Ideas for Comedy Writers

by Dave Haslett

  148. Toilet humour.

  Unseemly as it might be, toilet humour is often very funny. You can’t help feeling sorry for this character. He has a severe digestive problem and can’t go very far from his bathroom. He’s almost housebound, but that doesn’t stop him from leading a full life – once he’s made a few adaptations. He works and shops from home, or more specifically, from his bathroom, because that’s where his computer is. He has replaced the driver’s seat in his car with a chemical toilet, so he can go out if he really needs to. Though he can’t get out of his car unless there are ‘facilities’ nearby. And you wouldn’t want him to give you a lift anywhere, or be a hitch-hiker. What other changes might he make to his lifestyle? What do other people think of these, and of him? What can he not do? What caused his digestive problem? Perhaps his doctors are baffled. The cause, once they discover it, might turn out to be comical and easy to cure. He might even have caused it himself.

  149. Tragedy 1.

  Tragedy plays a big part in comedy. Many comedians have tragic pasts or private lives, and many of them end their lives early. Some of them use comedy as a way of relieving their tension, or sharing their anguish with their readers or audience. A good example is the writer and comedian Ben Elton, who turned his failure to conceive a child into comedy: his novel Inconceivable, which then became the movie Maybe Baby. Other comedians have simply stood on a stage and listed the tragic things that have happened to them. As they list more and more things it turns from bad luck to pathos to farce, and the audience starts laughing. By the end they are almost in hysterics. Yet all the comedian did was tell the truth about his sad life.

  150. Tragedy 2.

  Many comedies make fun of tragic situations. So see if you can find the funny side whenever something bad happens. Look back through old tragedies and see if you can find something funny to say about them. If you can’t think of anything, try changing the characters involved, making them absurdly unsuitable for the role. Or change the situation, so it’s inspired by the original tragedy but not actually based on it. As we saw above, a tragic situation can also become funny simply by piling on more and more tragedy. Once you pass the point where it would be sensible to stop, it starts to become absurd. And even when you think you’ve gone as far as you possibly can, add one more tragedy at the end. The worse things get the more your audience will laugh – even though nothing funny is happening.

  151. TV sketches.

  Many comedy writers get started in the business by writing sketches for TV shows – and some of them make a very good living from it. So here’s a tactic that should improve your chances of your sketches being accepted: write a set of sketches that all use the same location or set. These can all be filmed together, at the same time, so the cost of making each sketch will be significantly lower than making individual sketches. They can of course be shown over several episodes of the show, or spread across an entire series.

  You could also use the same characters in every sketch – or at least the same actors. That means they don’t have to change their costumes, or can just make minor changes, between sketches. Make sure the characters can be played by the show’s actors, so they don’t have to bring in more than one or two additional performers. And try to ensure that the characters match the actors as closely as possible. You could also suggest which actor should play each role.

  Anything else you can do to save the producers time and money will be looked upon favourably – although, as always, the idea and the writing have to be excellent too. If a sketch will be cheap and easy to produce and the producer and script editor really like it, they’ll be more inclined to work with you to improve it, even if it’s not quite there yet.

  So the lesson here is to avoid elaborate settings, exotic locations and one-off sketches until you’re an established sketch writer.

  152. Underdogs.

  The plight of the underdog works well in comedy. We may feel (a little bit) sorry for these pathetic types, but they’ve been the source of considerable amusement for hundreds, if not thousands of years – probably ever since the first caveman fell off a log or lost his loincloth while hunting. Consider these characters, and how you might be able to use them in your own stories:

  The downtrodden no-hoper

  The authority figure who lives in fear of his wife, cleaner or housekeeper

  The misfit who tries hard to fit in, but always gets a few details wrong or misses the point

  The people who have no skills whatsoever and fail miserably at everything

  Can you think of any more?

  153. Unsuitable for the job 1.

  A good comedy situation is to place someone in a role that he’s completely unsuitable for, and make him ill-equipped and unprepared. Imagine, for example, that a faithful gardener is left a huge mansion and pots of cash when the owner dies. How will he cope? How will he carry out the duties expected of him? Will it change him in any way? Will he get someone else to do the gardening, or carry on doing it himself? Will he try to change the way things are done? Will he succeed? Or will he rent out the mansion to someone more suited to that way of living, and go and live in the potting shed where he feels more comfortable?

  And what will he do with all that money? Save it? Spend it on drink, drugs, women and gambling? Give it away? Invest in crazy schemes in an attempt to get rid of it? Perhaps those seemingly daft schemes of his are actually hugely successful and make him even more money. Does that make him happy or sad?

  154. Unsuitable for the job 2.

  Imagine that someone has been given a job for which he’s entirely unsuitable – it happens all the time in most workplaces. Let’s say that the fire drill procedure needs to be updated and the person who used to do that job has left the company. So the job is given to the only person who isn’t busy with important work. Obviously there’s a reason why that person isn’t busy – and that reason becomes all too clear when the revised evacuation procedures are published. Oh dear! And lets take things a stage further and have an actual evacuation, even if it’s only a drill. Let’s see just how good the new procedures really are. (Or aren’t, as soon becomes apparent.)

  What other jobs could this character do? Why not invent a whole company? Who would be the least suitable person to do each of the jobs? Put these people in those very roles and let’s see what havoc they cause. How on earth did they get given those particular jobs? How did they ever get anyone to employ them in the first place? What will their customers and competitors think? How long will the company survive?

  155. Unsuitable for the job 3.

  Take a well known story or situation and swap the main character for one who is completely unsuitable for the role.

  Perhaps a weather man has to fill in when the sports reporter goes sick, but he knows nothing about sport, can’t answer any of the questions he’s asked, has no idea what to say to a guest who’s come in to be interviewed, and can’t pronounce any of the names that come up on the auto-cue.

  Or what if the ‘lady with the lamp’ wasn’t Florence Nightingale, but Florence Hitler – sister or aunt of the infamous Adolf. She’ll take good care of you – unless you’re Jewish. Then you’d better watch out. (You’ll have to work hard to keep this funny, as it could have sinister overtones for some people.)

  Or you could borrow the Old Job-New Job idea from the improvisation show Whose Line Is It Anyway? For example, a character is now a chef, but he used to be a submarine commander. He continues to think and act in the same way, and treats people and equipment just as he did in his old job, even though it’s no longer relevant. So he might give orders for the oven to be set to a depth of 200 feet (or fathoms) rather than 200 degrees. And when he lowers the food mixer into the bowl he might yell ‘Down periscope!’, and so on.

  156. Using your joke-telling friends.

  Do you know someone who’s really good at telling jokes? I’m sure most people know at least one person, if not several. So take them out for a drink and find out where they get
all their jokes from. If they make them up themselves, get them to tell you as many as they can. Write them all down and agree to split any money you make. If they get them from somewhere else, try to find out where – or who – they get them from. If it’s a person they get them from, does that person come up with them himself or get them from someone else? See if you can find the source, and become very good friends with that person.

  Also, since your friend is so good at telling jokes, would he be interested in performing them on stage? Perhaps a mixture of your jokes and some of his own?

  157. Visual comedy.

  When you think of visual comedy you probably think of comedy that happens on the stage or screen – the sort of comedy that’s very easy to translate for an international audience, since there’s little or no dialogue. But the visual part could be happening inside your readers’ heads if you write it well enough. Just because you’re writing a short story or a novel doesn’t mean you have to leave out the fun visual stuff. Think of things like bar fights, custard pie fights, food fights, two people trying to get a piano upstairs, someone carrying a long plank or ladder on his shoulder who turns around to speak to someone and smacks him with it, or two people carrying a huge sheet of glass across a busy road. The list goes on – and so do the comic opportunities.

  See if you can come up with some ideas of your own. Visualise them inside your head, as if they were actually happening, or as if you were watching them on the stage or screen. Then write down exactly what you see. You don’t have to tell jokes to be funny. Just show your readers what the characters are doing.

  158. We are now at war.

  For a satirical story about rivalry between different factions, try turning it into a war story between two (or more) countries. Each side will have its commanders and generals, an army of supporters, the party faithful, warriors and foot soldiers, and so on. Each country will be run along the same lines as the business, political party or other faction that it represents. When they declare war on each other, they’ll trample over neutral countries to get at each other, spread propaganda, slaughter or injure innocent people, destroy property, recruit allies, develop new weapons, and all sort of other things. You might also have people switching sides, fighting dirty, secret tactics, undercover operations, espionage, smear campaigns, and much more.

  You can use this method of storytelling to cover any situation where strong rivals oppose each other: cola wars, burger wars, newspaper wars, business rivals, politics, religions, and any other kind of argument or disagreement.

  How about a farmer who’s at war with the people who insist they have the right to cross his land? Then there’s the owner of a corner shop who’s at war with the supermarket that’s taking all his business. And neighbours who are at war with each other for any number of reasons: border disputes, dog fouling, loud music, relationships between their children, and so on.

  159. What were they thinking?

  Here’s something that might work well in a comedy routine. Start by talking about someone who’s in the news for a bad reason – such as a celebrity or politician who’s been misbehaving. Then give an unexpected or comical explanation of what the person should really have done. You’re leading the audience – or your readers – into believing that you’re going to criticise the person for whatever it was that got him into trouble when you’re actually criticising what he did as a result.

  [EXAMPLE] Someone has been caught having an affair and has sold his story to a particular newspaper. ‘What was he thinking?’ you begin. The audience thinks you’re going to criticise him for having the affair. But you continue: ‘“The Scoop” would have paid twice as much as he got from “The Daily Rag”’. This will earn you an easy laugh.

  160. While I’m here …

  The ‘while I’m here …’ scenario is a terrific way of introducing comedy into just about any story or situation. Let’s say that our hero is a detective and has gone to investigate a bungee jumping event. He’s always wanted to have a go at bungee jumping himself, so he says: ‘While I’m here … is it all right if I have a go?’ The organiser naturally agrees. But our detective will probably end up hurt or in hospital – after all, why was he investigating this person or company in the first place? They probably aren’t up to any good.

  So what has your hero always wanted to do? Have him come across the perfect opportunity to do it, while he’s supposed to be doing something else, and see how much trouble he can get himself into. It might seem like such a harmless thing: taking the baton to conduct an orchestra, taking the microphone to sing at a karaoke party, or simply pouring a pint of beer. But something will go wrong. Badly wrong.

  161. Why isn’t it funny?

  If someone is performing comedy and it isn’t working too well, or if you’re watching a movie or a comedy show or reading a story that’s meant to be funny but it isn’t, see if you can work out what’s wrong with it. How could you retell it or perform it differently so that it works? If you get stuck, try discussing it with friends – they’re bound to have a few ideas, and after a few drinks they’ll be more than willing to share them.

  162. Word play.

  You can have great fun, and create some terrific comedy ideas, by playing around with words. Think of Hilda Ogden’s muriel (mural) in Coronation Street (the British soap opera). See what other everyday words you can come up with that sound like someone’s name, and have one of your characters adopt one of them as a vocal habit.

  Some people have trouble with certain words: ‘specific’ and ‘Pacific’ are known to cause problems. There are dictionaries of troublesome and easily-confused words, which should help you come up with some good ideas. Or you could combine someone’s name with a brand name: his real name is Andrew but everyone calls him Andrex (a brand of bathroom tissue). And that leads us to toilet humour, which always goes down well with the Friday night pub crowd.

  You could also create a comical new invention by combining an object with a brand name: you’ve heard of a hovercraft and you’ve heard of Hoover vacuum cleaners, so how about a Hoovercraft? That might be some sort of water craft that collects samples of sediment from the bottom of the ocean.

  163. Writing for other performers 1.

  A great way of getting started as a comedy writer is to write material for other people to perform – particularly stand-up comics and TV sketch shows. In either case you’ll need to start by checking whether the performers write their own material, have an in-house writer or writing team, or whether they involve other writers (such as yourself). In the case of TV shows you can tell simply by looking at the credits at the end of the show. For stand-up comics who aren’t on TV – well, just try sending them some good material anyway.

  Once you’ve confirmed that the performers or shows you’re targeting accept material from other writers, the next step is to watch a performance (ideally several performances) over and over again until you can mimic that style of writing. Then, when you have a few jokes, routines and sketches ready, and you’re sure they’re really funny, send them in and wait for a response. In the meantime, start writing some more. If your chosen performer or show rejects your first batch of material but realises you’re persistent (and consistently funny) then you might eventually get taken on. At the very least they might use one or two of your jokes or sketches. You then have writing credits to add to your CV, and you can use these when approaching other shows and performers.

  164. Writing for other performers 2 – know your performer.

  If you’re writing comedy material for someone else to perform, it’s a good idea to get to know that person, at least a little. He’ll have his own opinions on subjects such as race, religion, politics and everything else, which you might be able to use – or decide to avoid at all costs. Many comics base their routines on events in their own lives, so get your comic to give you a potted history and details of any major (and minor) events in his life.

  See if you can arrange to interview him. It’s a good i
dea to prepare a list of questions in advance, or at least write down the topics you want to cover. And make sure you record the interview so you can refer back to it later. Allow at least an hour for the first interview, but to really get to know someone takes a lot longer than that.

  As well as getting to know him better for your comedy writing, you might also be able to sell the interview to a magazine.

  165. Writing for other performers 3 – try sending something different.

  When considering writing for a well known performer, most writers will send him the same sort of material as he already performs. And that might be exactly what he wants. But on the other hand, he might only be performing that sort of stuff because it’s all he ever gets. He might be best known for performing sketches, for example. Maybe he’d love to include a few clever one-liners in his show too, from time to time, but no one ever sends him any.

  It’s worth preparing a few examples of different material – tailored to his style. Make sure it’s your best work, and send it in with a covering note asking if he’d be interested in using other material to extend his repertoire. If he says no, you still have the option of sending in the usual sort of material he performs.