The Comic Toolbox: How to be Funny Even if You're Not
Page 3
The comic process takes place one step at a time. Unless you’re Superman, you can’t leap tall buildings at a single bound, so it’s really kind of stupid to tell yourself you must. Be aware of this stupidity. Require of yourself only that you do what you can do now. Do this one thing and your ferocious editor will melt like Frosty the proverbial Snowman.
Okay, now we have two tools that attack and diminish our process-killing fears: the rule of nine and lowering our sights. What other weapons can we bring to bear? This question, you may be pleased to learn, is not rhetorical.
POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT AS SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY
Applaud every small victory, because every time you do, you create an environment in which a larger victory can grow.
Man, I like that thought. I’m going to repeat it for those in the back of the class. Applaud small victories. They make big victories grow.
Let’s try another exercise and see if we can augment our efforts with positive reinforcement. First, using the rule of nine, write a list of ten funny names in your notebook. Here, I’ll start you off:
Julianne Potatoes
Spenley Cruntchwhistle
Dan Quayle
Okay, now you go. I’ll wait . . .
Dum de dum dum dum . . .
Nice day, huh?
A little smoggy, yeah, but that’s . . . Done already? Good work.
Now how do you feel? If all went according to plan, you used tool of lowering your sights to keep false expectations to a the minimum. You recognized this as a simple, trivial, and very possibly pointless exercise, designed to do nothing more than limber up your comic muscles. You didn’t expect it to change your life, and, hey presto!, it didn’t.
Now use the rule of nine to scan your list and discover that, yup, most of these joke names really aren’t all that funny. And suddenly that’s okay, because according to the rule of nine, they don’t have to be.
But what you did do is this very important thing: you finished the exercise. You got from point A to point B without wandering off into the never-never land of procrastination. You did the job. You did it no better nor worse than you expected to, and, in fact, you didn’t expect to do it particularly well or badly at all. Thus unburdened, you got it done, which may be more than what’s happened in the past.
So pat yourself on the back. Take the win.
Now look what happens: You congratulate yourself for doing this little job. That gives you a stronger sense of yourself as someone who can do a job. Which makes you slightly better equipped to do the job next time. Which means better performance next time. Which means improved self-image. Which means enhanced performance. Which means—well, you get the gist.
What we’re doing here is watching positive reinforcement turn into self-fulfilling prophecy. The better you imagine yourself to be, the better you become.
Whoa, hey, there’s a powerful concept, huh? The better you imagine yourself to be, the better you become. And how did you get better? By abandoning all interest in getting better in the first place. It’s almost Zen, isn’t it? You get better by not trying to get better. How is this possible?
You’ve changed your focus. You’re concentrating on the process, not the product. By attending to the ongoing performance instead of the applause at the curtain to come, you change the game from one you can never win to one you must always win. In so doing, you ditch your ferocious editor once and for all, for how can it manipulate your expectations when suddenly your only goal is to experience the process?
If this sounds a little too new-agey for you, then let it slide for now. But as the chapters roll by, and the exercises get tougher, please just concentrate on getting them done. Insofar as possible, let questions of quality fall from your mind. Your performance will improve, I promise.
Process, not product. Focus on this. In other words,
CONCENTRATE ON THE TASK AT HAND
Creativity and competition sometimes intersect. Much as we try to avoid it, we can’t help comparing ourselves to others and measuring our progress against theirs. It’s natural, inevitable. And it needs to be dealt with.
Suppose you got a call from a friend who’d just been offered a gig you really wanted and knew you could do quite well. Even as you congratulated him, you might find yourself wondering why him, why not me?
And if that call came in the middle of your working day, it could kill your creative process. Jealousy, envy, despair . . . all these weird, negative feelings swirl through the mind in a corrupting black cloud. How can you be funny with all that noise in your heads?
You go back to the one thing you can control: words on the page, cartoons in the sketch pad, whatever. By concentrating on the task at hand, you squeeze that inevitable competitive rage out of your mind. Then, having finished a small chunk of work by dint of sheer stubbornness, you use your positive-reinforcement tool and say to yourself, “Hey, this chunk of work is not half bad. Sure, someone out there has a job I want, but at least I have this to feel good about.”
And having found some darn thing to feel good about, you improve your self-image, reduce your anxiety, focus your concentration, and raise the level of your confidence. This makes it possible to attend to the next task at hand, the next joke or paragraph or drawing or audition or whatever.
This war is won in small battles. And the task-at-hand tool relies heavily on the difficult delusion that the outside world somehow doesn’t exist. Now, you know and I know that that’s not true. At the end of the day, when the jokes are all written, the cartoons all drawn, what-have-you, there are still bills to pay, and transmissions to fix, and crying babies in the neighborhood, and vanishing rain forests, and that nagging unresolved question of whether Leno is better than Letterman or not.
But none of that matters when you’re in the zone.
When you’re concentrating on the task at hand, the outside world truly does not exist. You get in a lick of good work, pat yourself on the back for that lick of good work, then, taking that win, press on to the next piece of work, better equipped than ever to win. Thus do the tools complement one another. Thus does the snake swallow its own tail.
Soon we’ll be moving on to the concrete tools of comedy, the nuts-’n’-bolts structural stuff you probably bought this book for in the first place. You may think that those tools are the only ones that matter. You may think that I’ve wasted a lot of time and a lot of words to create an emotional environment in which those tools can be used without unhelpful expectations, positive, negative, or otherwise. Would it make you feel better to know that I’m getting paid by the word? That’s the joke answer. The real answer is this: Without the proper emotional grounding, the tools themselves are useless.
Unless you first make a commitment to fight the fears which inhibit creativity, you won’t be funny at all. You will have wasted your money on this book, except for perhaps a buck you’ll recoup at some yard sale some day.
In sum, then, pitching forward on your face is not a bad thing, but a good thing. At least in falling forward you’re moving forward, and moving forward is all that really matters. Remember that stairs get climbed one step at a time.
Now that we’re all so giddily un-results-oriented, let’s look at how we can get some damn fine results out of our toolbox. In other words, enough yakking, here comes the hardware . . .
3
The Comic Premise
The comic premise is the gap between comic reality and real reality.
Any time you have a comic voice or character or world or attitude that looks at things from a skewed point of view, you have a gap between realities. Comedy lives in this gap.
The comic premise in, for example, Back to the Future is the gap between the comic reality of that movie’s 1950s world and the “real” reality of Marty McFly. To him, Ronald Reagan is President of the United States; to people living in the 1950s, Reagan’s just a hack actor.
That joke is typical of the film and reflects its comic premise.
In Catch-22, you can see the comic premise in the gap between Yossarian’s world view, ‘’I’m sane, but I want to be crazy,” and everyone else’s world view, “We’re crazy, but pretend to be sane.”
In the comic strip Peanuts, to take a wildly different example, there’s a gap between Snoopy’s “real” reality—he’s a dog—and his comic reality—he’s a World War I flying ace. You don’t have to look at movies or books or even comic strips to find the gap of the comic premise. It’s right down there at the level of the joke, the gag, the funny line.
“I haven’t had sex in a year. “
“Celibate?”
“No, married.”
The gap here is the difference between a real—world reason—celibacy—and a comic-world reason-marriage-for not having had sex.
The comic premise exists in all comic structures, no matter how large or small. Even the lowly pun is a function of the gap between the “real” reality of the way you expect a certain word to behave and the comic reality of the way it ends up behaving in the joke.
A man walked up to me and said, ‘’/haven’t had a bite in a week.” So I bit him.
We expect the word “bite” to refer to food. That’s the real reality. But when it suddenly refers to aggressive behavior instead, it twists into comic reality. That’s the gap. See the gap. Be the gap. Use the Force, Luke.
The television series Mork and Mindy established the gap between the “real” reality of Mindy’s world and the comic reality of Mark’s. In The Wonder Years, it’s the presence of a narrator, an adult looking back at his childhood, that motors the humor of that show. The gap here is between what a child knows and what an adult has learned from experience.
Can you find the comic premise in greeting cards? You bet your dollar forty-nine you can. Consider the following:
“A birthday toast to your best year ever!”
and then you open the card . . .
“1976, wasn’t it?”
Here the gap opens between the recipient’s real reality, expectation of good wishes, and the sender’s comic reality, an irony instead.
James Thurber’s writings, to take a more high-school literature tack, often describe the gap, literally, between reality and fantasy, particularly a given character’s comic fantasy interpretation of the reality around him. What’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” if not a cruise along the gap between Mitty’s inner world and the outer world he refuses to acknowledge?
Even titles can express a comic premise. Suppose you encountered a mystery novel entitled Spenley Cruntchwhistle, Private Eye. Would you not expect this book to be a comic mystery or perhaps a children’s book? If yes, it’s because of the gap between real reality (serious novels, serious titles) and comic reality (a detective with a joke name).
Now you may think that this is a little over-analytical, but bear with me. Once you recognize the gap of the comic premise, you’ll start to see it in every funny situation that crosses your path. And once you start to see it in everyday situations, you’ll begin to reverse the process, not just seeing it in experienced situations but investing it in comic situations of your own construction. That’s when the comic premise stops being a self-indulgent mental exercise and starts behaving like a tool.
Okay, so let’s do it. Let’s use the comic premise as a tool to create comic situations. In fact, we’ll do it twice: once right now and again later in the chapter after we’ve broken the comic premise into its component parts. Down the left side of the page, write ten real realities. Then, down the right side of the page, write ten comic realities that conflict with them. Before you begin, remember that it’s the process not the product that matters. You won’t be graded, it won’t go on your permanent record, and neatness doesn’t count. In fact, all that really counts is getting the dang thing done as quickly as possible so we can push on. I’ll do a few to get you started.
going to the store
shopping for Uzis
a cop stops a pickup truck
it’s full of space aliens
the Magna Carta
written by e.e. cummings
Right away, we start looking for something unexpected to create the comic reality. In fact, one way to solve this problem is just to think about what is expected and then insert the opposite.
going to church
in the nude
high-school shop class
taught by Albert Einstein
listening to a symphony
dancing to a symphony
If you found this exercise easy, it’s probably because you just let yourself go and allowed your flights of fancy to carry you away. Surprisingly, if you found the exercise tough, it may be because you didn’t have quite enough structure around which to organize your thoughts.
The unstructured mind asks, “What’s funny?” and instantly gets lost in a mass of amorphous goo. The somewhat structured mind focuses on this thing called the comic premise and tries to get led by some magic hand to some creative end. Less amorphous, but still goo. The more we structure the task, the more we convert the act of creation to the act of asking and answering simple questions, the easier the whole thing gets.
Within the comic premise, there’s not just one gap between real reality and comic reality, but all sorts of different gaps. They all turn on conflict, and the deeper the conflict gets, the more interesting the premise becomes.
THREE TYPES OF COMIC CONFLICT
In classic dramatic structure, there are three types of conflict: man against nature, man against man, and man against self. Since comic conflict is often just dramatic conflict with laughs attached, it will come as no huge surprise that these three levels of conflict exist in comic structure, too. You’ll find your comic premise on one, two, or all three levels of conflict.
The first type of comic conflict, so-called global conflict, is the conflict between people and their world. The conflict can be that of a normal character in a comic world or of a comic character in a normal world. Simple? Pedantic? Just wait!
A normal character in a comic world stands in for the reader or viewer or listener and represents real reality. The situation he finds himself in represents the comic reality. In Back to the Future, Marty McFly is a normal character in a comic world. Same with Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Same with the cartoon character Ziggy. Same with Bill Cosby when he introduces us to his quirky friends, Fat Albert, Old Weird Harold, etc.
A comic character in a normal world, on the other hand, carries the comic premise with him. In Tootsie, when Michael Dorsey becomes Dorothy Michaels, he turns into a comic character. His world hasn’t changed; his own act of transformation has created the comic premise.
When Robin Williams does stand-up comedy, he creates his humor by looking at the straight world in a bent way. Contrast this with Cosby, who looks at a bent world in a straight way. This is the difference between a comic character in a normal world and a normal character in a comic world.
Global conflict is often social conflict; that is, it pits an individual against a whole social structure. In Stripes, it’s Bill Murray against the US Army. In The Phil Silvers Show, it’s Sergeant Bilko against the US Army. In Private Benjamin, it’s Goldie Hawn against the US Army. Does one get the impression that the US Army gets picked on? Well, they’ve been picking on us for years. In Beverly Hills Cop, it’s Eddie Murphy versus the social elite. In Mr. Smith
Goes to Washington, it’s Jimmy Stewart versus politics-as-usual. This is global conflict.
So looking back at our last exercise, we can now refine i
t as follows: Create a comic situation that finds its premise in global conflict. You create a normal character, a businessman, say, and then you create a social structure against which to pit him. Et voila: the IRS audit from hell.
Or reverse it. Let the IRS audit office be the normal world now, and let the comic character be one insanely belligerent (or insanely naive, or insanely stupid, or insanely anything) auditee. Later, we’ll discuss how to get more punch out of these situations; for now, it’s enough to know that this sort of conflict exists.
Create a few new comic premises built entirely on global conflict and see if the task isn’t easier now that you’ve narrowed the focus. My money is on yes.
A bumbling scientist is at odds with a chemical firm
A renegade rock star turns against the music establishment An average joe fights city hall
A town tackles an alien invasion
A teacher takes on the school board
A school falls prey to a quirky new principal
Notice that these conflicts aren’t necessarily comic. That’s okay. In a few chapters we’ll have all the tools we need to turn any conflict into a comic one. For now, let’s move on to the second type of conflict, interpersonal or local conflict, battles between individuals.
There are two types of local conflicts. One pits a comic character against a normal character, and the other finds comic characters in opposition. In both cases, the conflict is between people who have an emotional bond. They care about each other. This doesn’t mean that they love each other, or even like each other. They may hate each other, but they clearly care. That’s what separates this sort of conflict from the conflict between, say, a cop and a con artist. Like the ads say, “This time it’s personal.”