Writing Comedy

     It would be impossible in something as short as a blog entry to cover all the different facets of comedy writing, but in this post I'm going to cover a few of the things I've learned over the years spending time with some very funny and creative people.

      First up, is the Iron Law of Comedy (according to the enigmatic mr wu), which is the punchline must meet or exceed the setup, which is to say the laughs your audience get from a bit, must be worth the time they spent waiting for you to get to the funny part. The longer and more involved the setup, the funnier the payoff has to be. This is why kids are terrible at telling jokes. They never get the setup right. They forget parts, mix things up, double back to fix the mistakes and by the time they get to the punchline 3 minutes later, the only funny thing is how cute a kid trying to tell a joke is.

      Maybe you just aren't a naturally funny person, and comedy doesn't come easily to you. Don't despair, here is a quick and easy way to make something funny. Find two incompatible concepts and reconcile them.  Betty White and Cage Fighting, James Bond in a seminar about how to meet women, Boy Band Commando Squads. The funny almost writes itself.

The third thing is timing. There are all sorts of comedy timings some of which I've talked about before. The two I want to talk about to today are timings where the comedy emphasizes the setup in a funny way...

and the reversal, where the comedy comes from something that immediately cancels out something that was just said before it in a funny way.

Both rely on getting just the right timing on switching the emotional tone from serious to ridiculous. These can be good for taking what could be a one note character and giving him some color. The inversion of this can be used to shock the audience when a seemingly easy going or funny guy does something horrible as we often see in Tarentino movies, but that's a topic for another day.

That's about it on writing comedy for now, I'm sure I'll get back to it at some point, Go forth and Be Funny.

The Sloth Punch

    Last time I talked in general about filling your writers playbook with the basic tool set of your genre.  Mastering that skill set in itself will allow you to become a very solid writer, but there is always room for new ideas. Today I'm going to cover a "play" that you may have seen in a movie or television show. I'm certain it has a proper literary name, but I like to think of it as "The Sloth Punch" .  Years ago, there was a kids superhero cartoon. In one episode, a villain invaded their headquarters and proceeded to beat them handily.  The fight raged back and forth in front of this statue of a sloth in a superhero costume in an action pose.  As the last hero was beaten, the villain turned around and BAM! dropped to the floor unconscious. "Great job Captain Sloth!" said the heroes, for the statue was not a statue. It was a very, very, slow Superhero. "I may be slow" said Captain Sloth, "but I sure do pack a wallop."

    In the context of writing, a "Sloth Punch" is a plot device that starts early, but doesn't take effect until much later in the story. It rewards your audience for paying attention.  The alert reader or watcher gets this fun little moment where they know what's about to happen before anyone else.  Here's an example from a standard issue romantic comedy.

In the first scene we see a well dressed, handsome if arrogant looking businessman named Alan (the heroes romantic rival) getting out of a cab in front of a restaurant. He doesn't tip the driver.
Alan:  "Thanks a lot, asshole,I'm running  late now.  Look Abu, Achmed, whatever the hell your name is "
  Driver: "It's Ibrah-"

Alan: "Whatever, you all look alike to me. If your gonna drive a cab in this country, learn to  fucking drive ok? If I miss my reservation I'm going to call your boss and have him fire your sorry ass.  god! Why do we even let you people into the country"....and so on."

Then he goes into the restaurant, and he's all charming and the love interest thinks he's a great guy. He's not a great guy. Her dad owns his company and she's his ticket to the top Fast forward 90 minutes into the movie. The Heroine is going to get on a plane to Europe to take over the companies Paris branch. The hero and the rival are racing to get there before she takes off and make the big romantic I love you speech.

Alan runs out of his building and hails a cab. "To the airport, and step on it."
And the Sloth Punch lands. Of all the cabs in Los Angeles he had to get into this one right?
 Spoiler Alert: Alan doesn't make it to the airport.

A few minutes later, the post credits clip finds Alan on the side of the road in the middle of  the desert. (This Romantic comedy is set in LA) "Hellooo....Anybody...."

Here's another example from the movie Training Day with Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke: This seemingly random event...

Seems like a filler  "Stuff that happens to cops" scene that gives Denzel a chance to throw some hard core tough guy dialogue around. It isn't until much later that this random event becomes absolutely pivotal

Bam! Sloth Punch.

Building the Playbook

          If you have a favorite writer, who's fairly prolific, and you've read or watched pretty much everything they've ever put out, you have probably noticed patterns emerge within their writing.  There will be scenes or bits of dialogue that get recycled into different stories.  I think that this is not so much a lack of fresh inspiration, but a function of a writer knowing what works for him and using that whenever possible. Different in the details each time of course, but with the same overall structure.  To me it seems comparable to the way a quarterback may build a repertoire of passing plays and running plays and offensive formations that he does well and can use as needed to put together an effective drive down the football field. A good writer has his own playbook of comedy bits and dramatic exchanges and various blocks of writing that he can do well and use at will to make a good story.

          Today I'm going to talk in general about things that should be in every bodies playbook. Later I'll get into specific plays with some examples drawn from books and video. For writers who aspire to write romance there are standard beats you have to master. The cute meet for instance,  arguments both mild and vicious, sincere confessions of love, breakups both amiable and ugly, awkward meetings after breakups, reconciliations. to name just a few. Watch enough romantic comedies and you'll pick all of these out readily enough. You should be able to write conversations with friends outside of the relationship. Friendly ribbing and one-up-man-ship , and support between guy friends, Good Will Hunting had some great examples of that.  The female equivalent of that with optional sassy gay friend. Mystery writers have to master the big reveal, that ones pretty much non-negotiable. Action writers should know how to write fight sequences both personal, and expansive, but also know when to skip to the aftermath like in the Hobbit  or HBO's production of Game of Thrones, when the story demands it.  A writer specializing in thrillers will probably want to master sequences of extreme tension like the secretary that the FBI is making plant he bug in the office of the sinister banker moving terrorist money and he catches her, then she tries to explain herself, and you don't know if he believes her, or if he's just toying with her, then she almost makes it to the door, and he stops her, and she can almost feel the bullets in her back, and he tells her not to forget her purse.

           I asked a friend of mine with nearly 70  good sized stories under her belt, what the most important thing for a writer to master would be, and she told me ending it right was hardest part of a story. That making sure that all the plot threads were tied together smoothly and that it built on everything that came before it,  and closed the story on the right note was the trickiest part for her.  That's something to keep in mind from the very beginning. Keeping a tight control of your pacing and character development  will put you in a better position to get your story across the finish line in good shape. The less you have to fix at the last minute, the better. So learning how to end your story in a way that makes your reader feel their time reading it was well spent is a critical skill set.

     So that's the basics. Learn to use the tools of the kind of story you want to tell. Learn to use them well. Practice writing those kinds of scenes even if you don't end up using them in stories.  Then start expanding on that knowledge.  Build your playbook until you're ready for anything.

Never put your Columbian Drug Lord next to your Gay Hairdresser

 

                I honestly don’t know whether this is a legitimate principle of solid writing, or more of a pet peeve of mine, that doesn’t bother anyone else, but I’m going to run with it anyways.  In the movie “Blow”, which was about the drug business throughout the 70’s and 80’s, you had the Colombian Cocaine Cartels, the American consumers of cocaine, particularly the Hollywood in crowd, and between them, the protagonist, George Jung, a smuggler with the right connections to move that much product. George’s primary pipeline into the Los Angeles market was a gay Hairdresser played by Paul Reuben.  Hollywood types knew him as the go to guy for “party supplies.” Through him George moved millions of dollars’ worth of cocaine.

When are we going to meet this friend of yours George? We’d love to talk to this friend of yours George, find out how he moves so much  product.  Say George, why don’t you and your friend fly down to Cartagena for the weekend? 

          Predictably enough, once they had the source, they didn’t need George anymore and they cut him out of the business.  His life went pretty quickly downhill from there.  This led me to an epiphany which became one of the defining rules of how I do business, which is “Never willingly expose the source of your power.” It’s the first step in losing that advantage to your own detriment.  A real life example was when the British sold a Jet engine to the Russians after WW II,  who until then only had propeller driven planes. The Russians reverse engineered it, and a few years later we were fighting Migs over Korea. 

                In terms of writing, this comes into play when a writer has his hero for some reason explain or reveal his secret weapon/spell/alliance in a way that gives his enemies the time, opportunity and information he needs to negate the advantage.  It’s the hero equivalent of monologuing.  “

“Your reign of terror is at an end Lord Savage, for I have discovered the fabled resting place of the Spear of Triumph.!"

“How interesting. Minions, go recover the fabled spear of triumph before this fool.”

“Doh!”

             It drives me crazy to see this in a story, when a supposedly clever hero shows his hand and gives up an advantage he didn’t have too. For some reason, he explains or demonstrates or shows off the thing that gave him the edge he needed to win, and therein loses its effectiveness.  If you ever wondered how little it takes for a clever and determined foe to beat a weapon you thought to be invincible you should watch a documentary sometime about the British efforts to break the enigma machine. How the tiniest openings imaginable gave them the toehold needed to claw open an unbeatable code.

               I like a story better where both sides have to fight for their information.  A cat and mouse game where maybe someone your hero trusted is dating an enemy spy and lets something slip, but one of your code breakers intercepted a transmission so you know that they know, but they don’t know that you know that they know.   Then you get great stories like “The Departed” where both sides race against time to uncover the others secrets before it’s too late. That’s much more exciting for me. Just have your heroes be smarter. More practical. As if real lives hung in the balance before they give up a tactical advantage.

Steal the Caffeine, Leave the Coffee

        In my last post, I talked about plagiarism and the idea of incorporating the things that inspire you into your work without stealing them from the original creator, and making something new that you can rightfully be proud of yourself. In looking for a good metaphor to describe this process, the thing that came to mind was taking the caffiene out of a cup of coffee, while leaving the coffee in the cup. Take the substance and leave the style. Try to figure out what was at work in a scene that made you love it and figure out how to apply that knowledge to your writing.

       Lets look at one of the definitive portrayals of envy in film. Then we'll break it down and see what we can use.  The film is Amadeus and the character we're looking at is Salieri, an accomplished composer in his own right who had the misfortune of living in Austria in the time of Mozart.

          There's an incredibly complex mixture of emotions here. There's genuine awe and admiration for Mozart's work. It is both agony and ecstasy for him.  To experience something so exquisite that surely it must be the hand of God on earth and to know that he can't do it. He's just talented enough to recognize true talent when he sees it.  I look at Salieri and I'm reminded of what we hear about the stages of grief.  Throughout the movie we see them all Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, even Acceptance to a degree. Everything that he ever created just became worthless in his eyes, all the accolades turned to ash in his mouth, the praise of his peers a cruel joke.  Nothing he ever does will be as good as what he just saw and he knows it.  His whole life to this point wasted. It's tearing him apart, because he loves music. He worked all his life to master its discipline and this little shit just had it given to him.  It's like seeing the girl you love, the sweet, beautiful, amazing future mother of your children marry a complete douchebag instead of you. And he ask himself. Why not me? Why, if you were giving out amazing inspiration and natural ability couldn't you give it to me God? Why him and not me? He doesn't deserve it and I do. How could you do this to me?

         This was a story about a composer swallowed by Mozart's shadow. But the feelings here could belong to anybody who came up second best in a story. You could be writing a story about an Olympic silver medalist or an actor who used to be on a show with someone who's career exploded into Blockbusters and Oscars. You don't have to copy the structure or the dialogue of the scene to make it work for you. Just tap into the power of it. Steal the caffeine, leave the coffee.