true. The wit is a truth-teller. It’s a daring thing to do, to speak the truth, but the wit often gets away with it because he hides behind his cleverness. If you delight someone while you’re uttering an unacceptable opinion, you might more easily get away with it. Satirists are often witty. Political satire utters opinions that can be dangerous, but in a way that pleases with humor. Wit shields the witty from the consequences of their opinions; emperors don’t like to be told they’re naked. While a sacred cow cannot gore you, sacred bull might. Rest in peace, Charlie Hebdo. You will never be forgotten. Snark There’s something noble about wit. It comes from a lofty place. Above the fray. Yes, it’s a form of criticism, but it seeks to instruct and behind it are standards (another word for norms), and those standards are usually high. Wit has a noble purpose—to improve the world. Then there’s snark. Snarkiness. It’s related to wit in that, like the witty character, the snarky character is not the butt of the joke. The snark, like the wit, points out the flaws in others. But it comes from a different place. Snarkiness is a put-down. It’s about putting people down—cruelly, if need be. We humans all want to be important, and I suspect that, being in life, you have seen the various ways in which we, as pack animals, seek to rise in rank. Some people do it by achieving excellence and achieving excellence and genuine accomplishments. That works sometimes, but less well than you may naively think. Van Gogh did not get rich. Another way to rise is by playing the game, working the system and politicking. That’s the most effective, right after being born to rank. Still a third way to rise in rank is by putting other people down. That’s the snarky character. The snarky character is usually kind of loser-ish, embittered, sour, envious, and in him the daring of wit has congealed into barely concealed hostility, passive aggression that’s not impassive, and intolerance. Snarkiness is a sneering, ugly sort of humor and, it goes without saying, greatly on the rise in our nation’s popular culture, which means that in no time at all we’ll have exported it all around the world. At least it retains a family resemblance to wit in its cleverness. Sarcasm
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Sarcasm is an adolescent form of wit: formulaic and much too easy. It’s simply saying the opposite of what you mean, to express a caustic, hostile, critical opinion: “Cool jeans, Mom.” “Nice suit,” is sarcasm. Lillian Hellman telling the House Un-American Activities Committee, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” is wit. Speaking of suits and fashions, here’s some snarkiness: I was reading Men’s Health Magazine and they were advising their healthy, male readers how to wear this year’s fashion, which they tell us is the herringbone sport coat, and they advise, “go sockless with dress shoes or white sneakers to avid looking like an adjunct history professor.” Now wait a minute. Who reads Men’s Health? The young, up-and-coming Western Sales Manager for the International Widgets Corporation? Who is that guy to look down on the adjunct professor of history, who is, let us not forget, already wearing the herringbone sport coat you just found out about. Articles having to do with fashion almost always have some snark, the better to make you feel insecure, self-loathing, eager to one-up others, and hence in a spendy mood. A list of comic types Almost any human characteristic, when taken to extreme or practiced too rigidly, can be comical. Still, certain types of human being have turned up over and over again in comedy. Here is a list of those types, with a few examples of each. Please keep in mind that comedy, in dealing with types, sometimes skates dangerously close to stereotypes. Just because I catalogue a type doesn’t mean I approve or disapprove of its implications. If comedy is about deviating from norms, sometimes that means the character deviates from the norms, but sometimes that means that the writer, in creating the character, is the one who goes over the line and gets a laugh by being naughty. Please also note that characters might turn up in more than one category. That’s not a mistake. Sometimes they embody two types combined into one, and sometimes two typologies are just different ways of looking at similar behavior. There are many other things wrong with this list. You may not like it. Make your own. The Rude Insulter. A subcategory of “the wit.” Violet Crawley on Downton Abbey. Insult comics such as Don Rickles and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog are out and out rude. Other examples: Carla on Cheers, Murray to Ted on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Fred and Ethel (to each other) on I Love Lucy, David Spade’s character on Just Shoot Me (he epitomizes the concept of “snark”), Moe of The Three Stooges, Oliver Hardy, Stiffler in American Pie, Archie Bunker on All in the Family, George Jefferson on The Jeffersons, Eric Kartman on South Park, Ren on The Ren & Stimpy Show, Red on That
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70s Show, David Spade in Tommy Boy, Stevie on Family Guy, Shake from Aquateen Hunger Force, Michael Caine in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Principle Skinner’s mom on The Simpsons. Shockingly Frank. Overlaps the Insulter. George Bernard Shaw specialized in this, but let’s take as our example Mrs. Warren in Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Sometimes overlaps the insulter, but this character is telling it like it is, not trying to be rude or put anyone down. Karen from Will & Grace. Sara Silverman. Louis CK. The Dummy. Dumb and Dumber—both of them, one’s worse than the other. The Three Stooges—all three (Moe isn’t actually smart). Homer Simpson. Joey on Friends. Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark. And Sponge Bob. The Luckless Predator. Can’t let go of a goal: a Warner Brothers cartoon specialty. Sylvester the cat uses crazier and crazier plans to get Tweety and always fails, and Wile E. Coyote is just the same. The luckless predator character reminds us of the performing axiom, “Comedy is failure played with the expectation of success.” In the words, Wile E. Coyote really thinks that this time, with this fine, new Acme product, this is the night he’ll be dining on that succulent bird. The cartoons featuring Wile E. and Sylvester tend to be episodic, with attempt after attempt after attempt—he tries fails, he tries again, and don’t you find yourself chuckling right after the cut—just as the new episode begins? The persistence of these characters in the face of repeated failure, the fact that they never learn, epitomizes the rigidity of the comic character. At the same time, it’s more than rigidity—they’re struggling against their fates: they were coyote or cat, and getting the struggle to get the bird isn’t really a choice for them. Deep, huh? Big Baby. Childlike. Doesn’t act his age, or too big to be a baby. PeeWee Herman on PeeWee’s Playhouse. Big Bird. Baby Huey. Curly of the Three Stooges. Stan Laurel. Chris Farley in Tommy Boy. Billy Madison. Woody on Cheers. Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers in Monkey Business. Cocoon. The Precocious Kid. Opposite of the Big Baby. Manny on Modern Family. Tootie in Meet Me in St. Louis. The little boy who keeps making passes at Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Pure Id. Bluto in Animal House. Divine in Female Trouble. The two leads in Absolutely Fabulous. The Intelligent Pragmatist. Sensible, unsentimental, free of cant. Iconoclastic. Andrew Undershaft in Major Barbara, Eliza Doolittle and her father in Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren in Mrs. Warren’s Profession. The Dizzy Dame. Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Phoebe on Friends, Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde, Cecily and Gwendolyn in The Importance of Being Earnest. Katharine Hepburn as the loopy heiress in Bringing Up Baby. A rather sexist stereotype.
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The Kooky Chick. Closely related to The Dizzy Dame, but with a modern propensity to attempt suicide: Shirley MacLaine as Miss Kubelik in The Apartment, Liza Minelli in The Sterile Cuckoo. Goldie Hawn in Cactus Flower, Shampoo, Foul Play and Butterfies Are Free. In her prime, Goldie was the The Kooky Chick par excellence, but the type is fading. Then again, tie-dyed T-shirts came back, so… The Harmless Crazy. The kook. Elwood P. Dowd with imaginary rabbit friend in Harvey, the two murderous old ladies in Arsenic and Old Lace (arguably not that harmless, but awfully loveable), Kramer on Seinfeld, the whole family in Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You. The Diva. Narcissistic. Actressy. The temperamental artist. Diane Weist’s character in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway. Ingrid Bergman in Indiscreet. Bugs Bunny’s opera singer neighbor. Nathan Lane’s character in The Birdcage. La Condessa in Charles Busch’s Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. The Outraged Observer. The character that observes the antics of other comic characters and is shocked, disgusted, judgmental. A reasonable person, but people “get to him,” and he displays his impatience or exasperation, thus being both the wit and the butt. Doris Day in Pillow Talk. The Witty Observer. More urbane than the outraged observer, judgmental but more detached. Not the butt of the joke. John Guilgud in Arthur. The Sophisticate. An aesthete. Coral Brown’s character in Auntie Mame. Earnest and Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest. Various Noel Coward characters. Grand and peremptory. Usually cultured or a sophisticated. Waspish, tart, pompous, but basically not malign. Noel Coward did it nicely in real life, as did Churchill. The male ones are often a bit tinged with gay, or at least Britishness. Clifton Webb did this type deliciously in Cheaper by the Dozen. Others: Frasier Crane on Frasier, Diane on Cheers, Santa in Gay as Christmas, Lady Bracknell in The Importance of being Earnest, Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner, Mr. Belvedere, Father in Life With Father, John Guilgud in Arthur. It is often amusing to see this character placed in a subordinate position; the butler who’s classier than the master. Henry Higgins in Pygmalion. The Martinet. Related to Grand and Peremptory with some overlap, but the martinet is meaner or at least grumpier. Miranda in The Devil Wears Prada. The bosses in Horrible Bosses. Scheming Woman. Uses trickery, often to snag her guy. Lucy on I Love Lucy. Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis and Katharine Hepburn’s crazy-like-a-fox act in Bringing Up Baby.
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The Old Meanie/The Curmudgeon/Cranky Old Person. The father played by Leon Ames in Meet Me in St. Louis. Mr. Wilson in Dennis the Menace. Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Tatie Danielle. Mama in Throw Mama From the Train. The old man Muppets Stadler and Waldorf. Homer Simpson’s dad. The Con Artist. A fast talker. Dishonest and tricky. Smooth operator. He thinks fast and bends the rules. Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours or Trading Places. Cary Grant as Walter Burns in His Girl Friday. Bugs Bunny. Ryan Reynolds in National Lampoon’s Van Wilder. Kurt Russell in the underrated Robert Zemeckis comedy Used Cars. Henry Higgins in Pygmalion. The Skirt chaser. The seducer. The horndog. The dirty old man. The desperate teen virgin, keen to bed any girl. Often inept or inexperienced. Superbad. American Pie. Charlie Sheen on Two and Half Men. Joey on Friends. Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk. The screen personas of Bob Hope and Woody Allen. Dudley Moore in 10. Bud on Married With Children. Harpo of the Marx Brothers (or is he pure Id?) Chef on South Park. Jack on Three’s Company. Quagmire on Family Guy. Fez on That ’70s Show. The incredibly not-PC character of Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles. The Hypocrite. Captain Renault in Casablanca. Tartuffe. The Gull. Too Gullible. Naïve. Too trusting. Elmer Fudd. Rose on Golden Girls. Female versions are often related to the dizzy dame. Crissy on Three’s Company. Gomer Pyle. Gilligan on Gilligan’s Island. The Love-struck Romantic. Pepé Le Pew. The innamorati in Commedia dell arte. Exuberantly Evil/Mad Genius. This character has a good time being bad. The Joker in Batman. Dr. Evil in Austin Powers. Jack Lemmon in Blake Edwards’s The Great Race. Wile E. Coyote. The Sheriff played by Jackie Gleason in Smokey and the Bandit. Monty Burns on The Simpsons. Kartman on South Park. The Brain on Pinky and the Brain. The Coward. The screen personas of Bob Hope and Woody Allen. James Garner in Paddy Chayefsky’s brilliant The Americanization of Emily. The Klutz. Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther. Dudley Moore in 10. Mr. Bean. Chevy Chase as president Ford on Saturday Night Live. Seething with Anger/Exasperated. Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Yosemite Sam. The Pollyanna. Always sees the bright side of things. Betty White on Golden Girls. The Plucky Little Guy. He attacks and runs. Jerry the Mouse on the MGM cartoons. Chaplin’s Little Tramp.
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The Sexpot. Usually a bit little-girlish, oblivious to or nonchalant about her own charm—as though her sexuality were a thing apart from her real self. Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch. Jayne Mansfield in The Girl Can’t Help It. Vamp/Sexually Aggressive Woman. The heroine of Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It. Blanche on Golden Girls. Ado Annie in Oklahoma. Kelly Bundy on Married With Children. The Mean Girl. Heathers. Mean Girls. Many teen comedies. The Bully. Nelson on The Simpsons. The Poser/Trying to Act Cool. Don Knotts as Barney Fife on The Any Griffith Show. Urkel. Bob Hope’s screen persona. Austin Powers. Unflappable. Road Runner. James Bond (who was often quite funny when played by Sean Connery). The Boor. Vulgar. Often a slob. Ignorant or heedless of social niceties. Rodney Dangerfield in Caddy Shack. John Belushi in Animal House. Borat in Borat. Wised Up or Street Smart. On to the game. Usually cynical but heart’s in the right place. Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon. Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Bugs Bunny. Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop. The Warner Brothers cartoon character Chicken Hawk. Captain Renault in Casablanca. The Nerd. Most of the guys on The Big Bang (but with various nuances). Napoleon Dynamite. The Foreigner. Apu on The Simpsons. The Peter Sellers character in Blake Edwards’s The Party. Borat. The Canny Innocent. Pretends to be so innocent and naïve but actually knows the score and it great at getting what she wants. The Warner Brothers cartoon canary Tweety Pie. Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Goody Two-Shoes. Dudley Dooright. Mr. Cool. Tim Matheson as Eric “Otter” Stratton in Animal House. The Hapless Boob. Sylvester the Warner Brothers cartoon cat. The Slob. Oscar in The Odd Couple. Pig Pen in Peanuts. The Big Lebowski. John Belushi’s character in Animal House. Al Bundy on Married With Children.
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The Fussbudget or Neatnik. A little OCD. Felix on The Odd Couple. Niles on Frasier. Monica on Friends. The Glutton. Likes food too much. Homer Simpson. The Cookie Monster. Scooby Do. Chunk from Goonies. Goldberg from The Mighty Ducks. Garfield the comic strip cat. Suspicious. Always figures people are up to something. William Demerest’s character in The Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan Creek. The Shrew. Katharine in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Mama in Throw Mama From the Train. Divine in Female Trouble. In making up your own comic characters or situations, a nice twist is to have your character pretend to be these things. For example, suppose your character is a Goodie Two-Shoes, put her in a jam where she has to pretend to play the vamp. Have circumstances force the Intelligent Pragmatist to impersonate the Love-struck Romantic. There climax of the toweringly great Leo McCarey screwball comedy The Awful Truth is when the Irene Dunne character, who’s basically the Wised Up type with a bit of the Witty Observer thrown in, has to pretend to be a cheap floozy. COMIC TYPES IN HISTORY The idea of set “types” may seem somehow anti-artistic or uncreative to you, but keep in mind that actual human beings do run to type. You know in your everyday real life people with resemblances to the types just described. A useful exercise would be to make a list of the people you know then see which of these fit into which type. Then, if you decided to use your friends, family and enemies is models for fictional, comic characters, you’d know what direction to push them to make them funnier. Comic types have a long and venerable history in world literature. Commedia dell’arte (feel free to skip this if you’re allergic to pedantry; much of it is stolen from Wikipedia) Commedia dell’arte was a form of comedy that began in 16th century Italy, and in the 17th century was imported to France. Its stock characters recurred in play after play. The plays were often improvised, but the performers knew their characters (also called maschere) so well that it was possible to navigate them through a variety of situations. Later, various playwrights used the characters is a variety of situations—literally for centuries. The lesson: if you have a truly well developed comic character you can profitably throw that character into an almost infinite number of situations, which is why sitcoms with really well-developed character can run for years without getting stale and, as the characters are refined, even getting better.
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Most of the characters fall into two categories: the zanni and the vecchio; the former are servants, the latter masters. Like most comic types, the stock characters in commedia dell’arte emerged from the mores, customs and styles of the day. As all those has changed over the centuries, the comic types of commedia dell’arte aren’t necessarily always useful to the modern writer of comedy, yet there is still something to be learned from them and it’s worth spending a couple of pages examining what comic flaws these stock characters embodied, many of which are timeless, and how multiple flaws are combined into single characters. Zanni (servants and clowns) The comic or clownish servants (zanni) represented the lower classes. Harlequin was the most famous of them, noted for his checked suit. Light-hearted and clever, he would oppose and sometimes outsmart his master, and pursue his love interest, Columbine (also called Columbina). Harlequin was also known as Arlecchino. Acrobatic and resourceful, he pursues his master’s food and any nearby woman, but not always with success. He is considered a forbear of what we call today clowns. Brighella is a zanni, too, but smart, selfish, scheming, ambitious, a good liar and good with wordplay, and a bit of chameleon. Pierrot was another servant, a naïve, sad and foolish clown, innocent and trusting, pining for Columbina, but it’s Harlequin who gets the girl. Columbina (also called Columbine) is a servant and Harlequin’s mistress, though the wife of Pierrot. Columbina works for Pantalone, whose advances she successfully deflects. Pantalone’s daughter is the Innamorata, and Columbina helps her get the boy she’s in love with by tricking Pantalone and Harlequin. She’s sexy but not stupid. Pulcinella (Punch in English, Polichinelle in French) is a servant, mean, crafty and given to pretending to be too stupid to know what’s going on. Sandrone, a peasant, is vulgar and cunning, a very poor man trying to get by. Scaramuccia (which translates as “little skirmisher”; also called Scaramouche) is a clownish servant who, like Il Capitano (se below) is boastful and cowardly. Harlequin often beats him. Vecchi (masters) The masters or elders (usually older men, known by the Italian term vecchi) are of the upper class. Their women and usually younger wives or classy courtesans.
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Pantalone (also called Pantaloon) was a master, very greedy, obsessed with money, he thinks he’s brilliant but is often tricked. Usually a father to one of the lovers and trying to keep them apart. Hunchbacked, old but still (unsuccessfully) horny, when he gets bad news about money he tends to fall over backward. In Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage speech,” the second to last phase of life is described as “the lean and slippered pantaloon.” La Signora (the lady) is perhaps a former courtesan, married to Pantalone, and she cuckolds him with the servant Padrolino. She’s sexy, tough and calculating. Il Dottore is another of the vecchi. He’s the Doctor, an upper class, old money, know-it- all, educated at the best Universities, and in league with Pantalone in separating the lovers. Fat, drunken and pedantic, his learnedness is mostly phony. Il Capitano is a braggart mercenary soldier who goes on about his supposed battles and women, but it’s all banana oil, he’s actually a coward. Hired by Pantalone to protect his daughter, Il Capitano is easily bribed away from his duty. He has no loyalty, but prefers whatever side is winning or pays better. Characters other than the servants and masters Tartaglia is sometimes one of the vecchio, sometimes one of the innamorati, and sometimes a servant, characterized primarily by his stuttering. The Innamorati (or amorosi) are the young lovers, often children of the masters Pantalone and Il Dottore. Beautiful, elegant, in love with themselves and in love with love, they tantrum like babies if they can’t get what they want: each other. They spout impossibly lofty passions in poetry and song, have beautiful manners, and are shallow and self- absorbed. Mature artists steal…inspiration T.S. Elliot once said, “Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.” It’s perfectly all right to base your characters on characters from other pieces. Many great paintings are based on compositional structures of earlier paintings. No artist reinvents the wheel entirely—not even Moliere or Samuel Beckett. In other words, if you want to base the heroine in your romantic comedy on someone from commedia dell’arte or on Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, fine. So long as you don’t take specific gags and lines, or break any intellectual property laws, knock yourself out. It’s worth taking a moment here to talk about stealing (don’t call it borrowing, that’s not a. In general, the more specific something is, the less steal-able. In other words, a particular line and a hilarious scene that are great in the source material will not transplant satisfactorily into your piece. That’s because your piece is an organic whole, and needs to be all cut from the same cloth.
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A great comic moment grows organically out of character, situation—a particular moment in as particularly plot. How often have you noticed that particular retort is hilarious if it’s said immediately after the last person spoke, while it would feel lame thirty seconds later. There’s a French expression, l’esprit de l’escalier, which translates as “staircase wit,” which is to say the devastating comeback that occurs to you on the staircase after you’ve exited the gathering. Tragically too late. It would have been so funny—in the moment. That implies the whole issue of comic timing. The comeback may be funnier if uttered instantly, or if wait a split second (a “beat”) or if you stare at your victim for fur seconds with loathing in your eyes than then utter the comeback (the “pregnant pause”). But by the time you’re on the staircase, the witticism’s utility is gone. The big point is that a line or piece of behavior is funny only in the perfect context— when it grows out of a specific character and situation—and so, obviously, taking a specific line or behavior that grew out of a different context and trying to shoehorn it into your script isn’t going to work. At least not often. (That’s also a problem one faces in writing a book on comedy—perforce one’s examples must be ripped from their contexts, so don’t seem as funny.) So what can you steal? Inspiration for your structure (plot) and your characters. If you’re writing a farce, it helps to read other farces and see how they construct certain situations—the confusion, the misunderstanding, the misbehavior, the hiding. If you’re writing a “comedy of remarriage,” it helps to look at other great comedies of remarriage (His Girl Friday, The Awful Truth, Tatiana and Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and see how the breakups and reunions were handled. Generally, it’s better to steal at the beginning of your creative process: when you’re conceiving your characters, and when you’re constructing the overall comic premise or situation, and coming up with a plot. You can start with a comic type that’s based someone you find funny, but by the time you’ve taken that character and guided her through a plot, she will be wholly your own and no one will, or should, connect her to the source material, because you will have invented all the specifics. Don’t believe me? Think it’s unethical? Woody Allen, perhaps the most respected writer of comedies in the world today, has gone on record as saying that his screen persona, the cowardly, skirt-chasing motor-mouth, was based on Bob Hope’s screen person which was, well, a cowardly, skirt-chasing motor-mouth. You may not like Bob Hope—when I was a kid and saw him on TV, I thought he was an ancient, smarmy, smirking, reactionary bore—but there’s no denying that he’s one of the most important figures in the history of comedy, and if you look at his persona in the “Road Pictures” he made with Bing Crosby, or in My Favorite Spy, The Cat and the Canary, Paleface or Son of Paleface, you’ll see what Woody stole: a horse he rode for decades. No one had to know it if he hadn’t admitted it—you probably never noticed it even if you’re familiar with the work of both comedians—so it was very brave (and instructive) of him to tell us.
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Just as characters can be stolen, so can overall plot situations. I’m not talking about specific scenes, but rather the overall situation of a script. Later, in the chapter on romantic comedy, we’ll get into more specifics, as there are really only a handful of overall situations common to the vast majority of romantic comedies. And if Woody Allen isn’t good enough for you, how about Shakespeare? The great comic playwright George Bernard Shaw, who did not evince the religious reverence for the Bard of Avon that most do, quipped, “Shakespeare was a wonderful teller of stories, as long as those stories had been told before by someone else.” The remark is not an unfair one. Shakespeare cribbed the plots of almost all plays from previous works (in fact, he interpolated words, phrases and even whole passages from other works into his plays, but we won’t go into that here as it doesn’t fit my thesis), and went on to make them gloriously his own. T.S. Eliot, in the case of Hamlet, argued that Hamlet’s behavior doesn’t make sense because Shakespeare didn’t adapt the play thoroughly enough: “The Hamlet of Shakespeare will appear to us very differently if, instead of treating the whole action of the play as due to Shakespeare’s design, we perceive his Hamlet to be superposed upon much cruder material which persists even in the final form.” In other words, Shakespeare stole the plot and didn’t make it his own. The upshot: if stealing is good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for you! Call it “influence” if anyone asks.
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CHAPTER FOUR: THE COMIC
CHARACTER WORKSHEET ANALYZING AND IDENTIFYING THE COMIC CHARACTER It’s important understand why a character is funny so you can make the character more consistently funny. Funnier. By the way, isn’t “funnier” a lovely word? Say it to yourself three times. Now it sounds kind of weird. Back to comic character. I can’t imagine constructing a comic character in a purely theoretical way—just coming up with a set of theoretically funny characteristics and building out from there. I don’t think one can write comic characters without basing them on some kind of model—at least I can’t: something that already exists. Maybe the model for your comic character is another character from fiction or drama, the way the Beverly Hills princess played by Alicia Silverstone in Clueless (Cherilyn “Cher” Horowitz) is based on Emma Woodhouse from Jane Austen’s Emma. Along with the character they also stole Austen’s plot. Or maybe your character is based on someone from real life. Someone you laugh at. In either case, it’s important to understand thoroughly, to think through, why the character is funny. To that end I’ve created a comic character worksheet. It prompts you to explore the potential for comedy in a given character. The worksheet can be used in several ways. 1) First, you can use it as an exercise to sharpen your understanding of comedy. Pick a favorite comic character, and plug her characteristics into the worksheet. In my advanced writing class, we usually do the exercise together and I tell the class to use one of the classic Warner Brothers cartoon characters because they usually have very distinct, defined, well honed comic personae, and pretty much everyone is familiar with them. The major ones are Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, Henery Hawk, Tweety Bird, Granny, Sylvester Cat, Pepé Le Pew (my favorite), Tasmanian Devil, Foghorn Leghorn, Marvin the Martian, Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner, Speedy Gonzales (now a bit politically incorrect, but after all one must make allowances for almost all classic comedy), and Yosemite Sam. Many of the cartoons pair an antagonist and protagonist: Elmer vs. Bugs, Foghorn vs. Henery Hawk, Wile E.
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Coyote vs. Road Runner, Tweety vs. Sylvester. It can be helpful to chose one of those pairs and contrast their characteristics. 2) The second way you can use it is to analyze a character you’d like to understand more deeply because it’s a character crib for one of your own comedies. In analyzing the character that exists in another work, maybe you’ll be inspired to create a character of your own. Do you know anyone who reminds you of Foghorn Leghorn? Big, booming voice, outraged authority, stammering rage when defied? I do. Me. If I wanted to write myself as a comic character, I might use Foghorn Leghorn as a model. And then I might steal the character of Henery Hawk, in a way that breaks no copyright laws and isn’t plagiarism. 3) The third way to use the comic character worksheet (which is copyrighted) is to pick someone who makes you laugh—and by that I mean someone you laugh at, the butt of the joke—and evaluate his potential as a comic character. A word of advice: don’t rush through this. Take your time and find just the right word. What was it Mark Twain said? “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” This is as true in nailing down a comic character as it is in nailing a punch line so that it lands and gets a laugh. Use a thesaurus if you must. Comedy is about nuance and specificity. We laugh because we recognize some truth—and truth is specific. Defining the character precisely with the perfect words gives you a handle on him, and gives you the luxury, later on, of understanding the character in a nuanced way. You may find, as you work with the worksheet, that there just is no answer in some of the categories. Not every character has every dimension. This is an exercise, not a test.
COMIC CHARACTER WORKSHEET (with commentary) Character Name: Funny names are a tricky business. Preston Sturges pulled it off, naming the millionaire in Palm Beach Story John D. Hackensacker III, and the father trying to protect the virtue of his wayward daughter in Miracle of Morgan Creek Mr. Kockenlocker (get it?), but if you give characters a funny name, make sure it’s funny. Physical description: Is there deviation from physical norms? THE CHARACTER IN THREE WORDS: If you had to boil down this character to three words, what would they be? KEY QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT THE CHARACTER (BOIL IT DOWN TO EXACTLY THE RIGHT WORD THAT RINGS TRUE FOR YOU): He’s too…WHAT? He’s always doing…WHAT? He’s always secretly thinking about…WHAT? What topic interests him most but he doesn’t admit it? It sneaks out.
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He pretends he’s…WHAT? He pretends he isn’t…WHAT? He places too much importance on…WHAT? He places too little importance on…WHAT? He acts as if…WHAT? He never learns…WHAT? THE MASK. The characteristic pose or manner: What attitude, pose, manner does he too consistently embody? What’s his style? His affect? Does he have a style or persona, or mood that he “always” wears? Does he misrepresent himself in a way that is phony, vain, or hypocritical? Is he pretending to be something he’s not? For example, Pepé Le Pew is always the French seducer, and Tweety is always playing innocent. What does your character PRETEND to be? What DIGNITY does he have that might collapse? How does he pretend to be BETTER than other people? His mask is what? THE FOIBLES AND FLAWS BENEATH THE MASK (we see them when the mask slips, when dignity collapses): Horny? Greedy? Pretentious? When the mask slips or his dignity collapses, he’s revealed to be what? Preoccupation: What does he think about too much? His mind automatically returns – defaults – to this, whether or not it’s appropriate to the situation. This subject or topic, often trivial, “pops up” suddenly and surprisingly at the oddest moments. Wimpy thinks of hamburgers. Daffy thinks of his competition with Bugs. Lucy Ricardo is crazy about breaking into show business. Flawed or Crazy Thinking; Misapprehension of self or the world: Comic characters operate at least some of the time from mistaken assumptions: a basic misperception of self or reality that leads to crazy behavior. This is the belief that is at the core of—that is the wellspring of—his madness. Pepé Le Pew believes himself to be “a player” (misapprehension of self) and he thinks the cat is a beautiful lady skunk (misperception of the world). What are the character’s delusions? To what is he oblivious? Crazy Behavior, or Inappropriate Actions: What does he do that makes us laugh? The moment we laugh at a character is our clue to his crazy thinking, and the result of his crazy thinking. Pepé continues to make love to a female who is desperately trying to wriggle out of his embrace. Redeeming Quality or Poignancy: Why do we like them in spite of it all? Funny? Loving? What is poignant about the character? What’s heartwarming? Sad? Their pain? What is the character’s secret heartbreak? Is your character lonely, like Chaplin in The Gold Rush? STILL MORE QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER: What does he do ALWAYS? He always hits on the lady skunk. Inflexible, never changes, never learns.
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What does he act AS IF? Pepé acts as if he were irresistible. How is he a FISH OUT OF WATER? Inappropriate? Out of context? Incongruous? For example, he’s a streetwise black man in white-bread Beverly Hills. Does he OVERREACT or UNDERREACT? “What do you mean the M&Ms aren’t all red?” What is it he CAN’T HELP DOING? Deviation from norm is either intentional or unintentional: comic characters may be intentionally naughty or perverse on one hand (Dr. Evil and Bart Simpson), or maybe on the other hand they deviate because they just can’t help it (Pepé Le Pew and Homer Simpson). Those who can’t help it are often unaware that they deviate, whereas those who intentionally deviate know it and just don’t care about the rules. There’s a difference between not knowing the norms and not caring. The genius of the character “Borat” is that he’s a person who intentionally breaks the rules, while pretending not to know them, so you get both at the same time. Is he a BUTT or a WIT, or both? CLASSIC COMIC TYPE OR FOIBLE: Does your character fit into one of the categories of classic comic types? Dizzy dame? Insulter? CLOSEST OTHER EXAMPLES OF THE TYPE: Are there other characters in drama or fiction who are the same type as your character? Lorelei Lee. Rodney Dangerfield. Here is a version of the comic character worksheet without explanations, to make it easier to work with:
COMIC CHARACTER WORKSHEET Character Name: Physical description: Is there deviation from physical norms? THE CHARACTER IN THREE WORDS: KEY QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT THE CHARACTER (BOIL IT DOWN TO EXACTLY THE RIGHT WORD THAT RINGS TRUE FOR YOU): He’s too…WHAT? He’s always doing…WHAT? He’s always secretly thinking about…WHAT? What topic interests him most but he doesn’t admit it? It sneaks out. He pretends he’s…WHAT? He pretends he isn’t…WHAT? He places too much importance on…WHAT? He places too little importance on…WHAT? He acts as if…WHAT? He never learns…WHAT? THE MASK. The characteristic pose or manner: THE FOIBLES AND FLAWS BENEATH THE MASK (we see them when the mask slips, when dignity collapses):
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Preoccupation: Flawed Thinking; Misapprehension of self or the world: Crazy Behavior, or Inappropriate Actions: Redeeming Quality or Poignancy: What does he do ALWAYS? What does he act AS IF? How is he a FISH OUT OF WATER? Does he OVERREACT or UNDERREACT? What is it he CAN’T HELP DOING? Deviation from norm is either intentional or unintentional. Is he a BUTT or a WIT, or both? CLASSIC COMIC TYPE OR FOIBLE: CLOSEST OTHER EXAMPLES OF THE TYPE:
CHAPTER FIVE: THE COMIC MOMENT
Once you have a comic character, the job is to reveal his flaws. In sitcom-writer parlance, this used to be called “lighting the lantern.” The moment where PUTTING IT TOGETHER: COMEDY HAPPENS IN THE HEAD The moment of comedy, the detonation, the provocation of the laugh, happens in mind of the viewer when he “puts together” the meaning of the behavior—whether it’s a line, an action, or a facial expression (such as a “reaction shot”). By the way, even doing nothing, making no face at all, can be a reaction, as our discussion of deadpan showed. The audience sees the behavior and understands what it means about the character’s inner life. That moment of understanding, when the puzzle, the mystery, is solved, when that effort is rewarded—that’s the moment of comedy, and everything we do—creating comic characters, creating comic situation, comic lines, comic behavior—is all, every bit of it, designed to serve that moment that provokes the laugh. You’ve heard the expression, “It’s a comedy goldmine,” referring to an apt premise or subject for comedy, but you still have to get the gold out, and that’s like gold mining in that an enormous amount of toil and sweat and sacrifice yields a few ounces of a precious substance. How tragic to do all the work, all the preparation involved in creating a comic play or screenplay and to fumble the joke on the one yard line! Landing the joke is very important. First you have to know that the joke is there, and then you have to refine the moment so that the joke springs correctly. Not Too Much Information—But Enough
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Of course the audience needs to have all the exposition they need to understand the situation—they need you to set up the circumstances, and set up the characters. They need you to plot the story and populate it with characters. Now might be a good time to define “exposition”: it’s the information the audience needs to make sense of the situation. Who are these people? What relationship are they to each other? What are their character traits? That kind of information is called “exposition.” It “exposes,” or sets up, the circumstances and characters so the audience knows where they are and who they’re with. After all, if a comic character is “too” something, if he “never learns,” is he is somehow pretending to be something he’s not, then we need to know him pretty well to recognize that. The moment of recognition that is the moment of comedy depends upon a thorough familiarity with the comic character. This book is about comedy that takes place in the midst of story, and in telling a story one has to create plot and character, and both must be comprehensible to the audience (let’s leave absurdism out of it for now). That’s the set up. It’s most of what you’re doing as you write a play or screenplay. But then arrives the moment of comedy, and the span of time leading up to it is quite brief, which may be why Shakespeare’s droning Polonius ironically said, “brevity is the soul of wit” (and why Dorothy Parker wrote, “Brevity is the soul of lingerie”). Comedy happens in a flash, even if the set up or build up to it may be slow. The “flash” is the flash” of understanding or recognition in the mind of the viewer. It’s funny because it’s true You’ve heard the expression, “It’s funny because it’s true.” It’s often spoken in reference to the nonfictional, literal truth of the so-called “observational comedian,” who just talks about real, everyday things (often starting sentences with the phrase “You know what really sucks?”), and the audience laughs because they’ve tasted airline food, driven in traffic, or lost socks on laundry day. Truth also rears it hideous head when someone tells you a true story about someone you know, and you laugh. “It’s a true story, so help me God. Then she did it again.” But, in a way, the expression “it’s funny because it’s true” can be applied to almost any comic moment, because the comic moment is always an expression of a kind of truth. It might be a universal truth about human nature or the ironies of life, or it might just be a truth about the character the writer has invented. Or both. But it’s a truth, and we delight in uncovering it. Comedy happens when we realize we’ve seen behind the mask—penetrated the appearance of things. That is something at which film and drama are especially adept. Film, for example, is a record of the surface of life. It’s all surfaces. Contrast that with prose fiction, where the author has the luxury of toggling back and forth between the inner and out lives of his characters (although the prose fiction writer has the advantage of telling us the naughty things people think but don’t speak). Like film, a stage play is an enactment of the surface of life. Admittedly, there are techniques in film and drama for
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getting around the limitation I’m talking about. In film there’s direct address of the camera or voiceover narration. A stage character can use asides and soliloquys. And those things can be used to comic effect. But most of time in film and drama, we’re not privy to the inner lives of the characters and have to figure out what they’re thinking, and when we do, that can be comedy. That is to say, it’s comic if it reveals comic character’s flaws or obsessions. We suddenly understand the truth beneath the surface. Another word for that is “recognition.” We recognize the hidden truth that lies within something or someone that is disguised or opaque. ON THE NOSE AND NOT ON THE NOSE There’s an expression in writing: “on the nose dialogue.” It means dialogue that is very direct: dialogue in which a character says exactly what he means. Sometimes, dialogue that is on-the-nose can be very funny, and we’ll discuss that in a minute. Right now, let’s examine the value of taking the dialogue to the side a bit. We’ll use a couple of Warner Brothers cartoon characters, starting with my favorite, Pepé Le Pew. He is, of course, a skunk who believes himself to be an irresistible lover. That misperception—delusion—is comical, yet there is a truth about human nature it exemplifies: psychologists tell us that most men overrate their own looks, while most women underrate themselves. Imagine a female character who’s like Pepé: stinky and repulsive, yet imagining herself an irresistible beauty. It’s just not as funny, for a variety, some of them admittedly cultural and even sexist, but the point here is that when Pepé behaves in a way that reveals his delusion, the truth is on two levels: men in general, and Pepé in particular. One way Pepé Le Pew might reveal himself would be to say: “I’m repulsive yet I find myself so unbelievably handsome and people won’t leave me alone.” Yikes. Much too on-the-nose. He’s just stating his thought baldly, with no work on the part of the audience. Here’s what Pepé really says: “You know, it is possible to be too attractive.” I love that line. I have it on a refrigerator magnet. He’s confiding that the life of an incredibly attractive person has its problems—it’s a burden. When he says that, we know not only how deluded he is—he thinks he’s really, really attractive—but we also know that he thinks problems in his life are caused by his attractiveness. He is over-the-top deluded. We’ve seen his cartoons before—we know he thinks he’s hot—but this remark reveals a new little alleyway of his delusion. Notice that he’s not explicitly stating that attractiveness causes problems. He simply says “one” can be too attractive, and we’re left to figure out what he means. Notice the uses the word “one” instead of “I.” Let’s look at another of my Warner Brothers favorites, Tweety. Here’s one of his best lines (I have it on a refrigerator magnet, too):
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“Once a bad old puddy cat, always a bad old puddy cat.” Notice that Tweety’s line is very “in character” (we’re used to his childlike pronunciation of “puddy cat”). Tweety’s comic character is that he looks innocent but really is quite wised up and able to take care of himself. “Once a bad old puddy cat, always a bad old puddy cat.” He’s been around the block and he’s giving us advice from the lofty perch of a worldly bird who has met cats like Sylvester before and knows the type. All of that is encapsulated in the line, but we have to figure it out—recognize it—and it wouldn’t be nearly as funny if it were “on the nose.” For example: “I may look innocent, but I know how to watch out for myself.” Yeesh. No. The comic moment may be complex One of the reasons that the making of comedy doesn’t yield readily to formulae is that a comic moment is complex. Usually more than one thing is going on at once. There have to be multiple factors in operation, and that complexity adds to puzzle, and of course solving the puzzle is the pleasure. For example, it’s funny to say or do the wrong thing. It’s even funnier to pretend to say or do the wrong thing. It adds a level of complexity. There’s a moment in Casablanca where Rick (Bogart) is sitting with the Nazi Major Strasser (German star Conrad Veidt, who also played the guy Dr. Caligari kept in a cabinet). Major Strasser hands Rick a “dossier” in which the Nazis have compiled information about Rick’s dangerous, anti-fascist past. Rick glances at the dossier and drily remarks, “Are my eyes brown?” A great line that still get a laugh when I show the film to students. At least three things are going on. First, only a person of subnormal intelligence would not know the color of his own eyes, so Rick deviates from the human norm by being exceptionally stupid and/or oblivious. Second, we get that Rick obviously does know the color of his own eyes, and that he’s only pretending the information is a surprise to him—misrepresentation. Third, he’s insulting Major Strasser, and insults are almost always a deviation from cultural norm. Rick’s real meaning is, “I really don’t take your little dossier seriously because the information it contains is worthless, and you people really aren’t all that impressive.” Arguably, there’s also an element of collapse of dignity: Major Strasser, who could not be grander, is brought down a peg. OK, so a simple, throwaway line—and the way he drily throws it away is perfect—contains 1) deviation from human norm 2) misrepresentation 3) deviation from cultural norm and, when we include the butt Strasser’s reaction to the wit’s wit, 4) collapse of dignity.
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You might be thinking right now, “Yikes, how can I ever write comedy, construct a comic moment, if the moments are such complex interplays of comic principles?” Good question. Fortunately, you’re brain does a lot of things “unconsciously.” The point of this text is to help you set up the conditions where your brain, and your characters, will do the work for you. Those conditions are: a story based on a good comic premise, and characters with comic possibilities. And when you do that your characters will say and do funny things, and you will not stop to analyze those things in the terms I’ve been using, you will just thank God and move on to the next scene. The butt reveals himself inadvertently In any case, the comic flaw is not simply announced. Instead, the comic character may reveal the flaw inadvertently. The character is simply being himself. The character usually does not intend to reveal himself or even know he’s revealing himself. In fact, often character is trying to conceal himself—to maintain the mask, but unsuccessfully. The character is busted when the mask slips. He is the butt of the joke, as when Pepé Le Pew. The wit reveals himself intentionally Conversely, perhaps the character slyly is trying to reveal himself, as Rick does when he asks, “A my eyes brown?” Rick is The Wit, and he points out the flaw in Major Strasser. Pepé Le Pew, on the other hand, is the butt of the joke when he reveals Obscure references Have you ever noticed that when a play or movie has a joke that hinges on an obscure reference—a literary allusion or arcane knowledge—the people who have that knowledge laugh especially loud? I know I do. Loud. Why? Because laughing at the joke demonstrates one’s mastery of understanding the world. We delight in that, just as the little girl delighted in figuring out elephants couldn’t hide in her bed. Is there a sense of superiority gained by laughing at an obscure reference? Sure. Is comedy a little bit about feeling superior? Maybe, but one could also say it’s about feeling competent. COMIC RELIEF: TENSION PRECEDES RELEASE The preceding example from Casablanca demonstrates another principle: tense situations are conducive to laughter. Major Strasser is a menacing, evil man. We have no idea what he has in mind for Rick, but we know it isn’t good and we’re scared on his behalf. When Rick makes a joke at Major Strasser’s expense, the tension is released. A New Yorker cartoonist of my acquaintance once told me he became a cartoonist because it was a safe way to express his hostility. There’s some covert hostility in Rick’s remark—he’s tweaked Strasser’s nose and gotten away with it, so our relief comes not
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just from the laughter but also from part the moment plays in the plot: Rick takes Strasser seriously enough to break his rule about drinking with customers, but he’s not so rattled by the Nazis as to lose his cool. Strasser has Panzer tanks. Rick has wit and isn’t overmatched. A term that has been applied to a joke that punctuates a tense, highly dramatic or even tragic situation is “comic relief.” One of Shakespeare’s innovations was to mix comic material into tragedy in a way the Greeks did not do. There are laughs in Hamlet but not in Medea. Of course, no one knows what Shakespeare was thinking (though that never stops people from guessing), but some people believe he carefully calculated the effect the comedy would have—that at whatever particular moment of the plot the tension or suspense was so great that comedy was necessary. I suspect it was more like, “Oh, I thought of a joke, I’m putting it in, what the hell, this turkey goes into rehearsal tomorrow.” Words, ideas, tumbled out of Shakespeare’s fertile brain, and his tendency was to throw it all onto the page. He was very wordy, even by the standards of his day, and nobody performs the plays without cuts. Someone once boasted of Shakespeare that he turned out very clean copy and never blotted a line, prompting Ben Johnson famously to retort, “Would he had blotted a thousand.” He loved Shakespeare but felt The Bard could do with a little editing. Back to comic relief. Tension definitely serves to lay the groundwork for a laugh. Arguably, Rick is in mortal danger—the Nazis know the Rick fought on the right side in Spain and could be working against them in North Africa, having fought in Spain, and so it’s the tension of mortal danger. The fictional movie spy James Bond, after violently dispatching a villain, had a habit of tossing off a dry quip. In You Only Live Twice, when piranhas eat the villain, Bond rejoins, “Bon appetit!” In Dr. No, as a hearse containing villains flies over a cliff and explodes, a bystander asks, “What happened?” Bond replies, “I think they were on their way to a funeral.” If you think the line isn’t funny when you read it here, maybe that demonstrates that a joke is funnier in context of tension. The villains got in some nice comic relief as well, as in this exchange between Bond and the villain torturing him: Bond: “I think that’s enough, Goldfinger, you’ve made your point.” Goldfinger: “Choose your next witticism wisely, Mr. Bond, it may be your last.” Bond: “Do you expect me to talk?”
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Goldfinger: “No Mr. Bond I expect you to die!” Of course, the whole point of the thriller genre is to create suspense and tension, so there developed a subgenre, the “comic thriller.” Ernest Lehman’s witty script for Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) contains some of the most suspenseful sequences ever put on film yet is full of laughs. Another example would be another Cary Grant vehicle, Charade (1963), a film that, like North by Northwest, holds up very nicely over half a century later. The tension does not have to stem from mortal danger, though. Almost any kind of an emotional buildup will do. A fight, a rush of enthusiasm or passion, the embarrassment of an awkward social situation, all of these will work. In most cases the writer probably isn’t conscious of it. He has had the sense to construct an interesting, exciting plot with fully imagined characters, and while writing the scene the comic line or behavior just popped into his head. The point here is that plot and character and comedy interact. Comedy springs out of character in a dramatic situation. The takeaway is that, if you have thought through your comic characters, if you have constructed a proper plot with suspense and conflict, you as a writer have laid the groundwork for comic inspiration: that is to say—set up the joke. Even horror can provide a context for comedy. Horror genius David Cronenberg (Scanners, The Fly, Videodrome) said this about the relationship between horror and comedy: “Humor, to me, is a crucial part of life in general. It’s such an incredibly subtle and passionate way of relating to people. Your sense of humor communicates what you are, your approach to life. You’re very vulnerable when you make a joke. Not when you’re telling a joke so much, but when you’re joking around. To me, it’s just an instinctive, natural part of character development—showing what a character is. Also, you do it (I do it), when you’re under pressure; it’s a way of dealing with impossible situations. Untenable situations can only be dealt with through humor, if not despair and resignation. So, I prefer the humor. That’s how I like to use it in a horror film. But it’s not any different in how I would use it in any other film.”
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CHAPTER SIX: COMIC
DIALOGUE COMIC LINES: SHORT, CRACK LIKE A WHIP, THE LAST WORD ASSEMBLES THE MEANING The key to sharpening and landing a moment of comedy is simple: get to the joke before the audience does. You’ve got to beat them to the jokes, so that the joke ends and then they have to put it together in their heads. That’s why amateur actors must constantly being instructed, “Hold for the laugh. Hold for the laugh!” Why hold? If the author knows his business, it will take the audience a split second to decipher—“get”—the joke. Of course, the joke mightn’t land, in which case the actor has to finesse the situation, and the actor will, which is why good actors deserve so much money. How do you insure that you get to the joke before the audience does? Quips, wisecracks and punch lines should:
1) Be as short as possible and no shorter
2) Should not be comprehensible before they are over. How is that accomplished?
1) Omit needles words.
2) Place the word that makes the line make sense last. They should crack at the end like a whip. That is to say, the last word in the sentence should be the one that triggers the laugh: “Take my wife—please!” And that is to say, that the last word in the line should be the word that makes it all make sense.
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The key, the technique you want to know, is this: The meaning of the line should not be apparent until the last word in the line is spoken! The audience hears the last word, and assembles the joke—solves the puzzle-in its head. Why? So as not to “telegraph the joke,” which means give away the joke too early, to telegraph ahead and give it away in advance of the proper moment. A good punchline has snap. It’s snappy. Here are some lines of comedy. Let us analyze how they are short—shorn of all extraneous words—and how their meaning cannot be assembled until the last word in the line has been spoken. (By the way, clips of most of these lines can be found online—just type the line into your search engine—and seeing them actually played by skilled players gives priceless insight into performance of comedy.) Great Lines Claude Rains played police Capt. Louis Renault in Casablanca (1942). At the end of the film, it’s unclear whether or not he’s going to arrest Rick for the killing of the Nazi, Major Strasser. It’s a tense situation. There’s a pregnant pause. Renault is deciding and he hasn’t much time. Then, Renault says to his officers: “Round up the usual suspects.” We have our answer! Renault is letting Rick off the hook! The line is only five words long, and one obviously cannot put together its meaning until the end. The listener has to wait for the last word to assemble the meaning the meaning of the line. “Round up the usual…executioners?” No. Suspects. Oh! Renault is going to pretend to investigate the murder of Strasser; he’ll perform a cynical charade. The line is so funny because we have seen who Renault is throughout the film: a sly, slippery cynic, an amoral trickster, so the line concisely reveals character: he’s behaving “in character,” revealing his character, again, but also there’s variation, because usually his cynical trickiness is in the service of his own, selfish ends, but this time, it’s the same, cynical trickiness, but to a higher purpose. This line is also a great example of how tension can prepare us for the laugh: what Renault says at this moment could send Rick to a concentration camp, or save his life. The “K” sound in the last word “suspects” helps crack the whip. But primarily, it’s about character: the line would not be half as funny spoken by anyone else. In When Harry Met Sally, the character played by Meg Ryan, Sally, wants to convince a male friend, Harry (Billy Crystal) that women can, and do, fake orgasms. Despite the fact that they’re in a crowded restaurant, Sally long and loudly renders the moans and gasps of a woman building to a screaming sexual climax. It’s funny but it’s really just the set-
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up; the joke is coming: when she’s done, a motherly, middle-aged woman in the restaurant remarks to her waiter, “I’ll have what she’s having.” Five lines long, and you cannot assemble the meaning until the last word has been spoken, the meaning being that older woman has mistaken the sounds of an orgasm for a reaction to a delicious dish. Misperception. Notice how the line makes us work a little bit to understand its meaning. If the older woman has said, “Her sandwich must be delicious,” it might still have been a little funny, but how much funnier it is as written, because it takes us a second to figure out what she means—“I’ll have what she’s having” is less on-the-nose. And of course, there’s a sly double entendre in that we assume that a screaming orgasm is something the older woman might want and may not have had from her older husband in quite a while. In Some Like It Hot, Joe E. Brown plays Osgood Fielding III, a millionaire who has fallen for a woman named Geraldine. But she’s really Jerry, a man who dressed up as a woman to escape gangsters. Jerry pulls off his wig and tells the smitten Osgood he’s really a man. “Well,” Osgood chirps, “nobody’s perfect.” What? He just discovered his inamorata is a transvestite and he dismisses it with a casual cliché? The truth is a profound one: love is indeed blind. Or maybe he knew all along and that’s his naughty preference. Osgood’s line is the last line spoken in the picture and one of the most famous curtain lines in the history of cinema. The line is just three…words…long. You might even argue that “well” is extraneous and breaks the rule of fewest words possible, but in fact the “well” gives the line it’s whole flavor of dismissiveness. He’s shrugging off an enormous revelation, so the principle of under- reaction is at work here, too. Then there’s the “K” sound in the last word, “perfect.” Peter Sellers plays multiple characters in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), one of them being President Merkin Muffley. The plot hinges on American bombers erroneously sent to drop bombs on Russia. Everyone convenes in the U.S. military HQ, the War Room, so sort out the problem, but tensions get hot and the Soviet Ambassador and an American general start physically tussling like boys in a schoolyard. President Muffley tries to stop them, scolding, “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!” It’s a crisp line, perfectly worded, that you can’t make any shorter. The joke is that in the room from which nuclear weapons are controlled, violence is completely out of place, but no one could possible suss out that apocalyptic irony and insane hypocrisy before the line is over; it’s a line that has to be figured out. Another comedic principle at work here is collapse of dignity: Muffley’s line collapses the dignity of the War Room, while the two battling middle-aged men have collapsed their own dignity already.
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Airplane! is similar to Dr. Strangelove in that it’s a comedy that uses the tension-filled location of a control room during a disaster—in the case of Airplane! they’re in a control tower at an airport. Here’s the most famous dialogue exchange in the movie. Striker (Robert Hays): “Surely you can’t be serious.” Rumack (Leslie Nielsen): “I am serious…and don’t call me Shirley.” Short? The punchline is just five lines long: “And don’t call me Shirley.” Obviously, you can’t put the meaning of the line together until you hear the last word— Shirley. And it has snap because it’s so brief—the speaker GETS TO THE JOKE BEFORE THE AUDIENCE. If it were longer, it wouldn’t be as funny. Would the line be funny if it read, “And why did you just call me Shirley?” (Seven words, still a little funny, but not as good.) As for ending with a snap like the crack of a whip, that’s often accomplished with a “K” sound, but in this case it’s the silliness of the last word. “Shirley” is just kind of a silly- sounding name to me. Of course, it’s a pun n the sword “surely,” and puns are usually based on the comic concept of misunderstanding. In the hit 1987 romantic comedy Moonstruck, Cher plays Loretta Castorini, a New York Italian woman who stumbles into bed with her fiancé’s brother (Nicholas Cage). They wake up the next morning and she tells the brother it never happened—take it to the grave. “I can’t do that,” he says, “I’m in love with you.” There’s a brief pause, then… She slaps him—hard—twice—and barks, “Snap out of it!” This is a comic moment with “snap” in more ways than one. The shock of the slaps, punctuated by expertly times pauses, creates a tension that sets up the line. The line is admirably brief—four words—and packed with truth. First, there’s that Loretta is excessively blunt and overly practical, so the line expresses the way her ingrained character drives her into inappropriate behavior. When someone declares his or her love, is that the expected, customary, appropriate response? Of course not. But comic characters respond inappropriately. The second truth is, we all know that romantic love, falling in love, is a kind of delusional madness that, if everything works out, evolves into a longer-lasting kind of love. But the further truth is one can’t just “snap out of it” merely because the love is inconvenient or inappropriate. And talk about snappy, it even employs the word “snap.”
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All About Eve (1950) was nominated for 14 Academy Awards (a tally unmatched until the 1997 film Titanic) and won six, including Best Picture. It is, with the possible exception of Casablanca, the most quotably witty script in the history of cinema. It’s the story of Margo Channing, a fierce, bold, scrappy Broadway star who battles Eve, a younger actress out to steal Margo’s career, and her man. Margo throws a party, but before it even starts she’s tossing back dry martinis and making cutting remarks. Her best friend Karen fears that Margo is set to make an ugly scene at the party: “We know you. We’ve seen you like this before. Is it over or is it just beginning.” There’s a pause as Margo guzzles another martini. Margo starts up the stairs, stops, and turns back to Karen. Margo (with menace): “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” If you’ve seen the picture you’re grinning. If you haven’t you aren’t. That because the line heavily dependent on context. First, the writer-director Joe Mankiewicz masterfully conducts the tension building up to the punch line. Second, the line works because it is an expression, a distillation, of pure Margo, and if you haven’t seen the film (treat yourself, see it), you haven’t had the character of Margot Channing stamped indelibly onto your brain forever, so the that’s-so- Margot-ness of the line (“We’ve seen you like this before”) doesn’t click. The line is an example of comedy based on two, simultaneously employed principles. 1) A pun: “night” instead of “flight.” Second, inappropriate behavior stemming out of character flaw. Planning to make a scene at a party is inappropriate, but Margot is an overreactor. Like a lot of women who succeed in the tough profession of show business, when she feels unsafe she toggles instantly into attack mode and makes no apologies about it. The light snaps nicely, ending with the word “night,” with the last word simultaneously completing the pun and assembling the line’s meaning. Having analyzed some comic line—punch lines, if you will—let’s try to assemble some observations and review what we’ve learned. 1) A comic line is one in which the character inadvertently reveals his crazy thinking. 2) A comic line ends with the word that triggers the laugh. It’s more than just a timing issue—it’s also about the thrill the viewer gets from assembling the twisted logic in the character’s head. An ideal comic line is like a puzzle or mystery that isn’t solved until we get that last bit of information-the last word—that completes the picture. Then, there’s a “beat” (a pause) during which the viewer “assembles” the joke.
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3) The comic line is very specific. In a student script, a student wrote about a tenderhearted college-boy vampire who, in an effort to become a great humanitarian, decided that instead of murdering virgins to get their blood, he would steal their tampons. His vampire roommate, horrified at the vampire’s pretensions to humanitarianism, cried, “All you’re doing is stealing tampons! Do you want an award?” The line didn’t really land, but it was funnier when he changed it to, “What do you want, the Nobel Prize?” Why is that funnier? Because it’s more specific. Why is more specific funnier? Because the specificity often reveals the quirky thinking of the character, and it adds another layer that the viewer sort through before he “gets” (which is to say assembles in his head the twisted logic of) the joke.
4) Building tension before the punch line is a good thing. A tense situation (for example, a control tower at an airport when a jet’s in trouble) is the gasoline—the punch line is the match. 5) “K” sounds (and snappy words) give the punchline snap, like the cracking of a whip.
Which is better of these three? “Are you on drugs?” “Are you on ecstasy?” “Are you on crack?” When you have constructed your line of comedy so that the last word in the sentence is the one that makes the sentence make sense, and is the word that provokes the laugh, then you need to make sure that word snaps, cracks or pops. It’s a cliché of comedy, but a safe bet is to go for the “K” sound. Don’t sit on the sausage! Don’t sit on the banana! Don’t sit on the pickle! See? Pickle is funniest. And it’s not because pickles are inherently funnier or more phallic than bananas and sausages, which if you ask me are all rather funny. It’s because pickle has the “K.” 6) Don’t telegraph the joke. Comedy is the moment the viewer puts the backstory together in her head. That should happen in the split second after the joke ends. If they get the joke before the line is over, they won’t laugh because they’re listening to hear the rest of the line, and by the time they get t the end of the line they’ve suppressed the urge to laugh. This is one way of “stepping on a joke.” There are other techniques the writer can use to create funnier comic dialogue. One of my favorites is using the image to contradict to the words being spoken. The image “belies” the words.
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VOICE-OVER NARRATION: INCONGRUITY BETWEEN IMAGE AND SOUND Singin’ in the Rain is film widely considered the greatest of all movie musicals and one of the ten best movies ever made. Sure, the musical numbers are great, but also the script teems with dazzling comic scenes and moments. Gene Kelly is a silent film star, swanning up the red carpet at the premiere of his new epic. Flashbulbs pop, he’s dressed all in white and, with the help of Gene Kelly’s sparkling smile, the character glows with serene confidence. He’s stopped by a Hedda Hopper-ish radio reporter who begs him to share the story of his rise to show biz success with her millions of listeners. At first he demurs, oozing unctuous humility, but he finally relents and takes the microphone: “Well, Dora,” he smiles, “I’ve had one motto, which I’ve always lived by. Dignity. Always dignity.” He proceeds to tell the radio audience of his upper class childhood, being sent by Mom and Dad to “the finest schools, including dancing schools.” Then he’s “perform for all of Mom and Dad’s society friends.” Now we cut from the red carpet to a flashback of the character as a child, but he is not at the finest dancing school, nor is he performing for Mom and Dad’s society friends. The little boy is dancing, all right—in a crummy pool hall for pennies and nickels tossed at his feet by off-screen drunks. The liar! As he sanctimoniously spouts the press agent fabrication of the movie star life a la 1927, we see the truth. The image on the screen shows us the reality behind the mask he’s creating with his words. He continues his story in the same vein, talking about how Mom and Dad’s society friends made “such a fuss” over him—but what we see is the pool hall proprietor pick him up and carry him to the door. Then he tells us his parents brought him up on “Shaw, Moliere, the finest of the classics” (note he cites the two greatest comic writers in history), but what we see is him sneaking into a nickelodeon to appreciate a movie that appears to be about a gorilla kidnapping a bosomy blonde. He goes on. His “rigorous musical training at the Conservatory of Fine Arts,” is contradicted by the image on the screen of him playing the fiddle at a rowdy saloon. “Audiences everywhere adored us,” he assures us—cut to the audience loudly booing. The key here is that the image contradicts the narration. It reveals the narration to be a misrepresentation of the facts.
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In general, narration in a movie should never just illustrate what the narrator is saying— it’s a repetitive bore unless it adds something. In this case, it directly refutes the voiceover. The comedy is that the image rips off the mask of the words Don speaks. Obviously, when he speaks his motto, which he repeats later in the sequence, “Dignity— always dignity,” we’re being set up for the comic concept of collapse of dignity. The image collapses the dignity of the narration by revealing it to be a lie. By ripping off the mask, the movie collapses Don’s dignity. Another beautiful thing about this sequence is it’s a brilliant way to deliver “backstory,” defined as exposition regarding the character’s life or circumstances before the movie began. It turns what could have been a dreary recitation of facts into a comic tour de force. Catchphrase The catchphrase is a remark that’s always the same and comes out of character; it’s a quintessential expression of the characters unchanging flawed character. “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” comes out of Wimpy’s gluttony and placid laziness; he wants hamburgers and expects not to work for them. (The truth behind the gag is that we all want that). The repetition is an expression of the sameness of the character – his continuing obsession with hamburger. Homer Simpson says “D’oh!!” It’s an expression of frustration, of being thwarted, but it also contains the realization that he’s been outsmarted—again. Ralph Cramden on The Honeymooners says, “To the moon, Alice.” He’s an angry man but also powerless—Alice knows he’s just being a blowhard and wouldn’t slug her in a million years—sort of like the way I threaten to hit my students with a baseball bat. It wouldn’t be funny if she were afraid, because then his remark would not be expressive of impotent anger plus overstatement and overreaction (mere human foibles), but rather, of violent brutality (a serious matter and not funny). “What’s up, Doc?” expresses Bugs Bunny’s impish alertness, curiosity, and a certain coyness. It seems like an innocuous pleasantry, but in fact he often says it when he’s fully aware of what’s up, and so it comes an expression of what he is: a trickster. If comic characters are “always” themselves, it makes sense that they have something they “always” say. As with all comedy, the trick is for us not to expect it. If the catch phrase is overused, or we can see it coming, it fizzles. Here are some memorable catchphrases from film and television. Not that, if you grew up in the US, you can hear them delivered in your head before you even see who spoke them.
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“Yada, yada, yada.” Seinfeld. “Isn’t that special?” The Church Lady on Saturday Night Live. “How you doin’?” Joey Tribbiani on Friends, upon meeting a potential sexual conquest. “Oh my God! They killed Kenny!” Stan and Kyle on South Park. “What you talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?” Gary Coleman on Diff’rent Strokes. “Ruh-roh!” Astro, the family dog on The Jetsons. “No soup for you!” The Soup Nazi on Seinfeld.
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CHAPTER SEVEN: COMEDY TECHNIQUES
This chapter includes a grab bag of taking for making a script funny, or funnier. IDENTIFY THE FUNNY As you’re writing your script, or after it’s done, it’s important to identify what’s funny. The key is to know where the laughs are. COLLAPSE OF DIGNITY The great Mack Sennett, more or less the inventor of film comedy, once said that there are really only two gags in the whole world: collapse of dignity and mistaken identity. You may remember we talked about collapse of dignity when were talking about misrepresentation, in particular the misrepresentation embodied in “pretentiousness” (defined by Miriam-Webster as “expressive of affected, unwarranted, or exaggerated importance, worth, or stature”). Want to be seen as respectable and dignified, and when you undercut that dignity—pull the rug out from under it—that’s the collapse of dignity. One of the classic figures in this regard was Margaret Dumont, the tall, regal actress who played the foil to Groucho Marx. Posh and grand, she seemed almost bloated with dignity, which Groucho delighted in puncturing, usually verbally and anarchically with some of his most famous put-downs. Here’s an exchange from the Marx Brothers best film, Duck Soup. Groucho: “I suppose you’ll think me a sentimental old fluff, but would you mind giving me a lock of your hair?” Dumont (charmed): “A lock of my hair? Why, I had no idea you …” Groucho: “I’m letting you off easy. I was gonna ask for the whole wig!” Notice how the writer sets up a dignified situation—an old-fashioned swain requesting a lock of his beloved’s hair, then collapses the dignity of the situation with an outrageous insult. Elsewhere in the film, again he tenderly woos her: Groucho: “Why don’t you marry me?” Dumont: “Why… marry you?”
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Groucho: “You take me, and I’ll take a vacation. I’ll need a vacation if we’re going to get married. Married! I can see you right now in the kitchen, bending over a hot stove. But I can’t see the stove!” Groucho’s line would seem to break the rule of keeping the punch line short and sweet. It would seem that, “I’ll need a vacation if I marry you,” is a punchline and has been buried in middle of the speech—but Groucho’s brilliant comic timing saves the day. He doesn’t pause for a laugh, instead swiftly switching quickly back into a sentimental mode with, “Married! I can see you right now, bending over a hot stove.” Then going in for the kill— insulting the size of her keister. There’s another example of collapse of dignity in the great Leo McCarey screwball comedy The Awful Truth. Cary Grant bursts into a room where he thinks he’ll catch his wife in hankie pankie wit her Latin Lover music instructor. Oops. It’s a dignified, hoity- toity musicale. He nonchalantly leans against a table—which collapses, along with his dignity. Elsewhere in the film, trying to be cool and nonchalant, Grant leans casually against a grand piano—and the lid smashes down onto his hand. Chaplin has similar gags, for example casually leaning…against a hot stove. MISTAKEN IDENTITY Remember that Mack Sennett claimed there were only two gags in the world and that the first was collapse of dignity. The second? “Mistaken identity.” The concept of mistaken identity is related to things we’ve talked about already. One is “misperception”: I think something is one thing, but it’s another thing. I mistake its identity. Chaplin has a famous short in which he’s a clock repairman, but he seems to have mistaken the clock for a living thing—he listens to it with a stethoscope. And of course, in one of the most famous comic sequences in all of cinema, he spears two dinner rolls with forks and pretends to “mistake” them for dancing feet—and has the rolls do a little dance. Another concept we’ve discussed that related to mistaken identity is misrepresentation and disguise, but mistaken identity can occur without either. Some examples of mistaken identity in the movies: In the classic screwball comedy My Man Godfrey, Carole Lombard plays an heiress who impulsively hires a hobo to be her family’s new butler. When he father sees him leaving the daughter’s room early in morning he takes his coat off and rolls up his sleeves, preparing to defend his daughter honor—until he learns it’s the butler. (Neatly, the gag works on another level, too. The butler becomes her lover.) In the film The Inspector General, loosely based on Nikolai Gogol’s play, Danny Kaye plays a vagrant who’s mistaken for the Inspector General sent by Napoleon’s
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government. Because they have mistaken his identity, the corrupt mayor and his cronies treat him with fawning respect—while secretly trying to kill him so he won’t report their corruption. In Being There, the 1979 film based on the 1970 Jerzy Kosiński novella, Peter Sellers plays an exceedingly simple-minded gardener who is mistaken for a wise, upper class sage. Pepé Le Pew mistakes a female cat with white stripe inadvertently painted down its back for “la belle femme skunk fatale.” And here’s an example of mistaken identity through disguise; the character intentionally misrepresents the identity, and the “mistake” is on the part of those who believe him: There’s Something About Mary: is the pizza delivery boy who pretends to be Tucker, the gentle, loveable British architect who uses his reliance on crutches to bid for Mary’s sympathy. Why? “I love her, ma-a-a-n-n-n!” SIGNALING COMEDY If the audience is unsure if it’s “OK to laugh,” it might not. For example, if it’s a very realistic piece with a full measure of life’s pain mixed in with its sweetness and absurdity, people will sometimes forget that they’re watching a comedy. This is less a problem nowadays because A) people are used to dramedies and B) people don’t worry as much about whether what they do is “OK.” Still, how do you signal people know it’s OK to laugh? One trick is to put a bit of obvious comedy at the top of the scene—something clearly comic or silly. There was a classic sitcom, The Dick Van Dyke Show. Under the opening credits, the star, Dick Van Dyke, a tall, handsome, charming fellow, was walking into his living room to greet a roomful of guests—and he trips over an ottoman. A pratfall. Slapstick. Silly. But we know that it’s OK to laugh at these people. It’s possible to do this simply by announcing that it’s K to laugh. The musical comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (inspired by the farces of the Roman playwright Plautus) opens with a song entitled “Comedy Tonight.” In other words, it’s OK to laugh; this is a comedy. TURN ON A DIME The “turn on a dime” is the comic situation where someone who seems firmly going one direction meets an obstacle or new piece of information, and changes his tune instantly. Me: “I’ll never tell you where the microfilm is!”
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Evil Villain: “Then we’ll have to torture you.” Me: “My left shoe.” The turn on a dime often happens when a character has great bravado and his bluff is called—the flaw of cowardice—but not always. It can indicate hypocrisy, cynicism Here’s a great snatch of dialogue from Singin’ in the Rain, between the studio head, R.F. Simpson, and Cosmo Brown, the character played by Donald O’Connor: R.F. Simpson: “The public is screaming for more…talking pictures…Every studio is jumping on the bandwagon, Dexter. All the theatres are putting in sound equipment. We don’t want to be left out of it.” Cosmo: “Talking pictures, that means I’m out of a job. At last I can start suffering and write that symphony.” R.F. Simpson: “You’re not out of a job, we’re putting you in as head of the new music department.” Cosmo: “Well, thanks, R.F.! At last I can stop suffering and write that symphony.” Note how Cosmo turns on a dime, belying his previous noble sentiment that he’s pleased to lose his job because it would allow him to devote himself to high art. He’s a hypocrite, like we all are, and he compounds his hypocrisy by clinging to the fiction that he’s still going to write that symphony. The moment also works because the turn-on-a-dime reflects exaggerated aspects of his character: the explosive optimism and agile clownishness we say in the number “Make ‘Em Laugh.”
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CHAPTER EIGHT: STYLES AND GENRES
Comedies come in many flavors. It helps, in understanding the comedies you see or the comedies you write, to understand what the styles are, but be forewarned that the variations and combinations are endless. Genres combine and form new genres. The scholar Victoria Dunleavy of Victoria University in New Zealand wrote, “In 2004, registering the arrival of a ‘new wave’ of situation-based comedies, indicative of which were BBC’s The Office (2001-3), ABC Australia’s Kath and Kim (2002-5) and HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000-), Brett Mills underlined that “something is happening in sitcom,” an assertion that ran counter to the predictions being issued by TV industry commentators that the live action sitcom – a primetime staple through more than 50 years of television – was dying. Later that year, Mills described The Office as ‘comedy verité,’ a label that acknowledged its hybrid innovation as a comedy that fused the conventions of traditional sitcom with those of ‘reality’ TV sub-genre, the docusoap.” In other words, reality TV mated with the tradition television sitcom and gave birth to The Office. Comedy genres can collide with other genres, creating a situation akin to a concept we discussed earlier: hybridization of type, where one comic character contains elements of two (usually contradictory) human type. Space Baby. Samurai Tailor. Arguably, this was pioneered in the feature film This Is Spinal Tap in 1984. The combination of different styles of narrative is also related to a concept we discussed much earlier in the book: Deviation from Artistic Norms. If sitcoms are usually shot in a certain way, then to shot them in the style of a documentary is a deviation from the norm, and somehow “naughty” or “wrong.” So comedy verité is a deviation from artistic norms while at the same time a hybridization of artistic styles. Does that make it also a parody? Let’s just say that in the world of comedy, everything starts to overlap with everything else. It’s not a science. So for now, let’s try to understand some basic styles of comic narrative that have been around a long time and leave comedy verité for another day. Satire Comedy that makes fun of the rich and powerful, or of rich and powerful institutions, or of the establishment, with the intention of bringing about change, has a name: satire. Satire often mocks political or religious leaders. It skewers sacred cow. It points out that the emperor is naked. It’s dangerous, and as George S. Kaufman said, “It’s what closes on Saturday night.” Aesop, Twain, Gogol, Dickens, Wilde, Shaw, Will Rogers and Dorothy Parker have all been called satirists.
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Examples: Thank You for Smoking, Dr. Strangelove, Catch-22, The Daily Show, Borat, anything by Bunuel, The Onion, South Park, and The Howard Stern Show, Lysistrata. Singin’ in the Rain could be called a satire of the movie business, but an affectionate one: satire’s tone is usually sharper, more merciless. When Death of a Salesman muscled it way into theatrical history in 1949, one of the things considered remarkable was that it was a tragedy about an everyday Joe. Tragedies were supposed to be about kings and queens, whereas low characters were considered fit only for comic treatment. There was a time you could lose your head for mocking or ridiculing a prince: safer to make fun of the dustman. Now, at least in civilized democracies, anything goes (and we can thank the brave satirists at Charlie Hebdo for reminding us how important that is). Characters from all strata of society can be comic because everyone, rich or poor, has comic flaws if only you look for them. Satire’s proper object is the rich and powerful, but sometimes what is called a “satirical tone” is used to mock the powerless and disenfranchised. In such cases “satirical tone” usually means “cruel and snarky.” I’m talking to you, Christopher Guest. Parody People often use the terms parody and satire as interchangeable, which they are not. Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary, Unabridged, Second Edition defines a parody as “a literary or musical composition imitating the characteristic style of some other work or of a writer or composer, but treating a serious subject in a nonsensical manner in an attempt at humor or ridicule.” Parody mocks a work of art or a genre, while satire mocks an important, powerful person or institution. Synonyms of parody include take-off, lampoon, send-up and spoof. In prose fiction, parody goes back at least as far as Don Quixote, which parodies traditional knight errant tales. In drama, parody goes back at least as far as 405 B.C., to Aristophanes’s play The Frogs, which scholars say contains elements of parody. Parody has a long history in the cinema: Georges Méliès’s 1903 A Trip to the Moon was a parody of Jules Verne. More recently, Mel Brooks parodied the film Frankenstein with Young Frankenstein, the Western genre in Blazing Saddles, and Alfred Hitchcock’s body of work in High Anxiety. A more recent example of parody is Scary Movie (and its many sequels). And of course Mad Magazine is famous for its film parodies in almost every issue. In parody, the work of art being parodied represents the norm, and the parody deviates from the norm, usually in the direction of silliness or exaggeration. In writing the parody, the author gets a kind of head start toward comedy, so the parody is rather an easier form of comedy to write. The narrative being parodied contains a
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whole, fully imagined world, complete with style, setting, plot and characters. No, the parodist doesn’t simply reproduce those elements, but there is a certain advantage in being able to use, as the target of one’s comedy, such a limited and ready-made (and ready-made by someone else) target. Contrast that with the situation of the comic writer who works from life, for example a Chekhov. Even the tone of parody is more or less decided for the parodist in advance—the tone is parody is almost always silly and broad—whereas the comic writer who uses life as his source material probably has to decide on a voice or style chosen from a wider range of possibilities. In other words, when you decide to parody a thing, the “voice” of your comedy is pretty much selected for you, by the act of parody and the tone of the work being parodied. But if I write a comedy based on life—say, my crazy Aunt Lillian—I have to feel my way to a tone. Black comedy? Warmly sentimental? Chekhovian? Shavian? All that is not to denigrate parodists, but just to say that working in parody gives the writer a head start, and that’s why the work is often so hilarious—like that of the great Mel Brooks (arguably the only humorist in history have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony—“It’s good to be king”). Some people believe that one limitation of parody is that the audience needs to be familiar with the work being parodied, but I don’t think so. Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon is funny whether or not you’ve read Jules Verne. Related to parody is “pastiche,” a word often misused. Like parody, pastiche is an imitation of another artist’s style or work, but pastiche is without comic intent. Godard’s Breathless is a pastiche of low-budget American crime movies. The Todd Haynes movie Far From Heaven is a pastiche of the films of Douglas Sirk. Parody is irreverent, where pastiche is often affectionate or respectful. When Ann Margaret slathers paint all over her mostly naked body and writhes on a giant canvas placed on the floor, she’s parodying the “action painting” of Jackson Pollock. “Burlesque” is another word for “parody,” but implies a low, undignified tone taken in the parody of high art. Scary Movie can’t be called a burlesque because it’s mocking a popular, and somewhat low, genre: horror. On the other hand, if Bugs Bunny mocks grand opera in What’s Opera, Doc?, that’s burlesque. When, in The Swinger (1964), a mostly naked Ann-Margret slathers herself in paint and writhes on a large canvas, she’s “burlesquing” the action painting of Jackson Pollock. “Burlesque” is the low sniping at the high—a desecration, if you will. Farce Farce is a perfectly good and respectable term that has taken on pejorative and totally incorrect meanings in recent years. It’s often confused with “slapstick” (comedy in which rambunctious or even violent comic action dominates) or “low comedy.” The Three Stooges do not do “farce.” They do slapstick.
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A farce is a comedy in which the machinations of plot are more important than character. Of course, what with English departments always denigrating plot (they have to denigrate what they’re unable to teach), a form that extremely effective and difficult to do is denied respectability. Farce sometimes sacrifices deep characterization, true, but it makes up for it with intricate, clever plotting. The whirling, dizzying, snap-snap-snap of a polished, farcical plot is a tremendous feat of engineering and can make audiences perfectly giddy. Some examples of farce: The plays of the Roman playwright Plautus The plays of the French playwright Feydeau Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquette Noises Off Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire The plays of Alan Ayckbourn, especially his great three-play cycle The Norman Conquests Boeing, Boeing A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum Almost no one can write pure farce anymore, and audiences don’t seem to appreciate it as they once did. Sometimes, though, really good farce turns up unexpectedly on television. There’s an episode of Frasier where he’s having dinner with a gay man who thinks Frasier is gay, too, that’s hilarious, and Woody’s wedding, on Cheers, is textbook farce, complete with people popping in and out of the dumb waiter. Farce is very often about hiding something. Trying to hide naughty behavior, for example, and the complications that ensue are the result of the cover-up. Bedroom farce The most common type of farce has to do with hiding sexual indiscretions. It’s called “bedroom farce,” or “sex farce” or sometimes “French farce,” because the word “French” is often a euphemism for something dirty and because the master of this kind of farce was the Frenchman Feydeau. Feydeau doesn’t get the respect he deserves in the history of comedy. Slapstick In 16th Century Italy practitioners of a form of comedy called Commedia dell’arte invented a prop called a “slap stick.” A slap stick is a long piece of wood with a split in it, such that, if I hit you on the head with it, it makes a very loud clap. Obviously, if I hit you on the head it’s already funny. But if I hit you on the head and it makes a very loud noise, well, I mean—that’s hilarity, right? The same with eye gouging. Which explains why generations of school children have rushed home from school to watch The Three Stooges—and, much to the consternation
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of their mothers and father, imitate them. Don’t try this at home, kids. You’ll put your eye out. Exaggerated physical comedy with an edge of violence or danger is usually what we mean by slapstick. Clumsiness often figures in, leading to something called a “pratfall,” which the Cambridge Online Dictionary defines as, “a fall in which a person lands on their bottom, especially for a humorous effect in a play, film, etc.” Camp Another norm of dramatic narrative is that the piece be well modulated and well done: good. If something is very badly done, or very skillfully done but is nevertheless “over the top”—exaggerated, overplayed or over-aestheticized—it evokes something called the “camp sensibility.” Audiences laugh because “it’s so bad it’s good.” For example, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Ed Woods’s ultra-low-budget sci-fi “epic,” has a cult following of people who find it hilarious. I am not among them. Another brand of camp is things that are skillfully done but over the top, exemplified by certain Bette Davis melodramas of the 1930s and 40s, Now, Voyager and Dark Victory being the films commonly cited. Davis’s fiercely extreme acting and the exuberantly shameless melodrama of the expertly crafted plots combine into films that are deliriously “too much,” and thus evoke laughter (while still working as brilliant melodramas). More recent examples of unintentional camp are the films Valley of the Dolls and Mommie Dearest. In the 1960s, Bette Davis starred with Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, a gothic horror movie is which she played a grotesque former child star, now aged, mad, and living with her crippled sister, also a former star. Davis’s fearlessly over the top performance, combined with the over-the-top mood of neurotic hysteria infused by director Robert Aldrich, worked brilliantly on multiple levels: as horror, as incisive psychological drama, and sometimes as campy comedy. One can’t know whether the campiness was unintentional, but the film is a masterpiece. Intentional Camp Up to now we’ve looked at campy works that didn’t set out to evoke laughter but did so unintentionally—by violating artistic norms unconsciously. A later development in the history of comedy would intentional camp. One marvelous example is the 2010 film comedy Baby Jane? by San Francisco director William Clift, who enlisted drag queens to play the female leads in what at times was a shot-by-shot remake of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? If you can find it, it makes a wonderful double bill with the original, but it’s far from being the first example of intentional camp, which is to say not a work that was originally intended with a straight face, but rather, a work that sets out to be camp.
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It’s really a matter of sensibility. The idea that there was such a thing as a camp sensibility was first popularized by cultural critic Susan Sontag in her early 1960s essay “Notes on Camp,” in which she identified the phenomenon and pointed out that the camp sensibility emerged from the gay subculture. Perhaps because of their outsider status in the mainstream American culture of the day, gays had a more subversive view of convention. Whatever the case, unintentional camp gave rise to intentional camp: a particular flavor of comedy that is intentionally “bad,” or “deviant,” or over the top. Charles Ludlum, who founded the Ridiculous Theatre movement in the mid-1960s, was soon joined by the even more successful playwright and female impersonator Charles Busch. With the help of director Kenneth Elliott and their stock company of actors, Busch created a string of sidesplitting plays starting with Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, which went on to hold for many years the distinction of being the longest-running nonmusical in the history of Off Broadway theatre. Busch would continue the open the vein of intentional camp in such plays as The Lady in Question, Red Scare on Sunset, Psycho Beach Party and Die, Mommie, Die, the last two of which were made into films. Busch was quoted in a newspaper interview as saying, “I guess if my plays have elements of old movies and old fashioned plays, and I’m this bigger-than-life star lady, that’s certainly campy. I guess what I rebelled against was the notion that campy means something is so tacky or bad that it’s good, and that I just didn’t relate to.” In other words, intentional camp isn’t necessarily an attempt to be “bad,” but it certainly is all about playing with artistic norms. The camp sensibility leaked into mainstream, with The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Often, intentional camp employs parody. For example, the master of cinematic camp John Waters parodies “women’s” melodramas of the ‘40s and ‘50s in Polyester. Shock comedy More and more, a way of deviating from artistic norms is to be shocking. The norm in film and theatre for quite a long time was to be morally acceptable to everyone. In Elizabethan theatre, the Master of the Revels made sure that the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe were not a threat to public morals (or to Queen Elizabeth’s power). In the 1930s, the Hayes office and its Production Code kept a lid on sex, violence and profanity in American movies. When Charles Busch opened Vampire Lesbians of Sodom Off Broadway in 1985, some people were shocked. No one’s scandalized by lesbianism anymore, and even less vampirism. The shock stakes go up every year. Shock is harder and harder to pull off as, increasingly, anything goes. The National Lampoon created quite a stir in 1966 magazine cover threatening to kill a cute doggie if you don’t buy the magazine, but nowadays, you’d have to pull the trigger. Even the great Baltimore filmmaker John Waters, whose film Pink Flamingos features his muse, the drag diva Divine eating dog feces (legend had it the poop was real), seems much tamer than when his films came out decades ago. Waters’s brilliant Female Trouble is less screamingly funny than it once was because times have changed. The other thing about shock is that it can backfire on the writer. Push the envelope just far enough and you break through the clutter, and become the next big thing. Push any
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further and nobody produces your play. As Bayles and Orland in Art & Fear said, if you make outrageous art, don’t be surprised when people are outraged. In deviation from artistic norms, the characteristics of the work itself deviate from the norm in ways that are naughty, impish or somehow wrong. Who’s misbehaving? The writer? The work itself? The characters within the work who embody the disobedience? Sometimes one of those, sometimes all three, and as with so many instances of comedy, it’s hard to tease apart. GENRE: ROMANTIC AND SCREWBALL COMEDY The romantic comedy has a long history on stage and screen. In contrasting a romantic comedy, there has to be an obstacle. Something has to stand in the way of the lovers or there’s no script. And, as Lysander says in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “The course of true love never did run smooth.” Usually the rub is that one of the lovers wants it and the other resists, so there’s a pursuit. But there’s also the situation of outside interference—the lovers want to be together but outside forces block them. I quote here a section from my book Screenwriting for Neurotics: The Romantic Comedy: The Five Situations
The important thing to understand about romantic comedies is that, like all stories, they must have conflict. In a love story, this almost always means that one character wants to have a love affair while the other does not, and there is a pursuit or a chase. If both characters want to be in love, where’s the problem? You’ve heard the expression, “Boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back.” In all three of those states—getting, losing, getting back—the girl isn’t his! Love stories that work are usually about two people only one of whom is in love. 1) I love you but you hate me (The Shop Around the Corner, You’ve Got Mail, 10
Things I Hate About You, Groundhog Day, and Rushmore). 2) I love you but you don’t believe in love (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, (500) Days of
Summer, Much Ado About Nothing and Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, where the heroine is a Marxist who thinks love is a bourgeois frivolity).
3) I love you but you think you love someone else, or at least are involved with someone else (The Wedding Planner, Sabrina, The Apartment, The Awful Truth, and His Girl Friday, with Ralph Bellamy in his usual “someone else” role and Rosalind Russell thinking she loves him when we know she’ll end up with Cary Grant).
4) I love you, but I am pretending to be someone I’m not (or mistaken for someone else, or in disguise) and it complicates my pursuit of you (City Lights, The Lady Eve, There’s Something About Mary, While You Were Sleeping, Tootsie, Sorority Boys, Some Like It Hot, and in fact virtually all cross-dressing comedies).
5) We hate each other but are forced together and, over the course of pursuing another goal (often adventurous), come to love each other (It Happened One Night and Romancing the Stone).
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In romantic dramas, often the lovers agree to love each other early on, but some outside force keeps them apart (the feuding families in Romeo and Juliet) or some problem in the relationship threatens to separate them (alcoholism in The Days of Wine and Roses).
It has been said that you write a love story by starting out with two people you can’t imagine together, and by the end of the picture you can’t imagine them apart. However, it has also been said that, in classic screwball comedies, we know the pair should be together because they laugh and play together like children, money and practicality be damned. Those two pieces of advice seem contradictory to me, so take your pick.
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CHAPTER NINE: PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER AND PLANNING A
COMEDY In planning your comedy, the most important thing is to have comic characters, and the other important thing is to put them in a world and situation where they have the opportunity. Here is a list of questions designed to help you think about your characters and your story.
o How does the character deviate from cultural norms? o Is the character an ethnic stereotype, and how are you handling the implications of
that? o How does the character deviate from human norms? o How does the character deviate from the norms of physical possibility? o Have you come up with a plot situation that creates tension or suspense, which
can then be released in moments of comedy? o Does your piece deviate from artistic norms, for example by breaking the fourth
wall? o Does your piece deviate stylistically by combining genres in a surprising or
contradictory way? o Do your characters deviate from linguistic norms? Do they talk funny, using
malapropisms, non-sequiturs or nonsense? o Is your material so topical that in two years no one will think it’s funny anymore? o In what way is your character a fish out of water? o Have you selected settings of solemnity, propriety or theatricality that heighten
the impact of the comic behavior? Are the settings fancy or rule-bound? o Is your comic character secretly thinking of something other than what’s ging at
the moment? o Is your character in the habit or misrepresenting himself? o Is your character a liar? o Is your character hiding something? o Is your character in disguise? o Is your character pretentious or a hypocrite? o Does your character act “as if” something we so, when in fact it is not so? o Does your character come up with schemes and tricks to get his way? What are
they? o What are your character’s comic flaws? o Have you shown us your character’s pain? o Is your character an overreactor or underreactor?
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o Is your character the wit, or the butt of the joke? o Is your character one of the classic “comic types” explained in the text? o Are there other works with comic situations similar to the one in your script, and
have you studied what works and what doesn’t in those works? o Have you done a comic character worksheet for each and every character—not
just the hero? o Does the situation you have created have danger and embarrassment that creates
tension, tension being fertile ground for comic relief. o Have you gone over what you’ve written so far to see what about it is funny, so
you can develop and enhance those things? o Have you identified your laugh lines, and made sure that snap, and that the
meaning of the line doesn’t come together until the last word is spoken? o Are there opportunities to employ narration in a way that contradicts the action on
stage or the image on the screen? o What genre or style—or combination of genres and styles—does your story
embody?
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