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03/20/2006: Pet Peeve Adoption Center


There's a funny book called "Artistic Differences" by Charlie Hauck, which is a novelized account of working as a television comedy writer. I read it years ago and I remember enjoying it a great deal. It spins out into fantasy toward the end, but the stuff early on is gripping in its truthfulness.

I don't seem to own a copy any more, and I can't find excerpts on line, but I seem to remember a certain list in the book. It was a list of signs that you're working on a bad sitcom. I might have this quote slightly wrong, but I remember that the gist of one of the listed signs was "You're on a bad sitcom if characters use the word 'bingo' to mean 'yes.'"

Well, yes. No one is going to laugh, hearing someone say "bingo" instead of "yes," or "you got it." It's not a joke. And it doesn't help define a character except to suggest a certain flippancy which most sitcom characters have built-in anyway. And it's not novel. We've all heard it before. AND YET…

I'm not sure I've ever worked on a sitcom in which someone HASN'T used "bingo" in exactly this way, at least in some stage of some draft.

Here's how that happens. When a roomful of writers is punching up a script, they're looking for any way to put a comedic twist on every line they can. And the little humorless "yes" is unlikely to escape untwisted. We all know it's not a big laugh, but the "bingo" seems to add… hmm… flavor, you know? And ever since I read that list, I've cringed when I've seen it make its way into the script. It feels so cheap now. So limp and exhausted and "written."

As you're going through your own spec script, watch out for these little temptations. Bingo and its friends. A room full of exhausted writers trying to wring every chuckle out of tomorrow's run-through may end up with "bingo." And I don't blame them one bit. But if you find yourself putting in tired old twists like this, dig a little deeper, see if you can find something new. Your spec is a sparkly thing, treat it well.

Lunch: Mm. Thai food. Sticky rice and pad thai and tofu salad and basil chicken and thai ice tea. Now that everyone has peanut allergies, should we worry about the future of Thai food? I wonder.