The Comic Toolbox: How to be Funny Even if You're Not

by John Vorhaus

  Mork and Mindy are perfect examples of a comic character versus a normal character. Mark’s is the comic reality while Mindy’s is real. The gap between their personalities is the comic premise of the show.

  Felix and Oscar in The Odd Couple, on the other hand, are comic characters in opposition. Each has a strong comic reality, and these comic realities clash hard. This will be made clearer in the next chapter when we talk about comic characters and their strong comic perspectives.

  It’s nice when things fit into categories, but what about when things don’t fit into categories? What about What About Bob? In this film, Richard Dreyfuss is a world-class shrink, and Bill Murray is a world-class loon. Normal character versus comic character, or comic characters in opposition? Who knows? More to the point, who cares?

  The tool we’re using here is called classification. It’s a useful but tricky tool. Putting things into categories often helps one see the things more clearly . . . but push everything into pigeonholes and in the end all you get are squished pigeons. If a story or a show or a situation defies easy classification, don’t sweat it. As we’ll discover soon, the best comedy crosses lines of definition.

  Let’s tackle our comic premise exercise again, only this time create comic premises built on a comic character versus a normal character, and on comic characters in opposition. Our IRS example won’t work now because that’s a character versus a world, and the emotional investment is nil. But make the IRS agent the ex-wife of the businessman and you’ve got juicy local conflict.

  A normal guy deals with a crazy neighbor

  A soldier and a pacifist go to war

  An astronomer marries an astrologer

  A conservative father battles a liberal son

  A wild genius poses problems for her tutor

  A prude and a pimp join forces

  Notice once again how much easier it is to make choices when you have more precise questions to ask. Start with the question, “What’s a comic premise?” and you founder. But start with, “What’s a conflict between a normal character and a comic character?” and you’re already into specifics. You’re moving toward detail.

  Throughout this book, we’ll make every effort to move from the general to the specific. Life is better there.

  Not just in comedy but in all storytelling, the richest conflict is the conflict within. Sure, we have a passing interest in how Herman Munster fares on jury duty, and yes, we’re vaguely curious about Felix and Oscar and that scratch in the dining-room table, but for true dramatic drive, nothing beats seeing characters at war with themselves.

  In one sort of inner conflict, a normal character becomes a comic character, and the comedy is rooted in the character’s change of state. In Tootsie, Michael Dorsey starts out as a man and becomes a woman. He’s a normal character as a man and a comic character as a woman. The movie turns on the conflict between his normal and his comic selves. Likewise, the Tom Hanks character in Big. He starts off normal—a kid—and becomes comic—a kid in an adult’s body.

  It’s also possible to have a comic character at war with himself without his undergoing a change of state. Murphy Brown is a creature filled with doubt. Her doubt was with her long before we met her, and it will be with her long after we’re gone. That’s inner conflict.

  So to couch the comic premise in terms of inner conflict, we might explore the story of a sighted man who goes blind, or that of a blind guy who won’t admit that he can’t see.

  It’s easiest to view inner conflict in terms of a normal character who undergoes a comic transformation. And you can make this happen by taking any character and turning him into his opposite. Man into woman, child into adult, idiot into genius, etc.

  A kid becomes a CEO

  A housewife becomes a NATO commander

  The President of Paraguay becomes a boxboy at the A&P

  A classical pianist becomes a rock goddess

  A prince turns into a frog

  A gnome becomes a fashion model

  A football player becomes a ballet star

  The really interesting thing about these three types of conflict is how they connect and interleave. In the best comic storytelling, all three types are present in the same situation. When Walter Mitty disappears into fantasy, he is a comic character in a normal world, but he also has conflict with loved ones, and he has conflict within himself over the role he plays.

  Or to take another example, in the movie Trading Places, Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy do a prince-and-pauper number and become each other. They have global conflict—each struggles to survive in his new and challenging world. They also have local conflict with one another and with the people around them, people they love or hate or rage against or fear. Plus, they each have inner conflict, the struggle of a normal character who has, by transformation, become a comic character and struggles to come to terms with his new persona.

  In your comic premises, you should strive for situations that exploit all three types of comic conflict. These situations will reliably be the most richly rewarding comic earth you till. If you aren’t sold on my examples, simply take a moment to think of your favorite stand-up comics or movies or television shows or books or cartoons. Don’t you enjoy the complex ones more than the simple ones?

  In Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin has global conflict (teachers, parents, space aliens, and other authority figures), and local conflict (Hobbes), and inner conflict (uncontrollable flights of fancy). Nancy and Sluggo, on the other hand, battle the world and each other, but they never battle themselves. Which is the more interesting strip?

  A stand-up comic might do a routine about bad airplane food, and it might be very funny. But if she makes it so that the flight attendant is an old enemy who’s trying to poison her, and paints herself as a horrible acrophobe who never should have flown in the first place, then the material, so to speak, can really take off.

  Try this exercise: Imagine that you’ve been given the chance to draw a comic strip for a national syndicate. (Can’t draw? Never mind; neither can I, but let’s pretend, shall we?) Attack this problem in terms of the comic premise: What sorts of comic conflict would make for fun comic strips?

  A long-suffering schoolteacher copes with her holy terrors

  Newlyweds struggle with in-laws, each other, and themselves

  A boy has a pot-bellied pig for a pet

  A quick-witted sheriff runs a county jail

  A single mother and her teenage daughters can’t get along

  A typical suburban family moves to a space station

  A cartoonist can’t keep his characters from coming to life

  You may have noticed that I try to keep my comic premises short, the length of a sentence or less. Like they say, brevity is the soul of wit; more to the point, it’s the soul of understanding. If you can’t boil your comic premise down to a single line, the chances are that you don’t quite have a handle on it yet. Move toward simplicity; if nothing else, it means less work for you when you’re using the rule of nine to separate the wheat from the voluminous chaff.

  One final thought before we continue: The comic premise not only creates comedy, it also casts the light of truth on a given situation. Specifically, the comic reality reveals the truth in the “real” reality. When Snoopy pretends he’s a World War I flying ace, he’s revealing an essential truth: people pretend. Going back to our notion of truth and pain, look to your normal characters to reveal the meaning of your comic premise, and look to your comic characters to reveal its humor. When Dustin Hoffman rips off his wig at the end of Tootsie, the comic character (Dorothy) gets the laughs, but the normal character (Michael) demonstrates the truth and pain: Men and women behave badly toward one another—unless they learn.

  To recap: The comic premise is the gap between real reality and comic reality. Every form of humor, from the smallest joke to the largest comic tale, has some sort of defini
ng gap or comic conflict. There are three types of comic conflict: Global conflict takes place between an individual and his world. Local conflict is about people fighting people; you always hurt the one you love. Inner conflict features a character at war with himself. Inner conflict is always the richest and most rewarding. Just ask Hamlet, or any other comic character.

  Oh, you don’t buy Hamlet as a comic character? Well, maybe I can change your mind . . .

  4

  Comic Characters

  You know what a comic character is, right? That guy sitting behind you at the baseball game who, after six or seven beers, feels he has a personal, adversarial relationship with the umpire or the manager or the visiting pitcher, and a divinely ordained right to share the intimacies of these relationships at the top of his lungs with everyone around him. This person is a comic character right up until the moment he spills a cold beer down your back. Then he’s just a jerk.

  Okay, seriously, when I say “comic character,” who springs to your mind? Lucille Ball, Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin, Charlie Brown, Lily Tomlin, Johnny Carson, Ziggy, Bart Simpson, Joel Fleischman, Bertie Wooster, Jonathan Winters, Robin Williams, Sissy Hankshaw, Dave Barry, etc., etc. In truth, you can’t swing a dead cat in popular culture without hitting an authentic comic character. Which does you not much good in creating your own comic characters, does it?

  Fear not. As your faithful comic alchemist, I have found a formula for creating comic characters. It’s not quite as elegant as spinning gold from dross, but a darn sight more reliable. By the end of this chapter, you’ll be able to build comic characters of your own, from scratch, in about two minutes flat. In Frankensteinian fashion, you’ll have created a monster.

  Not all of your comic characters will be “keepers,” solid, memorable creations that can stand the weight of major development. But you know me, ol’ Johnny Rule-of-Nine. In my universe, it’s necessary to create lots and lots and lots of comic characters before I can be confident of having a chosen few who show real quality and promise. So what I’m after for my own creative purposes—and what I’d like to share with you now—is a comic assembly line, if you will, that can chum out bunches of comic characters. Then we’ll set ‘em loose and see which ones perform.

  Four elements go into the construction of a comic character. The first and most important is the comic perspective.

  THE COMIC PERSPECTIVE

  Show me a comic character without a comic perspective and I’ll show you a straight man.

  The heart and soul of any comic character is his STRONG COMIC PERSPECTIVE. I repeat these words—STRONG COMIC PERSPECTIVE—and capitalize them because they may be the three most important words in this book. Every comic character begins and ends with his strong comic perspective. Know this one thing about your characters and you’ll know what makes them consistently and reliably funny forever.

  The comic perspective is a character’s unique way of looking at his world, which differs in a clear and substantial way from the “normal” world view. In the last chapter, I talked about the comic premise as the gap between real reality and comic reality. In a sense, the comic perspective is a character’s own individual comic premise. The comic perspective functions in a character exactly as the comic premise functions in a story: It defines the gap that the laughs will spark across.

  Gracie Allen’s comic perspective was innocence. It was the filter through which she looked at the world, and through which her humor flowed. Harpo Marx’s comic perspective was playfulness. Groucho’s, on the other hand, was, shall we say, leering cynicism. In Northern Exposure, Joel Fleischman’s comic perspective is, basically, “New York rules, Alaska bites.” Can you see that every funny thing that happens to him on that show is a function of his comic perspective?

  Jerry Lewis, in his movie heyday, had a bumbler’s perspective. He acted clumsy but, more importantly, thought clumsy. Jack Benny’s comic perspective was tightwad. (Tightwaddishness? Tightwadditry? The noun escapes me.) The classic Jack Benny bit has a robber telling Jack, “Your money or your life.” When Jack answers, “I’m thinking . . .”he’s filtering the robber’s threat through his strong comic perspective. The possibility that Jack might value his life less than his money is what creates the laugh. And it’s his comic perspective that brings that possibility to life.

  A character’s strong comic perspective is the motor that drives his comic engine. Comedy flows from character, which really means that comedy flows from a character’s unique, quirky, off-beat way of looking at the world. When I see a great stand-up comic, what I admire most is his or her ability to take the ordinary details of everyone’s life and see them in a new and different light. Jerry Seinfeld has a knack for magnifying the minutiae of modern life; Jimmy Durante looked at the world through nose-colored glasses.

  Notice that I speak of a strong comic perspective. You will find in creating your own comic perspectives (which you’ll be doing in about thirty seconds from now) that the stronger they are, the funnier they are. It’s a direct mathematical function. You could graph it.

  Okay, so now we have a new tool called comic perspective. Let’s put it to work by generating ten strong ones. I’ll go first.

  virginal schoolboy

  newborn baby

  curmudgeonly oldster

  hard-luck loser

  space alien

  cockeyed optimist

  testosterone poisoning

  canny politician

  perfectly paranoid

  know-it-some

  Each of these is a single, clearly defined way of looking at the world. A virginal schoolboy, for example, would see a woman’s naked breast as the bridge to manhood, while a newborn baby would see the same breast as . . . lunch! The know-it-some will tell you that the submarine sandwich was invented by the Earl of Submarine; the perfectly paranoid person will wonder if it’s poisoned. Virtually anything can be filtered through a comic perspective, and virtually any point of view can be a comic perspective. Give it a go.

  It’s likely that you don’t love all your perspectives. Some of them may seem flat, dull, unpromising. Why is this? If you examine your list, I think you’ll find that the boring comic perspectives are the ones that travel the least distance from commonly held perspectives. A priest’s perspective, for example, is not inherently funny. Something must be done to that perspective, something that pushes it toward some edge and wedges open the gap between what’s real and what’s funny. That something is exaggeration, the tool we’ll check out next.

  Before we go, though, I’d like you to look briefly at your own creative process. By this point in the voyage, if you’re starting to get the hang of using tools, then your ideas should be flowing a little more freely, both as a function of changed expectation, and as a function of finer focus. Notice how the problems we’re solving continue to get increasingly smaller. (Bonus points to you who said, “Whoa, check that oxymoron.”)

  We started out asking, “What’s funny?” Then we asked, “What’s a funny story?” Then we asked, “What’s a comic character in a funny story?” Now we’re asking, “What’s a comic character’s strong comic perspective?” Next we’ll ask, “How can we make that strong comic perspective even stronger still?”

  EXAGGERATION

  If you can’t be right, be loud.

  The thing about Gracie Allen is not just that she was innocent but that she was the ultimate innocent. No one could possibly be more naive than Gracie. Likewise, no one could possibly be a bigger bumbler than Jerry Lewis (with the possible exception of Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau.) There’s no confusing Mark’s or ALF’s alien perspective with anything from around here. They came—literally—from millions of miles away.

  The tool of exaggeration, then, simply takes a comic perspective and pushes and stretches and accelerates it until it’s sufficiently far from our perspective that it starts to be funny. A priest’s perspec
tive isn’t necessarily funny, but if you turn him into a perpetual sot, or into the ultimate twinkly-eyed rascal, you start to move him where you want him to go.

  This tool, exaggeration, above all else, requires that you be bold. We writers tend to think in terms of what’s logical, but comedy defies logic. What’s dynamic? What’s strange? WHAT IS WRIT LARGE? That’s what we’re going for here. Joel Fleischman is compelling because he’s so strongly drawn. It’s not that he kinda likes New York and sorta doesn’t like Alaska. It’s rather that he unreservedly loves New York and utterly loathes Alaska. Nothing less would do.

  The rule, then, is this: Take your comic character’s comic perspective to the end ofthe line. When Dudley Moore played a drunk in Arthur, he was the drunkest drunk the world had seen (since Falstaff). Woody Allen isn’t just neurotic; as a comic character, he’s a Freudian field day. I’m beating a dead horse about this, I know, but it’s key, so bear with me. Most failed comic characters fail as a function of their limited exaggeration. Would Robin Williams be less interesting and less fun if he were less totally manic? You bet your two-drink minimum he would.

  More examples: remember Goldie Hawn in Laugh-In? She wasn’t just a ditzy airhead, she was the ultimate ditzy airhead. That’s what made her funny. Walter Mitty doesn’t fantasize about catching a bus on time, he fantasizes saving the world. Thurber took Mitty’s comic perspective to the limit. That’s what you must do.

  You know, I’ve talked a lot about not being afraid to fail, and I’m going to say it again here: When you attempt to exaggerate a comic character, don’t be afraid to fail. Because here’s the good news: In this case, you can’t fail. There’s no such thing as exaggerating too much. Isn’t that a blessing?

  Exaggerating.