by Robert McKee
The opening four beats turn on the value of humiliation/pride, but that dread quickly segues into yet another grand, series-long obsession: their mutual envy and constant competition, a.k.a. sibling rivalry, the very subject of the book they struggle to write. Onscreen, the scene runs for three minutes and fourteen seconds, igniting direct conflict between Frasier and Niles, two equally imbalanced personalities.
As in the previous chapter, I will work with the scene from two angles: Viewing it from the outside in, I will look at the beats of action/reaction that shape the scene’s progression as well as the changing charge of its values. Reversing the angle to the inside out, I will trace the steps of behavior—desire, antagonism, choice, action—that translate the intentions and tactics of Frasier and Niles into comically expressive dialogue.
Once again, the scene is printed in bold. Read it through without break and then review it in light of my notes.
INT. HOTEL ROOM—EARLY MORNING
As Niles nods off in front of the computer keyboard, Frasier pulls open the drapes.
BEAT 1
FRASIER
(looking out at the day)
Oh, dear God! It’s dawn! It’s Friday!
(turning to his brother)
Niles, why don’t we just admit it? We can’t work together. There’s never going to be any book.
NILES
No, not with that attitude, there isn’t.
ACTION: Frasier urging Niles to accept failure.
REACTION: Niles blaming their failure on Frasier.
SUBTEXT: Niles and Frasier begin with the same scene intention: the desire to fix blame. To Frasier’s credit, he’s willing to share blame, but Niles, to preserve his pride, places the fault squarely on his brother. They instantly become each other’s antagonist, and for the next four beats choose name-calling as their underlying tactic. At first, their spiraling insults masquerade as accusations, but by Beat 6 the masks fall.
TECHNIQUE: Comedy writing calls for artful exaggeration. Over-the-top distortion itself often prompts laughs, but its primary work is to promote enough distance between the characters and the reader/audience that we can judge behaviors against what society considers normal and find them ridiculously out of step.
Note Frasier’s first line: He could have simply said, “It’s morning.” Instead, he calls upon the deity. Comic dialogue thrives on overstatement (although understatement is also an exaggeration).
BEAT 2
FRASIER
Will you get off it? Come on. The fat lady has sung. The curtain has been rung down. Let’s just go home.
NILES
Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised you’d give up so easily. It’s not your dream after all. Why should it be, mister big shot radio host.
ACTION: Frasier calling Niles an idiot.
REACTION: Niles calling Frasier a snob.
SUBTEXT: Frasier accuses Niles of being oblivious to the obvious. We have a name for those people: idiots. Niles, in turn, accuses Frasier of being arrogantly self-important and looking down on lesser souls. We have a name for those people: snobs. Their accusations become humiliations with a literary touch.
Both Niles and Frasier are culture vultures, so notice that when Frasier declares that their work is done, he references opera and theatre.
BEAT 3
FRASIER
Is that what this little tantrum is all about, huh? You’re jealous of my celebrity?
NILES
It’s not a tantrum and I’m not jealous. I’m just FED UP! I’m fed up with being second all the time. You know, I wanted to be a psychiatrist, just like mom, way before you did, but because you were older, you got there first. You were first to get married; you were first to give Dad the grandchild he always wanted. By the time I get around to doing anything, it’s all chewed meat.
ACTION: Frasier calling Niles a petulant child.
REACTION: Niles calling Frasier an upstaging ham.
SUBTEXT: Frasier’s accusation is on point. Niles lapses into an adolescent snit as he accuses Frasier of deliberately hogging life’s spotlight and thus ruining his dreams. To save his pride Niles conflates coincidence with malevolence—a massive exaggeration.
TECHNIQUE: Note the phrase “chewed meat.” Its incongruity pops a smart laugh, but more to the point, the allusion fits hand and glove with the rest of the scene. Mothers around the world pre-chew meat so their infants can swallow it. The whole scene plays as an elaborate Benjamin Button–like metaphor, regressing the brothers to their diapered days, so that at climax Frasier can reenact his failed infanticide of Niles.
BEAT 4
FRASIER
You’re crying about something we can’t change.
NILES
You wouldn’t change it if you could. You love it.
ACTION: Frasier calling Niles a masochist.
REACTION: Niles calling Frasier a sadist.
SUBTEXT: Frasier accuses Niles of crying for no reason. We have a name for people who indulge needless suffering: masochists. Niles, in turn, accuses Frasier of reveling in his misery. We have a name for people who enjoy watching others suffer: sadists. These brothers are psychiatrists; they punch the secret places below the belt.
TECHNIQUE: A joke is a design in two parts: setup/payoff. The setup arouses energy; the payoff explodes it into laughter. Comic energy comes from three primary sources: defensive emotions, aggressive emotions, and sex. For this reason, when we look deeply into comic subtext, things can get scary, angry, and wild. But then, the more powerful the setup, the bigger the laugh.
You may or may not agree with the darkness of my interpretation, but when we reach the climax, look back and ask if it doesn’t fit.
BEAT 5
FRASIER
Oh, let it go, Niles.
NILES
I can’t let it go. My nose is rubbed in it every day. I’M the one on the board of the Psychiatric Association; MY research is well respected in academic circles; four of MY patients have been elected to political office, but it’s YOUR big fat face they put on the side of buses.
ACTION: Frasier calling Niles a crybaby.
REACTION: Niles calling Frasier a show-off.
TECHNIQUE: Note how the writers build the joke in Beat 5. They use a technique known as trivializing the exalted.
Niles’s anger over injustice infuses his setup, but he contains the energy inside a list of institutions of respect: “Psychiatric Association,” “academic circles,” and “political office.” Then his punch line throws a bomb of banality: “big fat face they put on the side of buses.”
SUBTEXT: Niles immediately senses that Frasier actually takes pride in his public transportation portrait. With that, he suffers his final humiliation. The value of humiliation/pride has run its course, and now a deeper value rooted in sibling rivalry comes to the fore: winning/losing.
BEAT 6
FRASIER
(indignant)
I do not have a fat face.
NILES
Oh, please, I keep wondering how long you’re going to store those nuts for winter.
ACTION: Frasier defending his face.
REACTION: Niles attacking his face.
SUBTEXT: By Beat 6 their subtext has risen to the text, and so the beats that follow are all more or less on-the-nose.
BEAT 7
FRASIER
Well, at least I’m not spindly.
NILES
Who are you calling spindly, fat face?
FRASIER
You, spindly!
NILES
Fat face!
FRASIER
Spindly!
NILES
Fat face!
FRASIER
Spindly!
NILES
Fat face!
ACTION: Frasier calling Niles ugly.
REACTION: Niles calling Frasier ugly.
TECHNIQUE: “Spindly,” a unique vocabulary choice, characterizes Frasier perfectly. Nonetheless, he loses the name-calling contest because h
e is in fact more fat-faced than Niles is spindly. Back to the wall, he escalates from verbal to physical.
BEAT 8
FRASIER
You take that back!
NILES
You make me!
ACTION: Frasier making a fist.
REACTION: Niles making a fist.
SUBTEXT: By “making a fist,” I mean they take a moment to mentally and emotionally prepare for a fight.
BEAT 9
FRASIER
I will make you.
NILES
I don’t see you making me.
ACTION: Frasier deciding where to punch.
REACTION: Niles daring him to punch.
SUBTEXT: Under this brief beat, the brothers make decisions about how far to take the fight. Frasier chooses to start light.
BEAT 10
FRASIER
Oh yeah, well…
(ripping hairs out of his brother’s chest)
… here’s making you.
Niles winces in pain.
ACTION: Frasier attacking Niles.
REACTION: Niles gathering his counterattack.
SUBTEXT: Under his wince and yelp, Niles chooses all-out war.
TECHNIQUE: After all of their threatening bluster, pulling out chest hairs makes a superb comic understatement. Note how the repetition of make/make/making/making gives the actors staccato, pace-building rhythm.
BEAT 11
Frasier turns to leave, but Niles races across the room, jumps on Frasier’s back, and wrestles him into a violent headlock.
FRASIER
(shouting)
Ow! Ow! Niles, stop it! We’re psychiatrists, not pugilists!
ACTION: Niles attacking Frasier.
REACTION: Frasier deceiving Niles.
SUBTEXT: Frasier could have used simpler language: “We’re doctors, not fighters.” Instead, to dupe Niles with vanity, he names their prestigious medical specialty and the Latinate for “boxer.” The trick works.
BEAT 12
Niles lets Frasier go.
FRASIER
I can’t believe you fell for that.
Frasier spins around and clamps Niles into a fierce headlock.
ACTION: Niles surrendering to Frasier.
REACTION: Frasier attacking Niles.
SUBTEXT: As they regress to childhood, Frasier’s ploy suggests that they have pulled these tricks on each other many times.
BEAT 13
Frasier throws Niles on the bed, jumps on top on him, grabs him by the throat, and starts strangling him.
NILES
My God, my God, I’m having a flashback. You’re climbing in my crib and jumping on me.
ACTION: Frasier going for the kill.
REACTION: Niles recoiling in terror.
SUBTEXT: Their roughhouse releases a wild, archaic instinct in Frasier.
Niles, in terror, flashes back to his babyhood and remembers the day when Frasier actually tried to kill him.
BEAT 14
FRASIER
(roaring as he throttles his brother)
You stole my mommy!!
Shocked by his murderous actions, Frasier jumps off the bed and rushes out the door.
ACTION: Frasier strangling his brother.
REACTION: Frasier fleeing the scene of the crime.
SUBTEXT: This hugely exaggerated beat explodes laughter because it draws energy from a primal impulse. The Cain and Abel story is a foundational archetype in Western culture. Sibling rivalry leads to violence more often than we like to believe. Ask any parent. In a drama, this last beat would be tragic. But comedy bundles catastrophe in laughter. “You stole my mommy!”, delivered with Kelsey Grammer’s frenzy, takes the beat delightfully over the top.
Subtextual Progression
This scene doesn’t arc so much as it drills down. Scan the following list of subtextual actions to sense the spiral.
BEAT 1: Urging Niles to accept failure/Blaming their failure on Frasier.
BEAT 2: Calling Niles an idiot/Calling Frasier a snob.
BEAT 3: Calling Niles a petulant child/Calling Frasier an upstaging ham.
BEAT 4: Calling Niles a masochist/Calling Frasier a sadist.
BEAT 5: Calling Niles a crybaby/Calling Frasier a show-off.
BEAT 6: Defending his face/Attacking Frasier’s face.
BEAT 7: Calling Niles ugly/Calling Frasier ugly.
BEAT 8: Making a fist/Making a fist.
BEAT 9: Deciding where to punch/Daring him to punch.
BEAT 10: Attacking Niles/Gathering his counterattack.
BEAT 11: Attacking Frasier/Deceiving Niles.
BEAT 12: Surrendering to Frasier/Attacking Niles.
BEAT 13: Going for the kill/Recoiling in terror.
BEAT 14: Strangling his brother/Fleeing the scene of the crime.
The brothers begin by attacking each other’s personalities, then descend into sneering at each other’s physical defects, followed by emotional assaults, bottoming out with near-lethal violence: fourteen beats of fraternal ferocity made hysterically funny.
COMEDY DIALOGUE TECHNIQUE
Laughter inspired by brutality is made possible by an eons-old convention. Since the dawn of storytelling, artists have maintained a bright line between drama and comedy by controlling the audience’s perception of pain: In true drama, everybody gets hurt; in true comedy, nobody gets hurt. Not really.
Comic characters may writhe, scream, bounce off walls, and tear their hair out, but they do it with a wild spirit that allows readers and audiences to sit back, laugh, and safely feel that it doesn’t really hurt. For without a clear comic style, readers and audiences would naturally feel sorry for suffering characters. To the comic writer, empathy spells death. Compassion kills laughs. Therefore, comic technique must keep the reader/audience cool, critical, unempathetic—on the safe side of pain.
Here’s a short list of four techniques designed to keep emotional distance and trigger laughs.
1) Clarity: Not only does empathy kill laughs, but so does ambiguity, perplexity, and all forms of confusion. To keep the laughs rolling, everything must be clear, starting in the subtext. If a character is up to no good, the audience or reader may not know exactly what that no good is, but it should be crystal that what he’s up to is no good.
Language, too. Piles of blurry, verbose dialogue suffocate laughter. If you wish to write comedy, go back and review the principles of style covered in Chapters Five, Six, and Seven. Their every point applies absolutely to comedy writing. Focus in particular on the fundamentals of economy and clarity. The best jokes always use the fewest and clearest possible words.
2) Exaggeration: Comic dialogue thrives in the gap between cause and effect. The two most common techniques of exaggeration either bloat a minor cause into a major overstatement—“You stole my mommy!”—or shrink a major cause into a minor understatement—“The Harry Potter Theme Park is a hit with both anglophiles and pedophiles.” Comic exaggerations come in a variety of modes: dialects, non sequiturs, malapropisms, impersonations, pretense, sarcasm—all the way down the line to babble and nonsense.
3) Timing: As I noted above, jokes pivot around a two-part design: setup and payoff, a.k.a. punch. The setup arouses aggressive, defensive, and/or sexual emotions in the reader/audience; the punch explodes that energy into laughter. The punch, therefore, must arrive at the exact moment the setup’s emotional charge peaks. Too soon and you get a weak laugh; too late and you get a groan. Moreover, nothing must follow the punch that would stifle the laughter.
These two examples from 30 ROCK:
“Avery is the most perfect woman ever created. Like a young Bo Derek stuffed with a Barry Goldwater.” Avery (Elizabeth Banks) and Bo Derek inspire sexual energy (setup); the antithesis of sex, Barry Goldwater, a right-wing politician from the sixties, explodes it (punch).
“If I give in, I’m no longer the alpha in my house. Before you know it, she’ll have me wearing jeans and reading fiction.” Here the energy of aggress
ive masculine dominance (setup) is undercut by a feminine act (from Jack’s POV), “reading fiction” (punch).
Note that both jokes use periodic sentences. Their punch words end the gag and nothing immediately follows, giving the audience room to laugh before the next beat takes their attention. As the old vaudeville saying goes: Don’t step on your own laughs.
In the FRASIER scene, notice that periodic sentences deliver all the punch words and phrases: “mister big shot radio host,” “chewed meat,” “the side of buses,” “fat face,” “spindly,” “pugilists,” and “my mommy.”
The only line that sets its punch word back from the last is Niles’s in Beat 6: “Oh, please, I keep wondering how long you’re going to store those nuts for winter.” The punch word is “nuts.” I suspect that the phrasing “Oh, please, winter’s coming and I keep wondering how long you’re going to store those nuts” would have gotten a bigger laugh, but I couldn’t be certain until I could see the actor deliver the line.
4) Incongruity: To build a joke, the relationship between setup and punch must strike a spark of incongruity; two things that don’t belong together suddenly collide. The underlying incongruity in the FRASIER scene pits civilized adults against their feral childhood selves. Psychiatrists who should be able to see their obsessions do not, and so cannot control them. In fact, they do the opposite; they let them loose. The steps they take to achieve their desires become the very things they must do to make sure they never achieve them. As a result, they act out the very book they cannot write.