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Okay, here is another chapter in the continuing saga of whether or not you’re going to need some other kind of material in addition to your specs of existing shows.

I’ve reported here before that writers are being urged by various agencies around town to have short stories, short plays and scripts for short films available in addition to traditional specs. But this week I heard a new spin on this.

Aspiring comedy writers are now being urged to have short comedy pieces available for busy executives and even show runners to read. And we’re talking really short, like a few pages!

The kinds of things that are being used for this seem to vary. Parody pieces suggest themselves immediately: a spoof of a catalog, or of a children’s book, or of a museum guidebook, or of a MySpace page, or of the “Harper’s Index,” or of the “cuteoverload” website, complete with pictures? … maybe an excerpt from a scholarly analysis of The Pussycat Dolls… maybe a school-lunch menu that devolves into a rant from a clearly deranged lunch lady. A parody of a travel guide or an obituary…? A funny series of newspaper retractions that build off each other…? An amusingly bad translation of The Rosetta Stone…? I assume comedy sketches and funny short stories would be good for this kind of purpose, and I could also see a humorous dialogue written as an exchange of emails, or as a series of text messages. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if soon execs are just given the address to the YouTube clip you’ve written and produced for them. Maybe we’re already there.

Be creative in thinking of your approach to what you pull together for this. If the concept itself is unique, that in itself might just be the thing that opens that door. Take a while to decide what to do, take a few practice passes at it. When a piece is short, it often takes far longer to write than something long, because every word of it has to be precisely right.

Now, recall that this does not replace a script. You will still need a spec script of some kind. Possibly a spec pilot, although I still advocate also having at least one spec of a show currently in production. So write your spec “The Office”. And then keep writing just a little bit more.

The idea, if this isn’t clear, is that reading a script takes time and concentration. Gems can be missed because the reader is rushed and tired. Something short and punchy that shows off your comedy skills in a concentrated fashion is going to have a heck of a lot of appeal.

Lunch: “Eggs Ranchero” at some random restaurant on the 3rd St. Promenade.

Good news! Andy Barker P.I. has a premiere date! It is: Thursday, March 15 at 9:30 (8:30 central) on NBC. You know this as the 30 Rock time slot of course, but don’t worry, they’ll be back. We’re just borrowing the slot for five weeks of Andy Richter-flavored comedy.

This is, of course, the show I’ve most recently been working on, and I love it. You’re going to love it, too. It’s got Andy, who is charming and hilarious, and Tony Hale (Buster from Arrested Development), and a mind-blowing guest appearance by Amy Sedaris in one of the eps. This is a classy operation, gentle readers, a really funny show, and I hope you check it out! (I’ll remind you again when it gets a little closer.)

Lunch: shabu shabu — beef and veggies and noodles cooked on the tabletop.

Let’s go to the mailbag, shall we? Such an interesting question just arrived from Eric in San Mateo. He wants to know the difference between a “high-brow” and a “low-brow” joke. Ooh, interesting!

Well, at least as I’ve heard it used, this is a distinction that pretty much has to do with the set of cultural knowledge you need to have to get the joke. “High-brow” jokes presuppose a familiarity with high culture. “Low-brow” jokes assume you know your pro-wresters.

Frasier was the happy pasture of high-brow jokes. Remember how they used to use those title cards between scenes? In one episode one of the cards read “A Mall and the Night Visitors.” In order to get the joke, viewers had to have heard of the Menotti opera “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” That’s pretty high-brow.

A short-lived comedy that I loved as a child was called “Friends and Lovers,” about a concert bass player played by Paul Sand. He entered one scene while descending from the stage brushing at his sleeves. He explained that the last movement had been so passionately performed that he was “covered in conductor hair.” The fact that you need some familiarity with the head-shaking habits of orchestral conductors — well, that makes it high-brow. The same joke could be altered to be about a heavy-metal band (front row fan exclaims excitedly that he’s covered in lead guitarist hair) and now it’s low-brow. See the difference? Johann Sebastian Bach = high-brow. Sebastian Bach = low-brow.

I’m sure you’re seeing by now that this distinction doesn’t line up neatly with good jokes or bad jokes. It also doesn’t line up with smart jokes and dumb jokes. You can make smart jokes that require knowledge of low culture and dumb jokes that rely on knowing high culture.

And sometimes it gets really complicated. When Niles Crane pretends to be interested in a book called “The Legends of NASCAR,” and pronounces it Nazkhar, as if it were an Arabian citadel, is that high-brow or low? It requires that the audience know what NASCAR really is, and that they laugh at Niles for not knowing it… which seems low-brow. On the other hand, his apparent assumption that it’s some little-known exotic location — well, it’s a kind of high-brow assumption. A puzzler!

If you’ve got characters making any joke that reflects a cultural background that you’re not very familiar with — high, low or whatever, make an effort to get it right. If your character is supposed to know about opera, don’t make every one of their jokes refer to fat German women just because you’ve only heard of Wagner. Similarly, if your character is supposed to know about cock-fighting, don’t just make up a bunch of likely-sounding terminology. Do some research. Also, the jokes will get better. Specificity is one of the main ingredients in humor, so the more you know about a subject, the more likely you are to be able to be funny about it, whether your own brow is naturally low, high or uni.

(In other mailbag news — I’m very sorry Jackie in Australia, but I’m not allowed to read the writing you sent to me. Thank you though, for *wanting* to send it to me!)

Lunch: hot udon soup with mentaiko (spicy cod roe)

UPDATE: Menotti died the day after I posted this. How weird is that?

That recent post about the importance of having original specs, as opposed to specs for existing shows, cited one important exception. The Office. It is, right now, the ubiquitous comedy spec, so I want to talk about the special problems that accompany writing the same show as everyone else.

First, I want to mention that this all takes me back to when I was starting out. I attended a UCLA extension course on television writing during my first year in LA. The guy running the course asked us how many of us had Seinfeld specs. Every single hand went up — at least a hundred Seinfeld specs were represented in that room that night. I myself had *two* Seinfeld specs and should have raised both my hands. As The Office is now, it was simply the spec that every single comedy writer had. You know what I would love to see? A collection of the old Seinfeld specs of every high-level comedy writer working today. Because they all had them.

Anyway, keep the ubiquity in mind as you write your spec Office. Remember that it has to stand out from its siblings. And yet, it can’t be so outrageous, so unexpected, that it suggests that you’ve misread the source material. Big stories in spec scripts worry me, particularly for a show like this one that is about capturing small moments of personality. If a bus crashes into the building, I’m not seeing small moments anymore; they’ve been trumped by the Big Event. And I’ve lost the heart of the show. So make the emotions big — break someone’s heart, expose someone to ridicule, reignite joyous hope — but keep the events in the neighborhood of realism. Having to contain your sadness or your joy because you’re in the workplace doing something mundane… that’s powerful, it’s very “The Office,” and it doesn’t work if the workplace has been occupied by terrorists. (Remember that this doesn’t mean the actual show can’t tell these big stories — they get special leeway because they own the cameras.)

Not that you would do that. I’m just sayin’ that it can tend to be an impulse, when you know you’re writing a popular spec, to juice it up. Fine. Juice up the emotional content, not the event content. At least, that’s what I would do.

And, as long as we’re in the area, it occurs to me that some of you were undoubtedly in the middle of writing specs for existing drama shows when I put up that post about writing original pieces. Don’t stop what you were doing, please! Carry on. There is no reason to think that a spec for an existing show won’t be useful. There are certainly show runners who want to see exactly that. It’s simply that, right now, it probably shouldn’t be the only arrow in your quiver.

Lunch: leftover rice from the Persian place, with beans on top

“Style” is a word that makes me nervous when it’s applied to clothing or home decorating. It just sounds so, risky, you know? If you attempt stylishness and fall short, then you’re just standing there in your seersucker culottes, looking silly and wondering what went wrong. But if you know what you’re doing, “style” is what sets you apart. It conveys confidence.

I noticed a stylish little scriptwriting move the other night on The Simpsons. A group of new army recruits is being addressed by their sergeant. We’re ANGLED ON the sergeant, giving his lecture. Talk, talk, funny, funny… and then he tells them all that due to lack of time, while he’s been talking, their hair has been cut and they’ve been put into their uniforms. ANOTHER ANGLE REVEALS that this is true. Now, of course, this is amusing because of the absurdity of it. But it is also incredibly elegant. Instead of using a DISSOLVE to indicate passage of time, the story has been advanced efficiently and in a way that underscores one of the main story points, that the pressure of an on-going war is speeding up the recruitment process. Also, I would argue, doing it this way emphasizes the recruits’ own sudden sense of powerlessness.

But that’s an animated show. They can do that stuff. What about something with real people in it? Well, a recent episode of 30 Rock did something similar. Tina Fey holds a co-worker’s baby. She twirls around with this baby in her arms, and then, suddenly, the camera angle reveals we’ve changed location. She realizes, at the same time the viewers do, that she is in her apartment. She has taken someone else’s baby home. Again, there was humor in the absurdity, and again, the story was elegantly and efficiently advanced, because the audience was put in the same position as Tina… startled with the realization of what must’ve just happened.

And it doesn’t even have to be played for comedy. The most shocking, wonderful moment on Battlestar was when the show “jumped ahead” one year. They could’ve handled this in a lot of different ways. They did it by pushing in on the tangled, burdened, top-of-the-head of Gaius Baltar, slumped on a desk, and then pulling out again to reveal that everything had changed. It was a stunning moment, made all the more stunning because it happened under our noses like a magic trick. Again, it was being used to purposefully disorient the viewers for a reason. In this case, the viewers got a sense of how unstoppable the events of the missing year were, how they had followed with a kind of inevitability from everything that led up to them. Ooh, it was nice.

So look at your script. Look at how you’ve got time passing, scenes following scenes. You know how to just slap events down in order now. So start looking for ways to be stylish about it. The things I’ve described don’t just look cool on the screen, they work on the page as well. They make you look really skilled. They’re style.

Lunch: sushi at Echigo. Skip the crab roll at the end, pay to have them bring you more whitefish instead. I did, and I have no regrets.

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