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

by John Vorhaus

  When dealing with story problems, you need to think in terms of two kinds of logic: plot logic and story logic. Plot logic is outer logic, the sequence of events that you, the writer, impose on your story. Story logic is the inner logic of your characters, the reasons they have for behaving the way they do. All of your story moves must satisfy both plot logic and story logic. In other words, your characters must do what they do to move the story forward, but their actions have to make sense to the characters themselves. If they don’t, you end up with plot robots, characters who serve no purpose but to move the story forward.

  Suppose you’re writing a spec episode of Mr. Wacky (Are you? I’m flattered . . .), and you want Mr. Wacky to consider a vasectomy. He can’t just wake up one morning and say, “Gee, I think I’d like to have my scrotum opened.” Rather, something in the story has to drive him to this point. If his girlfriend has a pregnancy scare, Wacky may decide that the time has come to say goodbye to Old Mr. Spermcount. This sequence satisfies both plot logic and story logic; you, the writer, want to get Wacky into that hospital room, and now Wacky wants to get there, too.

  If plot logic and story logic don’t agree, your readers or viewers will feel dissatisfied. So as you rewrite your story outline, make sure that every move every character makes is justified by who that character is, what he wants, and how we understand him to behave.

  Opportunities in your story outline are places where you can put your comic tools to work. In the example above, I put cynical Mr. Wacky in front of a television and let him react in his cynical way to all those commercials on TV. In rewriting the outline, I may see in this scene an opportunity to exaggerate Wacky’s reaction or apply clash of context to Wacky’s comic perspective, or even use abstraction to find a far better TV enemy. Home shopping? Televangelists? How can I make his bad situation worse?

  It’s in rewriting your outline that your story really gets good, and funny. Here’s why: Every time you rewrite your outline, you go further into your story, you understand it better, and you can mine its comic potential more effectively.

  I might be three or four drafts into my story, for example, before I realize there’s even more fun to be had from Dwight having two girls after him, or from Wacky falling for the girl’s mom, or from Wacky and his son going on a double date. The mere act of rewriting the outline inevitably makes the story richer and the characters more consistent, authentic, and interesting.

  To make the most of your story outline, you have to write the dam thing, and write it again, and again, and again, until the problems all go away and the opportunities all emerge. Spend some time now—not minutes, but hours or days or weeks—writing and rewriting the outline for your next sitcom script. The more time you spend in outline, the better your eventual script will be.

  STORY TO SCRIPT

  If you’ve done your job in outlining your story, it should be fairly easy to write the subsequent script. Well, maybe “easy” is too strong a word. Maybe “not impossible” is the phrase we need. But consider this: Writing a script from a thorough and detailed outline is merely the act of translating a story from one form to another. Writing a script without a full outline is like panning for gold with a shrimp fork.

  Does a well-wrought outline guarantee no story problems in script? I wish. Unfortunately, in going from story to script we often experience what I call the Grand Canyon effect. No matter how good the canyon looks from the rim, you really won’t get to know it until you go down that donkey trail. No matter how thoroughly you’ve worked out your story, you won’t discover all its problems until you hurl yourself into the script.

  Your sitcom script should be more or less as long as those of the show for which you’re writing. I once asked a story editor how long my script should be, and he said, “As long as you like, so long as it’s not less than forty pages and not more than forty-two.” These days I prefer a more organic approach. Write your story as fully and completely as you can. Cut out everything that’s irrelevant to the story. More often than not, you’ll end up with a script that runs about right.

  If all else fails, mirror the scripts of the show you’re writing for. Just do it like they do it, in format and length, and you can’t go too far wrong. Professional presentation is important. Your spec script is your calling card; you want it to be your showcase. This means that your characters’ names are spelled correctly, that your page layout is consistent and clean, that your copies are crisp, and that typos are eradicated. At minimum, you don’t want to give anyone an easy excuse to say no. They’ll find plenty of reasons to do that on their own.

  You see, there’s this phenomenon in Hollywood (and elsewhere, one imagines) called “the black hole of spec scripts.” When you send your earnestly wrought spec script to an agent or a producer or a television show, it joins dozens, maybe hundreds of other, equally earnestly wrought spec scripts. It helps to form a pile of scripts that could conceivably be used for the construction of Doric columns. Eventually, someone will pick your script up off this burgeoning Babylonian tower. If the first thing they see is a typo, or the star’s name misspelled, or photocopies of paperclips, they’ll throw your script back on the stack and pick up someone else’s script instead. It’s cruel, but a fact: Your script can lie inert, in place, until the show gets canceled, or the producer passes on, or the agent gets sick of the business and retires to Palm Springs. You want to give your script every advantage in the competition to get read. Start by making it look good. Making it read well is a far harder proposition.

  In these later days, when everyone and his dentist has written a spec sitcom, you might not even get a full read. Maybe they’ll open it to a page at random and judge the whole work by what they read there. Think back to what I said about microcosm and macrocosm. Can you see that in order for your script to work as a whole, it must work on every page? Sometimes, unfortunately, one page is all you get.

  Learn to test your own script rigorously and make sure that every page sings, and shows your real strength as a writer. Does that mean you’ll get work in television situation comedy? Maybe. Maybe not. Those odds, unfortunately, are long, and they don’t look to be getting shorter any time soon. Still, someone has to write the darned shows, the bad ones and the good ones alike, and if you have the talent and the drive, you may be the one. Just don’t fool yourself into thinking that situation comedy is only about jokes. As you can see, it’s about much more.

  13

  Sketch Comedy

  Sometimes you don’t want to tell a whole comic story. Sometimes you just want to open and explore a comic moment. If that’s the case, you don’t need the big comic structure of novels or screenplays, but you do need structure of some sort, if only to answer that nasty vexing question, “Where do I go next?”

  You must know by now that I won’t let you wander into this part of the comic planet without a map, or at least a set of coded instructions. This isn’t the only way to write sketch comedy, but it’s a nine-point method I find useful. Maybe you will too.

  1. Find a Strong Comic Character

  We’re back to basics: Who is your story about? Use what you know about comic perspective, exaggeration, flaws, and humanity to create a comic character for the center of your sketch. Don’t imagine that sketches are about “normal” people any more than any other type of comedy is. Think for a moment about your favorite sketch comedy and you’ll see that it’s built on characters: Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann, John Belushi’s Samurai warrior, etc.

  It’s not enough just to invent a comic character and hold him or her up for inspection. This creates the static picture of a character who’s all dressed up with nowhere to go. You have to put your character in motion. Comedy is conflict. Sketch comedy is comedy. Therefore . . .

  2. Find a Force of Opposition

  You have a couple of choices here. You can either find your character’s comic opposite or find a normal character to be your comic characte
r’s foil. If your comic character is Ralph Kramden, he’ll need Ed Norton to give him the worst possible time. But if your comic characters are the Coneheads, then merely introducing them to normal earthlings will provide sufficient force of comic opposition.

  In any case, you want to make sure that all your characters have a strong desire either to win or to get away. Absent one of these motivations, they have nothing to fight about, and they’ll just sit around making pleasant conversation. Your sketch will stop before it starts. Best-case scenario, you have two or more characters who want first to win and then to get away. What you need next is something to keep them from parting company until the battle is joined and fought.

  3. Force a Union

  What you’re after here is set glue, a strong, compelling reason why your characters have to stay together on the set for the life of the scene. This forced union can be as benign as a fictional television talk show or as malign as a prison cell or a room in hell. Monty Python used to force the union just by having some unsuspecting person walk into a shop run by a lunatic. Bob and Ray made endless use of a radio interview format. Virtually any situation will do, so long as it’s easier to get into than out of.

  4. Escalate their Conflict

  Sketch conflict starts small. Someone wants to know what time it is, and someone else won’t tell him. Someone wants to buy furniture, and someone else won’t sell it. Someone wants to take the coast route to Santa Barbara, and someone else wants to go through the mountains. No matter how the conflict starts, make sure that the argument gets worse (by which, of course, we mean better) almost right away. Make it loud and angry. Make it personal. Make it physically violent if at all possible.

  The easiest way to escalate conflict is to push it toward your characters’ emotional core. If a married couple is arguing over how to get to a party, it starts with “We’re lost,” then quickly escalates through “You never ask for directions” and “Stop nagging me” and “Why are you so stupid?” all the way to “I never should have married you in the first place” and “I want a divorce” and someone getting out of the car—preferably at highway speeds.

  5. Raise the Stakes

  At this point in the sketch, introduce a new element of risk or reward for your sketch characters. Make the scene be suddenly about something new, different, and fundamentally more important.

  If your sketch starts out with a priest trying to save the soul of a fallen woman, the stakes get raised when she turns the war around and puts his celibacy at risk. If the sketch starts out with someone trying to sell a shoe shine, the stakes get raised when it turns into class warfare. Always ask yourself, “What’s the worst possible thing that could happen to this person next?” and then find a way to make that worst thing happen.

  6. Push the Limits

  Make the bad things worse. If you have a fallen woman propositioning a priest, introduce more priests or more fallen women. Take off some clothes. Make your characters sweat. Put them in a box. What you want is a hurtling, mad, desperate sense of things falling apart. Have you brought the cops in yet? Has anyone broken a bone? Have all the pies been thrown?

  In the best sketch comedy, limits get pushed to the point of raving madness, full psychic deconstruction for one or more of the characters involved. Exaggeration is your best friend here, and logic should be ignored as much as possible. Be bold and outrageous and your scene will sprout wings and fly. Stick to the typical and your scene will die of ennui.

  7. Seek an Emotional Peak

  If all is going according to plan now, if your sketch is moving more and more toward the characters’ emotional cores, if the stakes are being raised, then a clear emotional peak should naturally emerge from the ruin you’ve created. This is why it’s so important to start with strong comic opposites and real conflict in a closed situation. These are the pressure-cooker elements that will cause the thing to explode. Sketch comedy works best when it goes ballistic. For this to happen, you have to create trouble, increase trouble, compress trouble, and push, push, push.

  8. Find a Winner

  Who wins? Who loses? To make your sketch comedy truly satisfying to the reader or viewer, you have to achieve some sense of completion or closure. It doesn’t matter who ultimately pulls out the (metaphorical) gun and blows his enemy away, but until that gun is drawn and fired, until the body hits the floor, your work is not yet done.

  A typical comic sketch might be built on an obnoxious talk-show host who attacks and humiliates his guest. In the end, the host might reduce the guest to a quivering mess, or the guest might throw a fatal choke-hold on the host. Or they could conceivably wind up best of friends. One of four outcomes is possible: Somebody wins or somebody loses or everybody wins or everybody loses. It doesn’t matter how the story ends so long as it does end. You know a sketch is in trouble when there’s nothing to do but fade out and cue the “applause” sign.

  9. Change the Frame of Reference

  This is where you put a twist or a spin on your sketch to cap the action. Whatever reality you’ve created, try to find a way to pull back from that reality and show it to be a fantasy of some kind or another. If you have a married couple fighting all the way to a party, pull back from that fight and reveal it to be taking place not on the open road but at a car dealership, where the couple is testing a new car to see if it can sustain the sort of fights they like to have. Changing the frame explosively releases all the tension stored in the sketch. It’s the coda, the grace note, and it is not to be ignored. At the very least, it’s a useful way to get out of a sketch that otherwise presents no natural out.

  In writing sketch comedy, there’s a huge temptation just to plunge in, start writing dialogue, and see where the darn thing leads. That’s one way of doing it, but I think the whole job is easier and more productive if you work out a beat outline before you go to script. A “beat” is a single piece of action or conflict, like, “Bob and Ethyl argue about a book.” A beat outline describes, in present-tense prose, all the actions and conflicts of a scene or script. A beat outline for the sketch mentioned above might look something like this:

  I. A couple is sitting in a car. He’s a mouse and she’s a shrew. They argue over how to get to a party.

  II. She starts to complain that he never stops to ask for directions. He counters that she’s always nagging him. If she’d just leave him alone, he could concentrate and they’d be there already.

  III. She reveals that she didn’t want to go to the party in the first place since it’s just his boring friends. He says it’s better than her boring family.

  IV. Now they start to fight in earnest, and the fight turns personal: her bad habits, his receding hairline, her weight, the men she could have married instead of him, etc.

  V. One of them has had enough and demands a divorce. The other agrees. They lapse into stony silence, resigned to the dissolution of their marriage.

  VI. There’s a knock on the car window. It’s a car salesman asking them how they like the car. They say that it suits them fine. As they get out of the car and start signing purchase papers, we fade on out.

  You can see, I hope, that writing the sketch from a structure like this is a good deal simpler and more reliable than the “hunt ‘n’ hope” method. As always, it’s easier to fix the broken parts of the structure in outline than in script.

  There’s a variation on sketch-comedy structure in which the force of comic opposition is not present but only implied. Typically, this will be a parody sketch, and the force of opposition is the person or thing or institution being parodied. When Chevy Chase impersonated Gerald Ford on Saturday Night Live, Ford was the implied force of opposition. Likewise, when Dana Carvey and Mike Meyers did Wayne’s World, they were mocking, and had implicit conflict with, the whole phenomenon of self-indulgent public-access cable-television shows.

  The danger of this structure is that a great comic idea can go flat fast if
it doesn’t have a strong story and real conflict to keep it moving forward. It’s not enough for the Church Lady to parody sanctimony—she has to have a true target, an enemy, nothing less than . . . SATAN!!! against which to vent her spleen.

  The best sketch comedy creates characters who slip into the public consciousness and become old friends. The Church Lady, Wayne and Garth, Edith Ann all became pop-cultural icons, so that the just showing the character again was enough to get a laugh again. These characters can become franchises for their creators. If you want such a franchise, start with strong comic characters. If you’re lucky, one will break through, and the vast revenue stream of T-shirt licensing will flow for you.

  Here’s an outline for a comic sketch.

  A self-styled expert is being interviewed on TV. We know he’s the comic character when it becomes clear that this self-styled expert knows nothing about his field. The interviewer is his force of opposition, someone determined to expose the fraud. The union is forced by the set-glue of the television show. The conflict escalates as the interviewer challenges the “expert’s” expertise. The stakes get raised when the expert’s ignorance proves potentially menacing or even deadly for those who follow his advice. The limits get pushed when the expert can no longer ignore the evidence that he’s a fraud. An emotional peak gets reached when the expert suffers nervous collapse at the realization of the damage he’s done. The winner is the interviewer, who has cut the so-called expert down to size. The frame gets changed when we discover that the interviewer and the expert are brothers, and this war is really over which of them was mother’s favorite son.

  Here’s another example of escalation in a comic sketch, this one from Monty Python: