by Tim Ferguson
Today, bumbling cops are still prone to officialise, preferring ‘The suspect is proceeding at speed in a north-north-easterly direction and I am rendering pursuit’ instead of ‘I’m chasing him north’.
Chapter Three:
Designing a Sitcom
Humour is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.
—Aristotle
Comedy Versus Drama
Narrative comedy is a not for the faint-hearted. Dramatic writers can explore the human heart at a measured pace, confronting their characters with choices that progressively force them to learn and change. A sound understanding of genre, story structure, character development, dialogue and narrative movement, plus native insight, comprise the dramatist’s toolkit. Their craft is not easily mastered and their technique requires constant re-appraisal and refreshment. Worse, with all its wandering through the dim corridors of the human soul, a drama writer’s life can be awfully depressing. It’s a wonder anyone does it, but we’re grateful they do.
Narrative comedy demands a firm grasp of dramatic technique—and much more. The comic storyteller must know how to compress drama, increasing pace, pressure, surprise, multiplying reversals of character and objective, heightening reality and intensifying action with successive tangential narrative changes. It requires a commonsense understanding of the absurd and the ability and inclination to expose human weakness and prejudice ruthlessly—beginning with one’s own.
Drama presents fiction as reality, but comedy presents reality through fiction. Dramatic heroes are heroic despite their flaws. Fitzwilliam Darcy in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is the perfect dramatic hero: stoic yet passionate, rude yet shy, flippant yet deadly serious. He’s arrogant but irresistible, capable of the deepest love and the cruellest distaste. Raffishly handsome, this lord of the manor is capable, enigmatic and filthy rich. In short, Darcy is as far removed from reality as any character could possibly be. Though Austen’s genius persuades us he is a real and complete human being, we’ll never meet a Darcy in real life.
Likewise, well-written villains in drama are never wholly evil. A villain who appears wholly evil at the beginning of a drama should reveal themselves as a flawed human being as the story unfolds. Even Darth Vader, in Star Wars, finds himself through his love for his son.
Most comic ‘heroes’ by contrast are not heroic at all. They are hapless victims without the social skills or material resources to deal with their situation. When they do act heroically, it is often for selfish reasons. Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers is a classical example of the comic hero: bullying, inconsiderate, self-obsessed, paranoid, vindictive, lonely, lost, needy, greedy, spiteful, manipulative, egotistical, self-hating, overbearing, pussy-whipped, lazy, lascivious and a compulsive liar. Basil Fawlty is Mr Darcy stripped of the bullshit. We see in Darcy the person we would like to be. In Basil we see who we are.
Comic villains are typically evil from the get-go, and don’t change much. Their flaws are immediately apparent and inspire neither sympathy nor empathy. For example, when we first meet Doctor Evil in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (Mike Myers), he’s sending a henchman to a grisly death and is so behind the times he thinks a million dollars is a lot of money. Though Evil is powerful and equipped with awesome ‘laser’ weapons, he’s bald, scarred and deeply flawed in both personality and outlook. And it’s all downhill from there.
Drama writers may think they’re showing life as it is, but if that were the case they would be making documentaries. Drama explores contemporary but universal issues with gritty, well-drawn characters in an intricately constructed narrative, performed by actors, backed up by stirring music and edited for dramatic effect. Drama’s subject matter may be real but the vehicle in which it’s presented is an artifice.
Comedy makes no pretence at ‘reality’. The moment the audience starts to lose themselves in the action, their laughter snaps them out of it. By accepting the audience’s distance from the characters (though that distance may be wafer-thin) comedy writers accept the demand that their stories must be more than real. They must represent the truth.
Where dramatists can leave the audience arguing over the moral questions in their story, comedy writers must deliver their message by flaming arrow. Their characters are unalloyed constructs and—unlike drama—the disengagement this causes is not necessarily a problem. There is no real emotional engagement, for example, in the satirical feature film Wag the Dog (by Larry Beinhart, Hilary Henkin and David Mamet). We dislike them all. Even when the film’s most charming character, Stanley Motss is taken to his death, the audience’s heart doesn’t skip a beat. We may love watching Motss, but we are never asked to love him.
Unconstrained by verisimilitude, comic stories can move at a pace and intensity beyond anything we’d expect from the real world. This freedom from fakery is both a boon and a burden for comedy writers. It’s a boon because it allows us to cut to the chase, pushing our characters and stories in ways that are openly concocted. It’s a burden because we cannot hide behind a fantasy.
But comedy and drama do have one thing in common: they must tell the truth about life. In either genre, the moment the audience senses a lack of authenticity in the writing they switch to a sports channel and never return.
Steps to a Sitcom
There are many ways to build a comedy—everybody has their own method. Good ideas, be they for a film, sitcom or play, start with some kind of inspired leap when you’re daydreaming, chatting or even thinking about another project. All of a sudden, an irresistible idea for a character, series or even just a joke pops into your head, and the process of building the concept begins.
The following principles and processes allow you to test and modify your comedy concept regardless of the stage of development. They will help you identify strengths, neutralise weaknesses, discover new possibilities and streamline each aspect of your concept. They can also help you determine whether, ultimately, the idea has ‘legs’.
Though every writer has their own approach, this book lays out in a systematic way the essential elements of any sitcom, and with them, a logical method of proceeding.
Theme: Choose your primary message for the series.
World: Identify the world your characters will inhabit, including your major locations.
Genre: Identify the kind of comedy (satire, farce or domestic comedy) that best suits your style and inclination, and choose your target audience.
Characters: Build a combination of characters that will be a reliable source of conflict.
Structure: Establish conflict, raise the stakes, increase pressure upon your characters and resolve your stories in an interesting way.
Dialogue: Explore rhythms, dialectics, jargon and patterns of comic dialogue that suit your characters.
Presentation and Pitch: Prepare your concept for pitching to a producer or network.
Choosing a Theme
Every TV comedy needs a theme, or what is known in feature-film development as a ‘controlling idea’. This inspires a show’s moral framework, the subtextual message that drives the show. Once you’ve had some initial thoughts about a project, take the time to identify its overarching theme. Often this is implicit in the show’s premise.
For example, the controlling idea of Kath and Kim, ‘Love of family ain’t much but it’s all we’ve got’ is a message we draw from watching a dysfunctional family coping with their troubles. For Gilligan’s Island, a show where seven castaways wait for rescue on a deserted isle, the theme is ‘We survive together or perish alone’.
Both these themes contain an implicit grain of hope, but at heart they are serious and concern universal human issues. A light theme, such as ‘Happy is as happy does’, is not necessary for humour to thrive. The TV series Kingswood Country deals with racism, sexism and cultural wars. The show’s main character, Ted Bullpit, faces isolation in
every episode and the theme is that tolerance unites us while intolerance divides us. Many a serious political speech has been made on the same topic—yet the show is a comedy classic.
A TV show represents months or years of work, so you need to say something to the world that’s important to you. There is a difference, however, between ‘serious’ and ‘dark’. A cynical theme like ‘Dishonesty works’, ‘Greed is good’ or ‘A life without love is a life without hassles’ presents three problems for the writer.
The first is personal. Though you might feel it is both important and true, will you still feel the same way after you’ve spent years of your creative life promulgating a cynical, joyless or empty message? (Or, if you think you will, maybe you should look at a career in law.)
The other two reasons are practical. Entertaining permutations on a cynical theme quickly run dry. For example, if ‘Dishonesty works’ is your theme, once your hero has become rich and comfortable, what else is there to do but teach him a moral lesson? Satires may depict their central characters winning the day through deceit, selfishness, heartlessness and villainy (see Yes Minister), but they are generally hollow victories. What positive qualities they may have are due to the extent that they thwart an even greater evil. Even the darkest satire has a moral rudder, using stories of dire treachery to highlight the shortcomings of our world rather than celebrating treachery itself. A satire’s message might simply be ‘The evils of this world are intractable’, but even this message implies the ideal of a better and fairer society, impossible though it may be. The dismal daily horrors depicted in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin simply underline the idea that the world would be a happier place if people were less ignorant, self-centred and petty.
Third, viewers are turned off by cynicism because ultimately it is unrewarding. They will simply find your show too depressing.
The characters in your show, on the other hand, can be cynical—it’s just the controlling idea that cannot. Even the exquisitely painful The Office has a positive, if cautionary, theme: ‘Be honest with yourself’. The antagonist, David Brent, must learn to face his inadequacies or he will never discover his strengths. The protagonist, Tim, must embrace his ambition and act on his potential or lose Dawn, the love of his life, and spend his remaining days in lonely torpor.
You’ll find richer soil for your episode ideas if your theme is more than an attack on the world you’ve chosen to explore. The theme of The Larry Sanders Show boils down to more than ‘Network television is populated by bastards’, though that message is clear throughout. By series end, Larry Sanders learns a grander, more challenging lesson: ‘To thine own self be true’. And throughout the series we’re on Larry’s side, even though he’s a selfish and scheming celebrity. We don’t engage with his faults, but with how he acts in his world.
Your controlling idea might be in the form of a question. The theme of The Nanny is ‘Do we deserve true love even though we are flawed?’ The answer is subjective. To respond in the affirmative we must forgive Fran Drescher’s nanny character all her faults.
To find a satisfying controlling idea, ask yourself what you are most curious about. The notion that writers should only write about what they know is misleading. Even in constructing a textbook the writer does more than jot down what they know on the first day. Writing is an act of exploration. Without learning as you go, the act of writing would be deathly dull—and the reading even worse. People write autobiographies because they want to make sense of their lives, not because they know everything that happened and what it means. Questions, not answers, keep us awake at night. So, what do you wonder about most? Love? Death? Identity? The true value of success? The price that others must pay so you can realise your dreams?
Be sure the theme, like the show’s premise, is something you want to explore—otherwise you could waste years working on something you don’t care about. And that is no laughing matter.
Choosing a World
The process of developing a sitcom usually begins with a ‘Eureka’ moment that involves, among other things, a setting, or ‘world’, for the show.
It’s not necessary for a sitcom setting to be intrinsically funny. The Librarians is based in a suburban library, Mother and Son in a suburban home and Cheers in an average American bar. These places could just as easily be settings for tragedies. For instance, Mother and Son is a show about a middle-aged man, Arthur, and his aged mother, Maggie. The stakes and pressures are genuine and universal. Arthur faces losing any chance of a normal adult life as he cares for his ailing mother. Maggie, though she is shrewd and manipulative, is experiencing the first symptoms of dementia, a condition that fills her with terror. The show’s apparent theme—love and frustration are inseparable—is not in itself comic.
What makes an ordinary setting funny are the characters, their conflicts, the trouble their natures lead them into and, of course, the self-contained or narrative jokes.
Don’t be too concerned if the main setting for your sitcom is familiar territory. A family home is the staple environment for a domestic comedy (e.g. Till Death Do Us Part, My Wife and Kids). While the genre has expanded to include apartment blocks (Friends) and group houses (Will & Grace), the home is always dom-com’s main arena.
Farce and satire settings have also been successfully reprised. For example, TV networks have been the settings for The Jesters, Murphy Brown, Drop the Dead Donkey, The Larry Sanders Show, Frontline and 30 Rock.
The ‘fish out of water’ genre (Mr Ed, Alf, The Addams Family, No Heroics and 3rd Rock from the Sun) features extraordinary characters in ordinary settings. No Heroics, for instance, follows a tribe of superheroes trying to get by without their special powers. It’s the juxtaposition of these out-of-this-world characters with ordinary life that creates the show’s comic conflict. The characters, not the premise, are what make a show truly original. Mr Ed and My Favorite Martian both have essentially the same outlandish premise: a single man living with a non-human character whose attributes must be kept secret. However, what makes the shows distinctive is that ‘Mr Ed’ is a smooth-talking troublemaker who understands human nature and ‘Uncle Martin’ is a curious and stubborn alien who often finds humans baffling.
Setting a sitcom on the moon will be attention-grabbing for the length of the opening credits. After that, the characters must do all the work.
Comedy and its Sub-Genres
Having chosen your theme, you’re ready to decide on the genre that best serves the style, tone and perspective of your sitcom.
As a genre, comedy is generally considered to comprise three ‘sub-genres’. These are defined by what can be called ‘circles of engagement’, or the level of affinity an audience has with the setting, characters, subject matter and theme.
DOMESTIC COMEDY
RAY: All three kids asleep. You thought I couldn’t get Ally to take a nap.
DEBRA: Good job, honey.
RAY: Yeah. By the way, tomorrow we have to buy a pony.
—Everybody Loves Raymond (‘Your Place or Mine?’ by Jeremy Stevens)
Domestic comedy tells the bittersweet truth.
This is the innermost ring of the circles of engagement. It offers the closest level of affinity and empathy with the characters. To achieve its emotional connection with the audience, ‘dom-com’ deals primarily with nuclear families, either conventional (e.g. Everybody Loves Raymond, Home Improvement, The Cosbys) or adoptive or single-parented (Hey Dad..!, The Nanny, Diff’rent Strokes).
As most people have come from one kind of family or another, such shows strike a chord. The subject matter of dom-com must be familiar territory for most of us: mothers and fathers struggling to find a work-life balance, marriage maintenance, interfering relatives, the difficulties of raising teenagers, paying the mortgage, getting fired, children learning life’s lessons and so forth.
Since the 1980s, however, dom-com has expanded the definition of ‘family’ to reflect modern life. In some ways a family is now defined simp
ly by the people who say they are in one: single parents with sibling flatmates (Two and a Half Men), a group of senior citizens (The Golden Girls), a group house with a hetero-gay mix (Will & Grace) or an apartment building (Friends). But no matter how far these shows stray from the original paradigm their subject matter remains familiar: the trials of single parenthood, the isolation of the aged, the single person’s desire for a partner, the quest for love and commitment by young adults and so forth.
Dom-com generally generates the drama amongst the main family members—usually with a parent or parents as one side of the conflict. In Everybody Loves Raymond, Raymond’s main problems stem from the rivalries between his mother, his wife and his brother. There are short-lived conflicts with characters outside the family (such as workmates) but mostly the family’s immediate relationships provide enough trouble and strife. As a result most of the genre’s action takes place in the family homes.
Dom-com’s main characters are usually flawed but lovable. Poignancy is employed regularly, if sparingly. Loyalty, honesty (to one’s self and to others), true love and courage are the meat and potatoes of domestic comedy. Dom-com stories typically deal with matters of the heart, inviting the viewer to engage emotionally in the dilemmas and choices of the characters. In the pilot episode of Everybody Loves Raymond (by Philip Rosenthal), Raymond is pressured by his wife to keep his meddling parents away from her birthday—for a change. Emotions run high. The parents’ emotional pain at the rejection comprises the stakes with which Raymond must negotiate. The pressure on Raymond to decide where his loyalties lie goes to the heart of the series.
Emotional engagement is the hook that will catch the viewer. If your conflicts are commonplace, that hook becomes a net that will capture an entire demographic. If you’ve never been touched by a poignant scene from a sitcom, you should stay in more. You know you’re truly in touch with your feelings when you tear up at Mork and Mindy.