Notes for Screenwriting Expo Lecture
Formalities
- hello, my name is Ira Nayman
- this lecture is called "The Philosophy of Comedy"
- those of you who were intending to attend a lecture called "The Art and History of Ferret Strangling" should probably go speak to the Expo organizers, and then get some serious help
- okay, you're all supposed to give me a ticket, so please come up here and redeem your ticket for a jelly bean and a business card
- you may eat the jelly bean any time; please do not eat the business card until after the lecture is complete
- if there is any rowdiness during the lecture, hanging on to the card will prove that you have actually paid to be here (and I, therefore, must treat you with the utmost respect and care)
- I will talk for about 45 or 50 minutes, then break for questions and discussion
- after the question break, I'll talk until I run out of things to say, and then we'll fill up the remainder of the time with further questions and discussion
- I'd like to start by giving you a sense of who I am
- I have written 12 feature length screenplays, 50 or 60 scripts for television, over 100 sketches for television and radio and four books of prose
- I have a Web site; the URL is on the card (another reason to hang on to it); on the site, you will find the prose, two screenplays, a few television scripts and a copy of my CV
- one of my books, Satire for the Hard of Thinking is in the running for this year's Stephen Leacock Medal, a Canadian prose humour writing award
- I should also mention that I have a Masters in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research (a degree that was done entirely online) and a PhD in Communications from McGill University
- my Masters thesis, Tell Me a Story I Can Live, was about telling stories in interactive media; my PhD dissertation, Literature at Lightspeed, was about people who write prose fiction and post it on the World Wide Web, and the challenge the Web has towards traditional print publishing
- I have written many articles on film for various publications, including Creative Screenwriting
- what you should keep in mind is this: I've been writing humour for one medium or another since I was 8 years old
- that's almost 35 years, now, which means I've been at it longer than some people in this room have been alive
- this lecture is about some of the things I've learned in that time
Introduction
- I promised myself that if I ever gave a lecture on comedy writing, I would start with some very basic questions every writer needs to ask him or herself before writing word one
- question 1: is there a god in the universe you are creating?
- I don't mean that a god necessarily has to appear in your story, or even that you need to have a specific god in mind when you are writing
- I mean: does right and wrong prevail in your created universe, or is it all chaos?
- if there is a god, you can easily justify happy endings; if there isn't a god, endings are more random, maybe they're happy, maybe not, maybe a mixture of good and bad
- the existence of a god principle in your universe also means that characters will tend to shade to the good; in the absence of a god, characters tend to be more murky, with both positive and negative characteristics
- and, finally, your notion of how your created universe functions need not have anything to do with how your characters view things: you can have atheist characters in a universe with a god, just as you can have religious characters in a universe without a god
- question 2: what makes people tick?
- I'm a believer in Balzac's dictum that "everybody has his reasons;" to write anything fictional, you have to understand the reasons people do what they do
- if you haven't already, I would strongly suggest that you read some psychology texts, then apply them to yourself and the people you know to see which, in your opinion, accurately describes the way people behave
- keep reading psychology and comparing it to real life until you develop a feel for why people do the things they do
- once you've done this, you can use your understanding of human psychology to develop interesting fictional characters
- I'm not suggesting that you have to follow a psychological orthodoxy; you don't have to be a strict Freudian, Jungian, Pavlovian, whatever
- you can even make up your own psychology, as long as it bears some resemblance to what you observe goes on inside real people
- that's more or less what I've done
- I agree with Freud that we can divide our psychological processes into conscious and unconscious, which means that we often do things for reasons we don't entirely understand (and, at least part of our role as writers is to uncover these hidden reasons)
- beyond that, I think people are pretty simple: we all want to be happy (have enough food to eat, shelter, meaningful work, strong ties to a variety of people, etc.)
- BUT, we're not born with road maps to show us exactly what we need to do to become happy; in fact, as we grow up, we are often given conflicting ideas about how to lead a good life
- is it any wonder, then, that people often don't seem to know how best to live, that they actively pursue paths that will not make them happy?
- putting this all together, you will see that my universe does not contain a god (as a result: there aren't a lot of happy endings in my work) and people are scrambling madly for happiness which seems, too often, to be beyond their grasp
- one of the things I have already mentioned and will be stressing throughout this lecture is that real life is the source
- let me illustrate this with a story from my own life
- when I was a teenager, I played a game of high school intramural tackle football
- now, I was pretty much as you see me now: five foot five and a half, overweight, glasses, serious asthma
- I can't for the life of me figure out what suicidal impulse lead me to want to play high school football
- well...that's a lie: I know what reason I had for wanting to play football - it's the same reason all boys in high school do terminally stupid things
- you see, there was this girl...she was a cheerleader, and I thought, in some sort of hormone-induced stupor, that I could impress her by playing
- there was a week of practice, and then we were thrown into the game
- now, I don't know how it is in your neighbourhood, but football in my high school wasn't played with subtleties like passing or plays
- the idea was to give the ball to the biggest player on your team and have him run to the endzone daring anybody on defense to knock him down
- so, we kicked off
- on this particular afternoon, the team we were playing had a back who was six foot six - I'm not exaggerating - it had to be a glandular thing
- on their first play, they gave him the ball; he ran around the line and down the sidelines
- I ran with him much of the way, but I didn't stop him, and the other team scored a touchdown
- we had a futile three downs and kicked the ball
- on their next set of downs, figuring if you've got something that works, why mess with it, they gave the ball to the biggest player on their team, he ran around the line and down the sidelines with my alongside for much of the way, and scored another touchdown
- the captain of my team called a time out and took me aside
- "We can see that you're very good at running with this guy," he said, "now, could you please do something to stop him? Throw your head at his feet - I don't care. Just do something!"
- so, okay, we had a futile three downs and kicked the ball
- predictably, they gave the ball to the tallest guy on their team, he ran around the line and down the sidelines towards me
- what could I do? I threw myself at him like we were taught in practice, put my arms around his legs and squeezed, squeezed for dear life
- it was a textbook tackle; I would have been ecstatic except for one small detail: the fucker wouldn't fall down!
- from my position, basically lying sprawled on my chest on the ground, I looked up; I could see him looking down and knew exactly what he was thinking: "What is this annoying thing down there?"
- I couldn't make him fall to stop play and he couldn't move; there we were, a tableau of teen futility
- just when I thought it couldn't get any more embarrassing, I noticed the cheerleaders on the sidelines not five feet from where I was lying
- the cheerleader I really had a crush on? She did not seem impressed...but it's hard to tell when somebody's laughing that hard
- three or four seconds later - although it seemed like an eternity - the captain of the team came over and knocked the guy down
- I was so traumatized, I sat out the rest of the game; the next down, the other team gave the ball to their biggest player and he scored
- it took 10 years before I was comfortable enough to tell this story
- if you think about it, it really is kind of pathetic
- this is what distinguishes a comedy writer from somebody who cannot write comedy: the ability to see humour in situations which most people would not recognize as funny
- comedy is not simply a matter of knowing how to structure a joke or a scene, or how to develop a comic character, although you need to know all of these things to be able to write successful comedy
- comedy is an attitude towards the world, a combination of observation and play
- I'm not going to talk a lot about the mechanics of comedy: there are many books and lectures you can go to for that
- instead, I would like to talk about what you fill the form with once you've mastered it
- One of the few useful things I got from Robert McKee's Story was the idea that if you fall into writing stereotypes, cliches or other unoriginalities, it is almost always because you haven't done enough research about your subject (go back to the real world and find something fresh and new)
- I would add that it is also possible not to have recognized what is unique about your subject: you may know everything there is to know about slaughterhouses, but if you write a cliched love story about a slaughterhouse worker, you haven't used your knowledge to create something new
- I know it's a cliché, but it bears repeating: write what you know
- does this mean that you can only write about things out of your direct personal experience? No. You can get to know a subject through research
- I've written a couple of science fiction stories that take place in (two very different) virtual realities; as research, I read a lot on the subject, of course, but I also hung out at VR cafes to get a feel for how people actually experienced VR
- in fact, I would go so far as to say that every screenwriter should have a substantial commitment to something other than the craft, whether it is a part-time job, a family, maybe volunteer service
- one major beef I have with American filmmaking is that so many films are about film, video and their related industries
- there are two reasons for this: one is that so many artists are so young they do not have a substantial life experience to draw from; the other is that, working in this town, filmmaking quickly fills your field of vision, becoming all that you think you know
- so much of American experience is not making it into your film, and this seems a terrible shame
- whoa - heavy shit
- as Billy Wilder, among others, has pointed out: writing comedy is a serious business
- I think of comedy writing as "drama plus:" comedy has to have the same elements as drama (believable characters, interesting conflict, gripping story arc, etc.), except, on top of this, it also has to be funny
- satire, which I have occasionally written and which I believe is the most difficult genre to pull off, is "drama plus plus:" it has to have the same elements as drama, it has to be funny and it has to give the audience something to think about after the curtain has come down
Character
- what do you think of when you think about a character who is a computer programmer?
- white, male, young, nerd?
- the most interesting programmer I know is a 35 year-old black woman
- your ideas about programmers are stereotypes
- stereotypes distil a certain amount of truth in a short amount of space; under certain conditions (when you have little time to establish a character, say, or when the genre does not demand complexity, like action/adventure films) they can be useful
- however, stereotypes can quickly become boring in comic or dramatic films because they give little new information to the audience
- also, let's be honest: stereotypes are most often used by lazy writers who cannot be bothered to develop an original character
- the sad thing is that creating interesting characters is not that difficult
-my programmer friend, for instance, is a former cheerleader who raised hell when she was younger; she loves opera and art galleries
- interesting characters are developed by the accumulation of details, many of which may not be that interesting in themselves, but taken together create a portrait of a unique, complex human being
- the traits can appear contradictory (ie: a hellraiser who loves opera) as long as they are both believable in the way the character behaves within the context of the story; in fact, apparent contradiction can grab an audience's attention
- you will sometimes be advised that you only need to give characters traits which will help propel the action (ie: a hero only needs to be heroic; a detective only needs to be smart; etc.); the problem is that these characters are really thin and tend not to be that interesting to audiences
- complex characters can be established within the needs of the story; in fact, they make the story much more compelling
- and, again, I will tell you that the best place to start in your thinking about how different traits go into making interesting characters is the world around you
- look at the people you know: what are their likes? Their dislikes? How do they behave in certain situations? What stands out about their personal histories? How do the dress? Carry themselves? Talk? What do they want out of the next five minutes? What do they want out of life? What do they want out of other people? Are they good at getting it? Do they even know how? What is their gender? Their race? Their religion? How seriously do they take these traits?
- the list of questions could go on and on
- the important thing is to get a feel for how people embody a wide variety of traits, and then to begin to think about how these traits can be put together to create interesting characters that people haven't seen before
- in Screenwriting 101, we are taught that, to be believable, our characters must be consistent
- this is to say, if a character acts intelligently in an opening scene, he must be intelligent in closing scenes; if she is belligerent early in the script, she must be belligerent throughout
- there is much sense to this: people do not behave for no reason, and if a character who has been established having one trait arbitrarily acts another way, audiences will lose faith in the character
- having said that, there are problems with this simple reading of character
- 1) characters who always behave one way quickly become predictable, which is a sure way of losing an audience's interest in the character (why do we love villains more than heroes? One reason is that the behaviour of most heroes is utterly predictable, while the behaviour of villains is not)
- 2) in real life, people can be wildly inconsistent (such as 15 year-old bookworms trying to play tackle football)
- the real trick to developing characters is to make them believably inconsistent; my football story is a good example of one approach to this
- I began by detailing my character (short, overweight, glasses, asthma, etc.); this is the baseline, my basic character, the part of me that remains constant
- I then gave the character motivation to act against his basic nature (the need to impress a girl)
- some of the better screenwriting books will tell you that this interior struggle between competing needs, wants or desires makes for interesting, believable characters
- we all have such interior struggles (people who love chocolate but hate being overweight; want a comfortable life but want to hold on to their moral beliefs, people who want to be happily in love repeatedly mating with people who are bad for them, etc.)
- this conflict can also be a source of much humour (just imagine a 15 year-old nerd on a football field in full gear, terrifiedly waiting for somebody a foot taller to run his way with the ball)
- the important thing, as I have already stressed, is to recognize these kinds of struggles in other people and ourselves, and to use what we see in our writing
Character Game
- go with a friend (preferably another writer) to a place where you know there will be a lot of people (a sports arena, shopping mall or movie theatre)
- find a place where you can stay for a while
- pick people out of the crowd and give them personalities and histories (challenge each other and be prepared to justify your decisions)
- at first, you will probably fall back on cliches (because a person looks a certain way, they must be a certain way), only be able to create the simplest characters or simply have difficulty coming up with interesting character traits or history
- go back into the world and analyze the people you know
- choose a different place try again
- over time, you will find that the game helps you focus on what is interesting about people, and you will be able to build complex characters from the simplest materials
Dialogue
- you may think you know how people talk, but you're probably so preoccupied figuring out what you're going to say next, that you don't really pay attention to the flow of conversation
- as a sensitizing exercise, I would suggest that you take a small tape recorder, record a conversation you are part of, and then listen to it at a later date
- most people are surprised by how incoherent conversations they remember as brilliant can be; we hem, we haw, we follow arguments that go nowhere, we cut each other off, etc.
- the art of dialogue writing is not to capture the way people actually speak (even David Mamet doesn't do that); the art is to boil speech down to its essentials so as to convey the maximum information (about character as much as about story)
- dialogue conveys character in a wide variety of ways
- regional accents can indicate to us where characters were raised or spent a lot of time
- sophistication of word usage and sentence construction can be a clue to a character's education or simply intelligence
- specialized language can indicate specialized training or membership in a specific group (ie: medical jargon for doctors; hip hop slang for rap stars, etc.)
- everybody here should be familiar with this last point: "character arc," "plot point," "three act structure" and all of the other terms screenwriters use constitute our jargon, which is largely impenetrable to people not in the industry
- dialogue can also be used to indicate a character's frame of mind in a specific scene (for example, hesitancy can indicate guilt; somebody speaking quickly can indicate they have something to hide; etc)
- if you pay close attention to the way people in the real world speak, you will also notice that one person may speak differently depending upon the context (for example: you probably speak differently with your mate than you do with your mother; a rapper will speak differently with his crew than he will with record company executives, etc.)
- this means that dialogue, well written, can indicate relationships between people
- get in the habit of listening to how people talk
- also: learn from the masters
- I have argued (in an article that was submitted to but not published in Creative Screenwriting) that great comedy dialogue is like great music
- the perfect comic routine, one which has been parodied a few times, is Abbott and Costello's "Who's On First" [READ FROM BOOK]
- notice how the dialogue can be timed with a metronome: tick tock, back and forth, very rhythmic (like music)
- notice how the dialogue repeats certain ideas, but never exactly the same way twice (like music)
- this is sometimes referred to as repetition with variation, a very useful idea I will get back to later in the lecture
- sometimes, new ideas will be added to the mix (in this case, they add the names of the outfielders), but the routine always comes back to the main motif of "Who's on first?" (again, just like music)
- another example of great comic dialogue is the Marx Brothers' "Why a Duck" routine (in fact, the Marx Brothers have brilliantly written routines throughout their first half dozen films)
- I would like to make one final point about dialogue, then we can break for questions and discussion
- you have probably heard that you must give every character a distinct "voice," that every character must speak in a uniquely identifiable way
- I think that this is overemphasized by people in the industry
- the truth is that people who grew up in a certain area or who have spent a lot of time in a specific milieu tend to speak in the same way
- I have attended my share of academic conferences, for instance, and I can say that academics can begin to sound alike after a while
- in this way, dialogue can show similarities between people, as well as differences
- two points are worth keeping in mind: if you are going to give a character a unique way of speaking, make sure that it is rooted in the character (that is to say, a southern accent is not just a way of speaking, but indicates a particular view of and way of acting in the world)
- do not make the mistake of giving a character a way of speaking just to make the character different from other characters in your work; a way of speaking actually promises the audience a lot about the character
- people are whole packages; always keep it in mind when creating characters
- the other point is that even people who sound somewhat similar have distinct verbal quirks, tics, affectations, catchphrases - call them what you will
- I would warn against using this too often, though (dialogue is about much more than just characters spouting catchphrases at each other)
[BREAK FOR QUESTIONS, DISCUSSION]
- when you think about it, laughter is a strange phenomenon
- given a certain kind of stimulus, we make loud honking noises with our mouths; in extreme cases, our eyes may tear up and we may gasp for breath
- what's up with that?
- here are a couple of clues for you: when we smile, we use the same facial muscles as when we frown
- when we laugh, endorphins are released in our brains; endorphins are natural painkillers; they are also released into the brain when we are injured or otherwise in pain
- it seems to me that, as Joni Mitchell sang: "Laughter and crying, you know they're the same release"
- put another way: laughter is a response to pain in the same way crying is (which, when you think about it, gives new importance to stand-up comedians when they say "I killed tonight!")
- this may seem counter-intuitive, but it at least makes sense of what is sometimes called "inappropriate laughter:" why do people laugh at funerals or other painful events? (it also makes sense of what we might call "inappropriate crying;" the tears that come when people laugh too hard)
- although they started the same way, at some point in human evolution, laughter became associated with pleasure and crying with pain
- I wrote an article for Creative Screenwriting on this subject if you would like to delve into it further; the point I would like to stress here is that comedy that makes people laugh is a humane endeavour that can decrease human suffering by helping people deal with it in an indirect manner
- what actually happens within us when we respond to something with laughter?
- I believe it is a two-step process: 1) surprise and 2) recognition
- to be effective, humour must catch a viewer unaware, startle her or him with something unexpected (this is why comedies don't age well; when the initial surprise is gone, much of the pleasure of the experience cannot be recaptured)
- this isn't enough, though: you cannot simply throw two things together that don't usually go together and expect laughter; there must be an underlying logic to putting them together, otherwise the viewer will think them strange, not funny, will respond with confusion instead of laughter
- thus, as part of the process of responding to humour with laughter, we not only have to be startled by the unexpected, but we then have to appreciate the logic underlying what startled us
- example: "Did you hear? Dissent and Commentary are going to merge. The new magazine will be called Dysentery." (Woody Allen, Annie Hall)
- the wordplay is euphonious (pleasing to the ear)
- the joke rests on recognition that the magazines are political, and the result is a disease involving diarrhea (do the magazines engage in verbal diarrhea?)
- appreciating a joke is quite a complex process
- do you have to know how humour works in order to be able to write funny?
- of course not; in a significant way, this is just a reflection of my personal passion for the subject
- however, if you're game, you might want to dip into Freud's Wit and the Unconscious or Henri Bergson's writing on humour arising out of the mechanical actions of human beings, or even just go to the Internet and see what you can find about the way humour works
- for me, this knowledge informs and enriches my writing
[GO AROUND THE ROOM: WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE FILM COMEDY? WHY?]
My Favourite Comedies
- Buster Keaton's shorts and features such as Sherlock, Jr. and Our Hospitality
- Keaton is the smartest, most inventive film comedian who ever lived
- this is not to take anything away from Charlie Chaplin, whose work I like even when it is marred with easy sentimentality
- I always say that Chaplin is the heart of silent film comedy and Keaton is its brain, and every healthy body needs both
- the Marx Brothers' first four films (including Duck Soup, Animal Crackers)
- pure comic anarchy that demolished sacred institutions
- their later MGM films (ie: A Day at the Races and A Night at the Opera) had touches of the old anarchy, but were saddled with romantic subplots that slowed down the madness (and also transformed the Marx Brothers from agents of chaos to agents of love, which was not a role they ever seemed entirely comfortable with)
- Frank Capra films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Meet John Doe
- Capra has a reputation (justified, in my opinion) for unearned sentiment (known as "Capra-corn")
- however, look beyond this and you see a director who is really interested in pushing his characters to the brink of despair
- he also seems to have a highly cynical - and frequently funny - take on corruption in business and government
- Preston Sturges films such as The Great McGinty and Hail the Conquering Hero
- Sturges was a great director of screwball comedies, with rich dialogue that zipped at an incredible clip
- and, although he also tended to end his films happily, his take on such issues as politics and war heroism are highly satirical (the fact that Hail the Conquering Hero was made during WW II astonishes me)
- Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange
- Kubrick's world is one of the bleakest of any director who has ever worked in film; despite (or perhaps because) of this, he has made some uproariously funny films
[- one of the people in the class demanded to know how I could consider A Clockwork Orange a comedy
- I argued that Kubrick was a satirist and, in this film, developed the theme of free will versus social conditioning
- another person in the class asked, in this light, how I would differentiate between satire and serious work, such as the writing of Dostoevski
- I suggested at the time that the main difference was exaggeration: you could believe that Crime and Punishment actually happened, but the events in A Clockwork Orange were so absurd that you could not believe in their literal truth, only their metaphorical value
- having had time to reflect on this question, I would further add a list of comic devices in A Clockwork Orange: juxtaposition of the absurd (the rape scene choreographed to "Singing in the Rain"); irony (the friends Alex betrayed turning up later in the story as policemen with the power to beat the crap out of him when he cannot defend himself); self-reference (the long tracking shot in the music store that ends on a close-up of the soundtrack to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey); etc.
- whether or not one actually finds the film humourous is a matter of personal taste, of course; still, I would argue that it certainly employs the forms of comedy]
- Lindsay Anderson's Mick Travis trilogy (If..., O, Lucky Man and Britannia Hospital)
- O, Lucky Man is perhaps my favourite film, a satire which manages to skewer every British institution in existence in the 1960s and 70s
- Anderson's films are dark and hilarious
- Woody Allen's Manhattan and Annie Hall
- the best romantic comedies ever filmed
- every scene contains comic elements, yet the films contain lots of truth about human relationships and the human condition
- Monty Python's Life of Brian and Meaning of Life
- the best television sketch comedy troupe makes insanely anarchic films: sophisticated one minute, puerile the next
- the sheer volume of comic ideas in Python has always left me in awe
- something relatively current? Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich
- as Roger Ebert observed: most comedies start to flag in the third act as the need to tie up plot threads takes precedence over being funny
- Being John Malkovich, on the other hand, is consistently inventive and original - and hilarious - from the first shot to the last
- my experience, and that of other writers, is that we start by imitating what we admire; after time, we start to develop our own unique ways of seeing the world and voices
- if this is true, one of the most important things a writer can do for him or herself to write constantly; only through frequent experimentation will you be able to stumble your way towards something truly original
- one thing I hope you take away from this brief list is that you shouldn't necessarily fixate on what Hollywood has put out in the last six months as your model for what works and what doesn't in comedy
- great comedies have been made throughout Hollywood's history, and throughout the world; if you want to learn from masters, choose examples widely (you'll learn a lot more that way)
- suppose you're sitting in front of your computer (or, for those of you who aren't with the 21st century, your typewriter) and you have a scene that just isn't working; what do you do?
- what follows are a few ways of thinking about the world that may help kickstart the creativity when it needs a little push
Juxtaposition of the Absurd
- I once had a high school teacher who claimed that the basis of all humour is juxtaposition of the absurd; while I can think of forms that don't follow this, the evidence of its importance is all around us
- simply put: juxtaposition of the absurd means putting things together that you don't usually find together (this is the most common way of surprising an audience)
- as an exercise, let your imagination run riot and put whatever is in your head together in no particular sequence or order
- then, see if you can create a context in which some of the things you've put together has a logic
- if you do this often enough, juxtaposition of the absurd will become second nature to you
Reversals
- just when you think a story is going in one direction, it doubles back and heads in the opposite direction (funny when it is totally unexpected)
- a great illustration comes from Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality
- Keaton plays a man who comes south to claim his inheritance, only to find that it isn't worth anything and, worse, to fall in love with a girl who, unbeknownst to him, belongs to a family that his family has been feuding with for decades
- in the climactic scene, Keaton, knowing he is being chased by somebody who wants to kill him, climbs down a rock face
- somebody shouts asking if he needs some help; when he says he does, the man throws him a rope and says he'll pull Keaton to safety
- Keaton and the man tie the rope to their waists; the man helps Keaton shift to a ledge where he is exposed, and he finds that the man is holding a gun waiting to shoot him
- in this way, the rope that was supposed to save him is actually putting him in danger
- in desperation, Keaton pulls on the rope, and the man falls over the cliff (the rope has reversed into saving him)
- unfortunately, because Keaton is still tied to him, the man's body hurtling past takes him over the side, and they both drop into the water (rope puts him in danger again)
- the scene goes through many more reversals before it concludes with Keaton saving the girl as she is about to fall to her death in a waterfall
- each reversal in this breathtaking sequence adds to its comic power
- as an exercise, try to remember all the reversals in your own life
- then, go one step further: how would things have turned out if something that did happen turned out to be the exact opposite of what you thought it was?
- apply this to what you know about other people's lives
- if really stuck, apply this to your story
Contradictions
- contradictions are a major source of humour
- listen to people and look for differences between what people said yesterday and what they say today
- example: Ronald Reagan during the Iran/contras scandal: The President, in his radio address, had this to say about the first week of testimony: "Well, the Boland Amendment (forbidding any US intelligence agency from aiding the Contras) was unconstitutional because the President is responsible for determining foreign policy, not Congress. And, if it was constitutional, it was so poorly worded that its intent was unclear. And, even if its intent was clear, it didn't apply to the National Security Council, which isn't an intelligence agency. And, even if the National Security Council was engaged in covert intelligence operations, the Boland Amendment didn't apply to me. But, in case it did apply to me, I didn't contravene it." It was nice of the President to give us a choice of plausible denials, wasn't it?
- more recent example: In order to justify a war with Iraq, United States President George Junior argued: "Saddam Hussein helped the Al Qaeda terrorists who attacked the World Trade Centre. Well, okay, he probably had nothing to do with the terrorist attack, but he's minutes away from developing nuclear weapons. Well, no, he's probably years away from having a serious nuclear capability, but he is definitely developing chemical and/or biological weapons. Well, sure, after daddy bombed his country the first time, he was left pretty much without any chemical and/or biological weapons, but he is an evil man who waged war on his neighbours and used poisoned gas on his own people. Well, yes, he thought he had American permission to invade or make war against his neighbours and we did look the other way when he gassed his own people, but Saddam is still a very, very bad man who needs to be removed before he does something really terrible." It must be easy to stay "on message" when there are so many messages to choose from.
- in both cases, the President made more or less all the statements attributed to him, but at different times; bringing them together points out the absurd slipperiness of each President's ever-shifting position
- another type of contradiction occurs when people say one thing but do another (ie: shout: "I love you! I love you!" while stabbing somebody in the heart)
- this type of contradiction can occur because one character is trying to hide his or her real motives from another character
- it may also happen because a character does not known what he or she really wants (the character who is miserable pursuing a high-paying career rather than acknowledging that he or she really wants to pursue an artistic career)
- contradiction between word and deed can also happen because a character has some psychological blockage that keeps him or her from acting in ways that will get him or her what he or she really wants (example: the woman who claims she wants a man who will be good to her, but repeatedly chooses men who mistreat her, not even aware of the inner drive that makes her make those choices)
- looking for contradictions within people around you (and, of course, yourself) is a good way of helping you think about real human behaviour, and may inspire you to develop interesting conflicts within your characters
Exaggeration
- sometimes, people will go to extraordinary lengths to achieve something that does not seem worth the effort (example: putting more work into stabbing a colleague in the back than actually working)
- a great source of humour, one that resonates with audiences, is taking a behavioral trait and exaggerating it
- the French playwright Moliere was an expert at this; his characters are one-dimensional, but they push that one dimension for all it's worth
- even while you're doing this, your writing must be grounded in real human experience
- think about the humiliation scenes in the film There's Something About Mary: few of us will probably ever get our penises stuck in a zipper, but there is something about that scene that speaks to an awkwardness most adolescent boys have faced in their lives
- or take the football story I began this lecture with: I doubt very many people have had the experience I had, but the general idea of making a fool out of oneself trying to prove something to somebody else
- boil some people you know down to their essences
- now, what would they be like if you pushed their essence to its extreme?
Repetition With Variation
- speaking about dialogue, I introduced the idea of repetition with variation; this idea can also be used when developing gags in a long piece
- I will assume you are all familiar with the basic structure of a joke (set-up, punchline, topper)
- the great thing about repetition is that is eliminates the need for a set-up, allowing jokes to unfold as a series of punchlines and toppers; this allows for a much greater concentration of humour
- think, for instance, of the Abbott and Costello routine I read part of earlier in the lecture: the set-up was when Abbott explained the names of the infielders and their positions; everything that followed was a punchline or topper (until Abbott introduced the names of the pitcher and the catcher, which was a new set-up that generated its own punchlines and toppers)
- repetition can work when you bring a joke you've used early in a screenplay back later in the screenplay; used with skill, you can, in fact, repeat the same joke several times in a feature
- however, repetition in and of itself is not enough
- since a basic element of humour is surprise, the laughter for a joke repeated in exactly the same way will diminish (much like the quality of successive photocopies will deteriorate)
- therefore, whenever you reintroduce a joke, you must change it enough so that it will seem fresh; the change doesn't have to be great (too large a change and, of course, it becomes another joke altogether); the change just has to be enough so that the joke has a new element of surprise
- again, a good example is the Abbott and Costello routine, which never repeats exactly the same dialogue
- this is repetition with variation
Details
- one of the things new writers are told is that we are trying to portray "universal human experience" in our work
- some people assume that to mean that detail must be bled out of their work so that they (and the audience) can concentrate on "essentials"
- I think that this is wrong
- the universals we need to concentrate on have to do with human experiences (love, pain, meaning or meaninglessness, mortality, etc.)
- however, no human experience exists in a vacuum; we all exist in specific historical and geographic locations
- what I think we really need to do, therefore, is to situate the universal within the specific, the unchanging questions of human experience with the ever-changing details of actual human existence
- whenever possible, therefore, be as specific as you can
- details make your imaginary world more real for your viewers; they can also help give depth to your characters
- they also are funnier (generic jokes don't work as well as specific ones)
- remember this simple rule: assault weapon good, Kalashnikov better
- this means, again, that you will need to know your subject
- on the other hand, you need to be careful: you run the risk of losing your audience if they aren't familiar with the details you choose
- context helps (Kalashnikov reference makes more sense in a war movie than a romantic comedy)
- if you're worried, you can always help the audience along (ie: "Kalashnikov rifle")
- okay, now, when you've got the creative juices flowing, how do you put everything together?
- let's start with a basic question: what purpose can an individual scene have in the flow of an entire work? [ASK AUDIENCE]
Purposes of a Scene
- a scene can do four things within the context of a larger work:
- 1) move the story forward
- 2) reveal something about character
- 3) help develop mood and/or theme ("love conquers all" or "people are essentially morons who believe love conquers all" and so on)
- 4) fulfill genre expectations (so, an action/adventure film requires scenes of action; a horror film must have scenes that scare the audience; and, most importantly for our purposes, a comedy has to have scenes that make people laugh)
- some writers say one and two are the same, that action is character, but there are examples of pure action scenes (James Bond) that have nothing to do with character, and scenes of character (Mike Leigh) where there is very little action
- what often happens in modern comedies is that there are successive scenes that fulfill one or the other functions: a scene of exposition (story) is followed by a scene of character development which is then followed by a comic set piece scene, and so on
- these films are thin
- ideally, you would like to have all four elements in every scene; this is how you create rich, full films (examples: Woody Allen's Manhattan and Annie Hall and Preston Sturges' Hail the Conquering Hero or The Great McGinty)
- one of the biggest stumbling blocks writers seem to have is with scenes of exposition: how do you make scenes containing a lot of necessary plot information entertaining?
- there are some tricks that I have found
- 1) give one of the characters a distracting quirk
- I once wrote a scene in which two lawyers were talking about a case; boring exposition at its worst, but necessary for the plot
- to make the scene more interesting, I made one of the characters paranoid; while the main character was trying to discuss the case, the secondary character was looking in the flower pot on the table to see if it was bugged
- this suggested a more general rule for expository scenes: give one of the characters a reason to be unwilling to share information: this can introduce conflict into a static scene; it has comic potential; you can still get the plot points out
- 2) add business to the scene
- in a screenplay I was working on, I had a confrontation between two characters whose relationship was ending
- it could have been a straight dramatic scene; instead, I had a series of flowers delivered to the female character
- this was consistent with the male character's psychology (he gave money to his partners because he couldn't give himself emotionally)
- it was also a source of humour, partially as the flowers piled up, partially because of the female character's frustration at being continually interrupted when she was trying to make a serious point
- 3) do something funny in the background
- in another work, I had a scene where a character is reviewing his life and wondering if maybe he's in the wrong profession
- I set the scene in the kind of deli where all of the dishes are named after famous people, and would every so often have somebody shout "Michael Jackson, hold the mayo!" and stuff like that
- these writing tricks will only work for you if you commit yourself to making every scene funny
- it's hard; it takes a lot more inspiration, and, on bad days when nothing seems to come, it may be easier just to let the scene slide and be dominated by exposition
- humour that comes out of the environment (3) is not as satisfying as humour that comes out of the story and/or character (1 and 2)
- if you keep at it, however, you will find that audiences have a much greater appreciation for work that is consistently funny
Conclusion
- in this lecture, I've tried to help you look at the complexities of writing comedy that go beyond the forms jokes can take
- I have suggested that comedy writing is not just about mastering form, but about seeing the world in a specific way
- at most points in the lecture, I have argued that the real world is the source from which we must all draw, and that the comedy writer must always be looking at the real world with an eye to its complexity and, most important, its absurdity
- in this lecture, I've talked about the satisfactions people can get from experiencing comedy; I'd like to close by talking about the satisfactions we get from writing comedy
- when I was in high school, I hung out with a couple of guys who wanted to be stand-up comedians, so I spent a lot of time in one of Toronto's comedy clubs
- one of the things I noticed was that stand-ups tended to be miserable bastards
- some people take their anger and turn it into ulcers; we take our anger and turn it into art (then, having to deal with producers turns it into ulcers)
- let's be honest: making fun of people is a great way of releasing personal tension and channelling otherwise potentially harmful aggression into something that is social acceptable
- there is a danger here, though: making fun of other people's foibles, it's easy to come to feel superior to those people
- I would strongly suggest you not do this for two reasons
- the basic, obvious reason is that if your audience feels you are judging your characters harshly, and they identify with your characters, they will feel you are judging them and be turned off the work
- the second, perhaps less obvious reason for not giving in to the temptation to feel superior or judge your characters is that we are all goofs who do dumb things
- I told you about my football playing days - believe me when I say that that wasn't the stupidest thing I've ever done, not by a long shot
- if you examine your own lives honestly, I think you'll find that you've done some incredibly dumb things, too
- one of the greatest things about comedy is that it allows us, writer and audience alike, to share the joke that is the essential goofiness of human existence
[- after the lecture, I was asked how a writer can avoid judging characters in her or his writing
- 1) try to understand a character's actions from the character's point of view (what seems ridiculous from outside usually makes perfect sense to the person who is doing it)
- now, try to get the character's point of view across in what you write
- 2) foreground the character's suffering (what is funny to an audience is usually painful to the character to whom it is occurring; show that pain once in a while)
- this is the difference between laughing WITH a character and laughing AT a character]
[ADDITIONAL MATERIAL]
I prepared these notes in case I ran short; as it happened, I didn't need them.
Irony
- there are a few different types of irony
- ironic dialogue involves a character who says one thing but, by the tone of her or his voice or some gesture, you can tell she or he means the opposite
- a second type of irony occurs when a character acts on a belief the audience knows is false
- a third type of irony, which I think of as "structural irony" occurs when a character achieves a goal, only to find out it wasn't what he or she thought it would be
Industry Reality
- there is a scene in Robert Altman's The Player that should be burned into every writer's memory: the main character, a movie studio executive, is explaining what he does to a woman who knows nothing about the movie industry
- basically, he tells her, 10,000 story ideas are submitted to my studio a year, and I can say yes to seven of them
- I hope nobody in this room has the illusion that they are suddenly going to be discovered and their screenplays will be produced by a major studio; the odds of that happening are about as likely as winning a lottery
- this knowledge can be very freeing
- some of you may be under the impression that the best way to succeed is to see what is already successful and copy it; this is almost certainly not true
- for one thing, there are not only thousands of people already using that strategy, but many who are already successful Hollywood writers
- rule number one: you will never succeed trying to compete with people who are already successful
- your best bet, one professionals with much more production experience than I have also said, is to develop your own voice, your own approach to material, your own subject matter
- being original is the best way to stand out, the best way to get noticed
Passion
- one final comment: whatever you write, I find that it really helps to have a passionate commitment to it
- if you want an audience to believe in the reality of your narrative, you really have to believe in the reality of your narrative; if you want the audience to care about your characters, you really have to care about your characters; if you want the audience to come away from your work with a specific point of view (on human nature, politics, whatever), you have to be able to convey a passion for that point of view
- it's not that comedies without passion get made; not only does it happen all the time, but some of them make shitloads of money
- the thing is that after their 15 minutes of fame (or infamy), these films will disappear from public consciousness
- the comedies that move people, that make them think as well as laugh, are the ones that are ultimately remembered
- decide which kind of writer you want to be
