by Greg DePaul
Bring the Funny
The Essential Companion for the Comedy Screenwriter
Finally … a funny book about comedy screenwriting from a successful screenwriter that uses recent—as in twenty-first century—movies you've actually seen as examples!
Greg DePaul (Screenwriter, Bride Wars, Saving Silverman) has sold comedy screenplays to Miramax, Fox, Disney, New Line, Sony, MGM, and Village Roadshow. He's worked with stars like Jack Black, Kate Hudson, Jason Biggs, and Amanda Peet.
Now Greg takes everything he knows about writing funny and breaking into the biz, tosses it into a blender, and serves up this tasty, fat-free smoothie of a book that’s easy to read, brutally honest, and straight from the heart … of Hollywood.
If you're looking to write comedy screenplays, buy this book now. But if you're ready to pack up your car, drive to Los Angeles, and live your dream of becoming a comedy screenwriter, steal this book, jam it into your pocket, and hit the gas.
High Praise for Bring the Funny
Bring the Funny is a manual on writing comedy screenplays that is for all levels: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. It can be highlighted, bookmarked, and kept right by the computer throughout a career. With directness and wit, DePaul covers a wide range: the exploration of genres, finding your own style, creating characters and premises—all framed by a pragmatic road map for the film industry. It’s filled with brass-tacks pointers for making your comedy work on the page—for readers, buyers, and performers.
Jim Uhls, Screenwriter, Fight Club, Jumper
Comedy demands high stakes, and telling the truth within those stakes requires very careful construction. Bring the Funny is a crucial reminder of all the factors that determine whether or not a great idea becomes a successful piece of comedy. Greg's points on character, premise, style and genre illustrate why this handbook is the essential guide for the comedy screenwriter. Greg DePaul writes Funny.
Kevin Kane, Emmy-winning Producer, Inside Amy Schumer,
Consulting Producer, MTV Movie Awards,
Special Consultant for Judd Apatow, Trainwreck
If you want to get into screenwriting—buy this book. Bring the Funny is no-nonsense, insightful, and really good. Our only hesitation in recommending it would be that, if you actually follow DePaul's advice, there will be more competition for us.
Lisa Addario and Joe Syracuse, Screenwriters, Parental Guidance,
Surf’s Up
DePaul’s credentials are impeccable as both a successful comedy screenwriter and an instructor of comedy writing. Bring the Funny covers all the bases in a way that’s fun to read. It also contains lots of practical, hard-won advice for the aspiring writer. I can’t wait to use Bring the Funny in my comedy writing classes.
George Rodman, Professor, Brooklyn College
Bring the Funny is a primer on twenty-first century film comedy. Using only movies made after 2000 as examples, Greg explains the craft and business of comedy screenwriting in a way writers can grab and immediately use. He also gives you a whole new vocabulary for writing and working with producers—tools you need to succeed in this crazy industry. Buy it, read it, and keep it close by when you screenwrite. You’ll need it.
Hank Nelken, Screenwriter, Are We Done Yet?
Greg DePaul totally brings the Funny!
Alan Riche, Producer, Southpaw, Starsky and Hutch, Tarzan
Bring the Funny
The Essential Companion for the Comedy Screenwriter
Greg DePaul
First published 2017
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Greg DePaul
The right of Greg DePaul to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
CIP data has been applied for
ISBN: 978-1-138-92926-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-92925-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-68132-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Times & Courier
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Acknowledgments
Act 1: You vs. Yourself
1 The Funny
What Is the Funny? (An age-old question. Try my age-old answer.)
Do I Have the Funny? (I hope so.)
No, You Can’t Order It Online (It’s like the Force. Look within.)
Pop Quiz!
2 Everything Matters
Prepare Yourself (Sit down at your computer, roll up your sleeves, and get ready not to write.)
Follow Your Heroes (The all-stars of comedy screenwriting)
Mind Your Mentors (Well, me, for one)
Live the Page (How to walk, talk, and blow your nose like a comedy screenwriter.)
Pop Quiz!
3 Get On Your Horse
What Is a Screenplay? (You think you know.)
A.I.C. (Pardon my French!)
Writing Hat
Editing Hat
Ass Hat (Again, my French!)
The Long Haul of the Feature Screenwriter (Pack a lunch.)
Season to Taste
Pop Quiz!
Act 2: You vs. The Page
4 Funny Peeps
What Is Character? (The undefinable element you must define)
The Inside-Out Method (Starting with character)
The Outside-In Method (Ending with character)
Relatability (“Hey, that idiot onscreen is me!”)
Your Character Stable (Where live the confidante, the antagonist, the mentor …)
Pop Quiz!
5 The Big Idea
Act Two Is All (Everything else is small.)
High Concept (This stuff comes from God. Or cocaine. Or both.)
Low Concept (AKA “execution dependent”)
Comic Justice (Healing the world one script at a time)
Genre-Bending (Where X meets Y)
Fish Outta Water (and f lopping on the deck)
The Idea Factory (Build it and they will come.)
The Two-Hander
The Ensemble
Pop Quiz!
6 The String of Pearls
The Basic Drama Rules (Ignore them at your peril.)
The Conceit (You get one big gulp at the beginning.)
Comedic Escalation (A BDR that’s so important it needs its own section)
Farce (It’s everywhere. Just gotta see it.)
Plotting
Late Point of Attack
The Juggling Act
Gapping (What not to write)
Really Important Comedy Screenwriting Rule #99
Really Important Comedy Screenwriting Rule #100
Pop Quiz!
7 The Pearls Themselves
What’s in a Scene? (Again, you think you know.)
Master Scenes (“Supper’s ready!”)
Dialogue
The Standard
The Four Most Important Scenes
Subtext (Much discussed, much misunderstood)
Set Pieces (Lea
ve them in flames.)
Pop Quiz!
Act 3: You vs. The World
8 The Biz
The Comedy-Industrial Complex (What’s being made now)
Pitching (Who needs it, who doesn’t, how to do it, why not to)
Agents (In Latin they are known as Tenpercenticus Exploiticus.)
Managers (Agents who want to be producers)
Producers (What do they actually do?)
Everybody Else (There is anybody else?)
Pop Quiz!
9 The Life
Sacrifice (You wanna be famous? Get out a knife and lay your son on a rock.)
Collaboration (And you became a writer to get away from people!)
Other Screenwriters (Yes, they exist.)
DePaul’s Ethical Code of Conduct for Comedy Screenwriters
Pop Quiz!
10 The List (of Successful Live Action Comedy Movies: 2000–2016)
11 Movie Diagrams
About Greg DePaul
Index
Acknowledgments
A whole lotta folks deserve to be thanked:
First, my wife, Dvora, supported the writing of this book, though most of it happened at the expense of our time together; after all, I could have spent those hundreds of hours rubbing her back or cuddling in front of an old movie. My loss. But thanks, sweety.
The same could be said for Sophie and Max, whom I could always happily be coaching, hugging, and watching grow. Thanks, guys. You’re the best.
A handful of people have influenced my screenwriting. Hank Nelken was a great partner and remains the industry’s most under-utilized talent. Jim Uhls was the first great writer to help me. Dennis Palumbo listens. Sure, he gets paid, but … still, he listens.
You can always learn something from actors. I thank the gifted performers at The Collective in New York, as well as the Clark Street Players and the Writers and Actors Lab in Los Angeles.
Will Akers advised me about writing a book. That’s a pretty nice thing to do. Again, great thanks to Dvora, who read and re-read. Amy DePaul helped as well. Thanks also to my good friends in the Stillwater Writers Group: Dave Hanson, Craig Nobbs, Sharon Cooper, Craig McNulty, and William Fowkes. Thanks to Johnny Coppola for help with pictures.
And thanks to my students at The New School and New York University. Without you, I’d just be standing in a room, talking to myself.
Act 1
You vs. Yourself
1
The Funny
What Is the Funny?
Honestly, I have no idea.
I can only tell you that I have the Funny and I know plenty of other screenwriters who have it, too. I also know screenwriters who do not have it.
I once dated a successful TV drama writer. She took everything she did very, very seriously and couldn’t crack a joke to save her life. Years later, I met a woman who was born with a considerable funny bone, my wife. We have two kids. Sometimes I think back on what I could have gotten out of marrying that first woman, the woefully unfunny one. As we were in California, I could have ended up with half of her bank account in a massive divorce settlement. But, alas, I wanted the funny girl. And funny kids.
And thank God for it. Because I love them funny kids. And the wife.
In any event, the Funny is hard to define. But I certainly know when I see it … in movies.
In The Hangover, it’s the fun-loving desire to see everything get more crazy, more out of control, more dangerous.
In The Lego Movie, it’s the urge to tell an epic story in a tongue-in-cheek manner, making fun of the yarn as it is being spun.
In Anchorman, it’s the silly thrill of seeing a big, goofy curmudgeon bungle and misstep through every situation he finds himself in.
I don’t know how I got the funny. My parents weren’t funny. My mother was a housewife, and my father was an attorney who specialized in defending murderers. That’s not funny, right? Well, it was to me. There was something about a guy making a living from death that always struck me as funny.
But enough about me.
Now I want you to ask yourself …
Do I Have the Funny?
I sure hope so.
If you love to joke around with your friends and live for those moments when you can crack wise, you probably do. If you were the class clown, almost certainly. If you’re normally shy, but secretly giggle to yourself when you see an old lady slowly pushing her walker up a steep hill toward a banana peel, most definitely. Note: if you put the banana peel in her path, then you are both funny and sick, for which you should seek help.
Of course, not everyone who has the funny shows it. I’ve known comedy writers who rarely utter a funny word and then sit down and write themselves a cracklingly raucous screenplay. Perhaps that’s you.
If you want to find out how funny you are, spend no time doubting yourself. Think instead of that quote from the Bible—which, to some, is a very funny book, indeed. The quote goes something like this: “Act as if ye have the Funny, and the Funny will follow.”
OK, that’s not exactly, word-for-word, from the Bible, but you get the idea. The point is—if you have the funny and you want to apply it to screenwriting, you’re holding the right book. Stick it in your back pocket and it’ll be like you’ve got a little me hanging onto your butt wherever you go. OK, that came out wrong. Let’s start over …
Years ago, when I was breaking into screenwriting, I had a difficult struggle on my hands. I had moved to Los Angeles, had no friends, and was working a dreary day job to pay the rent. At night, after work, I fought to keep myself glued to the chair so I could write my way into Hollywood. Sometimes I fell asleep at the computer and woke up the next morning with the imprint of a space bar on my forehead.
When I called my dad back East and told him how hard I was working and how exhausted I was, he mailed me a note that read, “Hang in there. Sleep less, work more.”
Dad was practical.
So I quit my day job, sold my car for rent money, and did nothing but write for months. Thus began my full-time pursuit of the funny.
Eventually I started writing with a partner, Hank Nelken, who also quit his day job in search of the funny. Together, we pushed ourselves to sleep less and work more. Within a year we sold our first script. Within three years, Sony Pictures was shooting our movie.
So if you’re still unsure if you have the funny, the best advice I can give is to act as if ye have faith and find out.
No, You Can’t Order It Online
Would you believe there is screenwriting software that purports to make you funny? Would you believe there are writers who would buy it? That’s funny.
When I first decided to screenwrite, I bought all the reigning books on the subject by all the well-known gurus. I urge you to do the same. In fact, read every book about screenwriting—twice. After all, if you really want to write screenplays that sell and get made, you should be reading everything you can possibly find on the subject you’re about to spend years of your life pursuing.
However, most of those books suffer from one or more of these faults:
1) The authors have little or no track record as screenwriters.
2) Their books don’t deal with writing funny.
3) They often use old movies as examples—movies you probably haven’t seen unless you’re, well, old.
To my knowledge, this is the first and only book by a produced screenwriter about comedy screenwriting that only discusses recent movies. And by “recent,” I mean movies made in the twenty-first century—the one we’re living in. The oldest movie I reference here is a classic called Saving Silverman (2001). The latest is Trainwreck (2015).
Now that I’ve implied Bring the Funny is the greatest thing about this new century (other than, say, smart phones or pizza delivery by drone), I want to take a quick step back and make sure you’ve read Screenplay, by Syd Field. It explains the three-act structure, which applies to almost all movies, and is referenced in this boo
k. Read it along with Robert McKee’s Story and Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!, both of which should remain on your bookshelf throughout your screenwriting career.
Remember: there is no fast and easy way to bring the funny. It requires heaping amounts of talent and hard work. From this point on, I’m going to assume you have the funny and show you strategies and habits for writing comedy screenplays that will shorten your learning curve and maximize what God (or nature or whatever) gave you.
This book isn’t a step-by-step guide or a paint-by-numbers workbook. It’s a companion—organized by subject matter and meant to be kept by your writing table for repeated use. Read the chapters in reverse order if you like. But read them.
And just to keep you on your toes, I want you to take this …
Pop Quiz!
1. The Funny is: A) Hard to define.
B) Easy to see in movies like The Hangover, The Lego Movie, and Anchorman.
C) What that TV drama writer in Greg’s story did not have.
D) All of the above.
2. If you wanna find out if you have the Funny, you should: A) See a doctor immediately.
B) Ask Greg’s dad. He seems to know stuff.
C) Toss a banana peel in front of an old lady. Laughing yet, sicko?
D) Act as if ye have the funny.
3. When it comes to books about screenwriting, you should read: A) Books by Robert McKee, Syd Field, and Blake Snyder.
B) Books by Greg DePaul.
C) All of the above, over and over, until you can recite them out loud by memory. Personally, I like to do mine with a Scottish accent, but it’s up to you.
D) The Torah. Hey, can’t hurt.
2
Everything Matters
When I first arrived in Hollywood, I had no friends and no connections. But before I could start making friends and connections, I needed to pay the rent. So I went to a temp agency.