The Comic Toolbox: How to be Funny Even if You're Not
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REVELATION
A book can hit a reader with the force of revelation. While you’re reading it, and for a short time after, you may feel pumped up, psyched, filled with the sense that anything is possible. Great! Go with that feeling! It’s included in the text at no extra charge.
But it will fade, for revelation always fades. Soon you won’t have the feeling of enthusiasm but only a memory of that feeling, and its hold over you will weaken exponentially. That’s the way revelation works: One day you’re Paul on the road to Damascus; next day you’re just looking at slides from the trip.
I hope you’ve become excited by some of the tools you found in this book. During the next week, you might use them every day. In the following week, you’ll use them less frequently. By week three, four, or five, this book will be just another volume on your bookshelf. This is not sad or lamentable. It’s natural, inevitable. Because revelation fades.
But revelation adds huge power to a life. If you’re excited and energized about anything, it makes you more productive and lends both quality and quantity to your work. So, then, keeping revelation alive is a good thing. But how to achieve that lofty goal? You can’t just flip back to page one and start re-reading. Nor can you wait for the sequel, The Comic Toolbox Two: How to be Funnier than You Already Are. That book may be a long time in coming.
To keep revelation alive in your life, seek new sources of inspiration. Read books. Take classes. Meditate. Do yoga. Wander in the woods and contemplate the Big Questions. Above all, create. Create as much comedy as you can. Don’t worry about whether it’s any good or whether it will make your wildest dreams come true. The mere act of creation is the strongest, most powerful force of revelation there is. Nothing electrifies a day or an hour or a minute like the act of creation. Make creation a habit in your life. Revelation will flow from this, and success, I do believe, will follow as well.
We struggle with motivation. Mostly we struggle with self-motivation. It’s easy to be motivated when you have a boss to force your labor. But there’s never a boss around when you need one, and providing your own motivation can be tough. I’ve tried in this book to give you a good swift kick in the motivation and to show you how you can improve your comedy and productivity through logical process and small, small steps. But as I said, revelation fades. What happens next is strictly up to you.
Set new goals. Set aside time to work toward those goals. Recognize that progress comes slowly, and grant yourself the time and the grace to go forward at your own pace. Use your tools to help you get past the “stuck” points and get you moving again. On the subject of tools, recognize that some of these tools will be more useful to you than others. Some will slip naturally into your comic process while others will feel gawky and awkward. Use the easy ones but don’t neglect the troublesome ones. Come back to them later and try again. It may be that you only need to grow a while as a writer or an artist or an actor or a comedian before you can use those difficult tools well. We tend to exercise our stronger muscle groups, but the weak muscles need their workout, too.
Recognize that creativity, especially comic creativity, is a gift. Every time you make someone laugh, you bring joy into the universe and make your world, in some small way, a better place to be. Respect this gift, honor it, and take responsibility for it. Comedy is no innocent thing, but a powerful, often subversive, force for change. It’s up to you to decide whether that force will be a positive or a negative one.
I hope you’ll make it positive. I hope you’ll use your talent and your drive not just to make your life better but to make all life better. I can even tell you why it’s in your interest to do so. When you contribute to the common good, you increase the amount of common good floating around out there. The more common good there is, the better are your odds of some of it coming back to you. If that’s too goopy for you, consider that working toward positive, humanistic goals brings you into contact with other like-minded people. Aren’t these good people the ones you want to know and hang out with and love?
And if nothing else, devoting your vision to positive ends makes you feel better about yourself. If you feel good about yourself, you tend to have good, productive, hard-working, and happy days. Exactly the kind of days you want. In a real sense, when you devote yourself to helping others with your works or words, you improve your ability to bring those words or works to life.
Every creative person has the chance to invest real heart in his or her work. Absent that investment, the best we can hope for is “artoid,” the velvet Elvis, not art but an incredible simulation. Art without heart is like, well, like sex without love. Yeah, it’s okay, but if you had a choice . . . ?
And you do have a choice. Your comedy can be constructive or destructive. Your art can mock or inform. Your words can degrade or enlighten. What you do is up to you, but if the worst happens and you’re never the success you want to be, wouldn’t you like to be able to look back and say, “At least I did the right thing?” I sure would.
So make your choice and take your stand, and recognize that life is long, fraught with opportunity. Have patience and have fun. You are blessed.
About the Author
In a professional career spanning many decades, John Vorhaus has written just about everything there is to write, from songs and sitcoms to screenplays, novels and non-fiction. He has also enjoyed a parallel career in teaching and training writers worldwide.
Vorhaus’s scriptwriting credits include such classic situation comedies as Married… with Children, and he’s the only writer in the world to have worked on the American, Russian and Bulgarian versions of that show.
An international consultant in television and film script development, Vorhaus has worked for television networks, film schools, production companies and film funding bodies in 30 countries on five continents. He has been a meaningful change-agent for tens of thousands of writers, and has created or co-created television shows in Eastern and Western Europe, Australasia, even Nicaragua.
A novelist of some note, Vorhaus has seven titles to his credit, including the “sunshine noir” mysteries The California Roll, The Albuquerque Turkey and The Texas Twist, recounting the exploits of world-class con artist Radar Hoverlander. His poker novels World Series of Murder and Under the Gun are classics of the “how-to/whodunit” subgenre of poker fiction. He has visited the 1960s in Lucy in the Sky and the 1970s in Poole’s Paradise.
On the non-fiction side, he is best known for Decide to Play Great Poker, co-authored with poker legend Annie Duke, as well as the six-volume Killer Poker series. When his work takes a whimsical turn, he finds himself spoofing himself (Decide to Play Drunk Poker; The Strip Poker Kit) or departing radically from the norm (A Million Random Words; How to Write Good). His other writing books include The Little Book of Sitcom, Comedy Writing 4 Life, and Creativity Rules!
Vorhaus is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and a member of the Writers Guild of America. He has consulted to Walt Disney Feature Animation and Sony Corporation, and taught at such institutions as Northwestern University, the American Film Institute, and the Writers Program of the UCLA Extension.
He tweets for no apparent reason @TrueFactBarFact and secretly controls the world from www.johnvorhaus.com.