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

by John Vorhaus

  All you really need to trigger this sequence is a comic character whose flaws will allow him to stumble into an eyebrow situation. That is, he has to be stupid enough, or scared enough, or stubborn enough, or desperate enough to get into this particular type of trouble. A bumbling murderer works; so does a flaky short-order cook, or an incompetent house painter, or a perfectionist chemist. Just add detail and you’re golden.

  Try this one: Imagine that your hero is a janitor at a nuclear power plant. He’s accidentally locked his lunch in the broom closet. See if you can “eyebrow” him from that broom closet to a full-core meltdown.

  It’s possible for the eyebrow effect to motor a whole comic story. Consider a time-travel tale in which the hero hits his thumb with a hammer, goes back in time to un-strike the blow, creates a small change in history, tries to correct it, creates a bigger change, tries to correct that, and so on until the very survival of mankind hangs in the balance. A little eyebrow goes a long, long way.

  VIRTUAL HUMOR

  The best lines in comic writing do three truly marvelous things: They tell the story, tell the truth, and tell a joke, all at the same time. I call this kind of line a three-dimensional (3-D) joke. They’re not easy to write, but they’re worth their weight in twenty-pound bond.

  There are two ways to approach 3-D jokes. One is just to write intuitively and hope for “found art” along the way. This works better than you might imagine, because by the time you’re deep into your story, with a full and complete understanding of your comic characters, they tend to start doing and saying things that are authentic both to their nature and humor and to their story. If they’re well-built comic characters, they’ll naturally be funny as a function of their comic perspective. If your story is soundly constructed, then the events of that story will naturally move it forward. If you’ve paid attention to the theme of your work, then the truth will naturally emerge.

  The other way to approach the 3-D joke is to attack it a dimension at a time. If you’ve written a line that does nothing but move the story forward, go back and rewrite it so that it tells the story and tells a joke. Then rewrite it again so that it tells a truth as well. Because this breaks your creative problem down into separate, smaller problems, it makes your creative task that much easier. Of course, this requires a strong commitment to rewriting and also a strategy for understanding the inner workings of your story, your scene, and your line. We’ll discuss the commitment to rewriting later. As for the strategy, one I find useful is virtual humor.

  When I’m trying to create 3-D jokes in a scene, I strip it down to its essentials. What I want is to see the humor, the story, and the truth, all on an abstract level.

  Suppose I’m writing a scene in which a diva is trying to seduce her hunky stage manager. By virtual humor, I abstract out the story of the scene: A woman is using power for seduction. I abstract out the truth of the scene: Women can be as exploitative as men in the right circumstances. And I abstract out the humor: Her efforts will fail because he’s just too dim to understand what she’s trying to do. With this abstract understanding, I can look at any moment in the scene and see how to make the moment function in three dimensions. She takes off her blouse, say, and whispers, “I suppose you know what this means.” “Sure,” he answers. “Costume change.”

  In my description of the guy at the stoplight, the abstract story was that of a man stopping to light a cigarette. The truth was that he’s a jerk and shouldn’t be smoking. The joke was that the deadly activity actually saved his life. With this abstraction of the scene, a behavior coupled to an attitude and an irony, we could rebuild the scene a dozen different ways. Try it and see.

  The trouble with our scenes, a lot of the time, is that we don’t actually know what’s going on in them. Virtual humor can reveal much that was hidden. If you’re stuck on a scene or a joke or a cartoon, or just trying to get more out of it, abstract it down to its essence, and then rebuild it to comic effect.

  Suppose I want to make a joke about how I hate cats. Instead of just floundering around looking for a funny line, I ask myself first what’s the “story” of hating cats. I want cats to stay away. What’s the truth? Cats can be annoying. What’s the joke? My hatred of cats manifested inappropriately. Looking for the 3-D joke, then, becomes a matter just of searching for the intersection of these sets. I want cats to stay away, and I find them so annoying that I’ll pursue that goal in a wildly inappropriate way: thus, “The only good cat is a doorstop.”

  Go back and re-examine some comic piece you’ve created lately. Select a paragraph or a scene or a sketch or a drawing and write down in plain English the point you’re trying to make, the story you’re trying to tell, and the joke you’re trying to crack. At worst, this will reveal what elements are missing. At best, it may lead you to a more elegant solution to your comic problem.

  Is it really possible to find good jokes this way? You may have to be the judge of that. All I know is that when I’m frustrated by a scene that I know could be funnier, or deeper, or more useful to my story, I start by asking what’s this scene, story, or joke really about? I find this a far more useful question than, “Why won’t the damn thing work?” or “Where has my sense of humor gone?” or “What’s the best way to slit my wrists?”

  BUILDING AUDIENCE ALLEGIANCE

  Whether it’s one reader curled up on her couch with your comic novel, a dozen people thumbing through your cartoon book in a bookstore, 2,000 people watching your stage show, 10 million avid viewers tuned in to your hit sitcom, or a whole wide world watching your movie, your audience is your friend. Earn their allegiance and they’ll forgive a multitude of sins. Violate their trust and they’ll turn on you like a dyspeptic rottweiler with the words “Born to sniff crotch” branded on his haunch. There are a couple of ways to win their loyalty and a couple of ways to lose it. Let’s examine them in turn.

  One thing an audience looks for is consistency. They want to know that the rules of your comic world are going to stay the same, and not jump around in an arbitrary and artificial way. Comedy requires understanding. They have to get your joke in order to “get” your joke. If you confuse them with inconsistency, they will feel betrayed. And they will leave.

  For example, if you’ve written a story that takes place in a foreign country, where people know nothing about American culture, you can’t suddenly throw in a joke about McDonald’s. If those foreigners know about McDonald’s at all, they must know about McDonald’s all along.

  If your comedy is farce comedy, it has to be farce comedy throughout. You can’t set it in motion as a realistic romantic comedy and then start throwing pies in people’s faces. Your audience’s gears will grind. Maybe you’ll re-establish contact, but maybe you won’t. If you don’t lose them, you won’t have to face trying to win them back.

  And the thing is that an audience, from a single reader to the entire global village, is incredibly sensitive to shifts of this sort. Because the human mind craves order, an audience wastes no time in establishing its own gestalt of your world. They understand intuitively what the rules are and feel subconsciously violated when those rules are broken.

  It’s also vitally important to give your audience sufficient information. As we’ve discussed, telling a joke is presenting a little puzzle to be solved. If your readers or viewers don’t have all the clues they need to solve the puzzle, they’ll feel stupid and inadequate, and they’ll take it out on you.

  Here’s an example:

  I’m Jewish, but I grew up in California. You know what the technical name for a California Jew is, don’t you? Presbyterian.

  What’s the virtual humor of this line? West Coast Jews are a lot less religious than other Jews elsewhere. By exaggeration, they’re so much less Jewish that they’re actually Christian. Using detail, we substitute Presbyterian for Christian, because Presbyterian is a more sharply focused word. But none of this works if you, my audience, don’
t know that California Jews are held to be less religious than other Jews. If you don’t have enough information, the joke is lost.

  Of course, it’s possible to supply your audience with enough information to solve the puzzle. In the example above, I could pitch the joke this way: “I’m not saying that California Jews aren’t religious, but their technical name is Presbyterian.” The puzzle contains its own clues for solution.

  Notice also that I’m careful to identify myself as Jewish before I make the joke. I don’t want people thinking I might be anti-semitic. By telling you that I’m Jewish, I retain for myself the right to make fun of my own kind, and you continue to think of me as an okay guy.

  This is called avoiding an adversarial relationship. In addition to knowing what your audience understands, you have to know what your audience will tolerate. In these politically correct times, for example, certain types of racist or sexist humor are (thankfully) declasse. It may be that in the next ten years it will become the banner of bad taste to refer, say, to internal-combustion engines or the former Yugoslavia. The savvy comic writer stays abreast of these changes. You don’t need to pander to your audience, but you don’t want to alienate them, either.

  Unless, of course, alienation is your act. Plenty of stand-up comics have built their success entirely on having an adversarial relationship with their audience. How can this work?

  All comedy creates an expectation within an audience. A “shock” comic like Howard Stern creates the expectation of bad behavior. When he then meets that expectation, he’s not alienating his audience, but rather giving them exactly what they want. By meeting their expectation, he wins them over completely. An insult comic is expected to be rude. By creating and then meeting the expectation of alienating his audience, he actually earns their approval.

  It turns out that meeting an audience’s expectation is about the single most useful thing a comic creator can do to win an audience’s allegiance. Violating that expectation, on the other hand, is the kiss o’ death. As we discussed above, changing the rules leaves an audience feeling confused and betrayed. Violating their expectations is a big way of changing the rules, and it’s very upsetting to an audience. Especially a TV audience.

  When people tune in an episode of, say, Married . . . with Children, they have a certain hope and a certain expectation. Their hope is that Al Bundy will win, but their expectation is that he will lose. While the show can defeat their hope, it must not defeat their expectation.

  Why can you defeat a hope, but not an expectation? Because “hope” is our picture of how things should be, but “expectation” is our picture of how things really are. By violating an audience’s expectation, you’re telling them that they’re wrong, somehow. People don’t like to be wrong.

  Which doesn’t mean they don’t like to be surprised. If you can meet your audience’s expectation and defeat it at the same time, you’ve really got them where you want them. In Married . . . with Children, the best of all possible worlds is for Al to lose . . . but lose in a completely unforeseen way. You want your insult comedian to piss you off in a new and different way. Howard Stern must reinvent shock every day if he wants to keep his fans coming back for more.

  Of course, there are some people who hate Howard Stern, don’t find him funny, and wish he’d get hit by a truck. Not everybody likes his material, and not everybody’s going to like yours, no matter how carefully you shape and tailor it. If you try to be all things to all people, you’ll end up being nothing to nobody. The bottom line is this: Know your audience.

  There’s a great scene in This is Spinal Tap where the band is mistakenly booked to perform at an Air Force dance. As a heavy-metal band, they can’t please that audience no matter how hard they try. They simply don’t have the right tools for the job. By knowing your audience, by understanding what they know, what they’ll tolerate, and what they find funny, you’ll be able to figure out how to amuse them, or even if you can amuse them at all. If you can’t, don’t sweat it. They’re just stupid, and you can tell them I said so.

  12

  Situation Comedy

  Some people think situation comedies are easy to write. Some people watch really, really bad sitcoms on TV and say, “Hey, I could do better than that.” And you know what? They’re probably right. They probably could write sitcoms better than the bad ones. Trouble is, the television industry is already pretty well glutted with writers who can write bad sitcoms. The trick, if you want to succeed in that neck of the weeds, is to write sitcoms better than the best, not the worst of them. If this is your path, I hope this chapter will help you blaze the trail.

  THE SPEC SCRIPT

  The typical passport to the land of sitcom hopes and dreams is the speculative, or spec, script. This is a sample episode of an existing television show that you write to demonstrate your ability to capture the characters’ voices, the story structure, and the jokes and rhythms of a given show. In choosing which show to write a spec for, there are a couple of things to keep in mind.

  You want to choose a “smart” show. There’s no point in writing a spec episode of a silly, bad, or derivative situation comedy, because no one who might hire you is the least bit interested in reading specs for that sort of show. You want to choose from among the hip, hot, “sexy” shows that are popular at the time of your writing. Here in 1994, the shows most often targeted for spec are Frasier, Home Improvement, and Seinfeld. But you need to know that by the time you read this book, all these shows will have been “specked to death” by the preexisting universe of sitcom wannabes. What you want is to get out ahead of the curve, pick and spec a show before it becomes a hit, and subsequently gets ground up in the spec sitcom mill. Watch the new sitcoms. Try to be the first on your block to write a spec script for a smart new show. At the worst, you’ll write a spec for a show that doesn’t become successful, in which case all you’ve lost is the time it took you to do the work, but what you’ve gained is the experience of having done that very work. About an even trade, I’d say.

  As you choose your spec target, ask yourself if you like the show you’re specking for. Will you sufficiently enjoy watching and studying it and writing it to devote the weeks and months of work necessary to do a good job on your spec script? Don’t kid yourself here: There’s no point in writing a spec script for a show you just don’t like, no matter how popular or smart it may be, for the simple reason that you won’t write the script very well. You may have a very serviceable, workmanlike approach to the writing of that spec, but some essential enthusiasm will be missing, and its absence always shows.

  Play to your strengths. Do you have a knack for gags? Then you want to spec a gag-driven show. Do you have “heart?” Then you want to write a sample for a show that has lots of heartfelt moments. Can you write kids well? Write a kids’ show spec. The purpose of a spec script is to knock ‘em dead with your proficiency on the page. Do everything you can to give yourself an edge in that direction. It might be useful at this point to note your strengths (and weaknesses) as a writer. Not only will this help you choose the right show to spec, it will also show you in general terms where your craft needs work.

  Finally, can you find your soul in the show? This is really the one key question. In my experience, no sitcom script is any darn good if the writer doesn’t put his or her real heart, real feelings, and real emotion into the work. Does the show you’ve picked offer you this opportunity? If you feel no connection to the characters or the situation of the show, how can you invest your true self in the work? Like a lack of enthusiasm, an absence of heartfelt commitment will torpedo even the best spec effort.

  LEARNING THE RULES

  To make your spec script shine, you have to learn the rules of the show you’re writing for, and then follow those rules in your own spec script. In the last chapter, for example, I mentioned a rule for Married . . . with Children, that Al Bundy always loses. To write a spec episode of this show well, you�
�d have to know, and follow, that rule.

  On Murphy Brown, there’s often a gag, or even a running gag, about a secretary, but the stories are never built around a secretary. Failure to follow a rule like this will betray your ignorance of the show’s inner workings. It’s a rule of Mad About You that the stories always turn on conflict between Paul and Jamie. In Bob Newhart’s shows, there’s almost always been a telephone monologue to showcase Bob’s trademark strength with this gag. It was a rule of Gilligan’s Island that no one ever escaped from the island. Can you imagine writing a spec episode of Gilligan’s Island where they all got away?

  For more on the rules of a show, contemplate what type of comic story the show tells. Remembering that Taxi is a center-and-eccentrics configuration would lead you to choose a story that placed Judd Hirsch at the center of an eccentric conflict. Then again, remembering that Taxi is off the air would lead you to choose a different show to spec in the first place.