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I’ve been cooking a lot lately. Lots of stuff with soy. And you know what happens? Eventually, you just can’t look a tofu in the face anymore. Bleah. And it occurs to me that you all might be feeling the same way about a steady diet of Buffy exemplars. So I went searching to see what comedy scripts were available online, so I could mine them for cool examples. But, instead, I stumbled across a British web site with comedy writing instruction on it. Looks a bit like this blog, really. I’m not gonna give the link because I’m about to criticize something they say, and I don’t wanna point a finger. Besides, I’ve said loads of dumb things in here, so why invite the tit-for-tat?

Anyway, here’s the quote that jumped out at me:

“There’s nothing you can’t write a joke about – nothing. Someone once told us that some subjects just weren’t funny. He picked up a cushion from the sofa he was sitting on and said, ‘This cushion for instance – nothing funny about that.’ So we decided to prove him wrong and wrote a joke about scatter cushions. No, we’re not going to tell you it – but it turned on the word ‘scatter’ and if you’re any good at this game, you can probably figure it out. Or write a better one. Go on.”

First off, I think they’re talking about throw pillows. So whatever joke they’re thinking about (I suspect it involves the phrase “scatter-logical humour”) won’t work in American English. But I think there’s a bigger problem. This is simply not how I’d approach the exercise. Script jokes – good script jokes – aren’t about things. They’re grounded in character.

Instead of trying to write random jokes about random objects, it would be much better training to write jokes about established characters and their relationship to objects. Niles Crane and a throw pillow, Roseanne Conner and a window treatment, Michael Scott and a handmade quilt… you probably already had a gut reaction to each of those pairings.

Let’s see… Niles is critical of his pillow because it doesn’t perfectly fit the small of his back; “my small is, counterintuitively, rather large.” Roseanne is amused by the whole idea of a window treatment: “I pretty much let my windows go untreated.” Michael talks about how every quilt tells a story if you know how to read the patterns, then he claims that this quilt tells an off-color joke. Then he admits that he’s kidding. Then he tells an off-color joke. Then he apologizes. Then he laughs at the joke.

Those are off the top of my head. They’re not great, but they didn’t take long. But, just thinking “throw pillow… go!” I’d’ve been here all day. I would’ve panicked and decided I couldn’t write comedy. Don’t let that happen to you. If you can write people, you can write comedy.

Lunch: Went to the food court at the local mall, and had a shredded cabbage salad. Pushed it down with something from the Godiva Chocolate shop: a fresh strawberry and banana kabob covered in chocolate. Yum!

I had a realization yesterday while eating a large bowl of pasta. I love lots and lots of parmesan cheese… or none at all. Because, as dull as an absence of parmesan is, what is far worse is a little bit that is not nearly enough. This is also true about phone calls with loved ones who are a very long way away.

Realizations are a wonderful place to look for comedy because they show you two aspects of a character’s mind – their first take on something, and then their re-evaluation. The buyback jokes I mentioned in the last post are one kind of realization – the kind where you realize you want to take back what you just said.

But there are other kinds. I find that I tend to write these jokes in pieces, because I actually have the revelation while writing them. That’s why, in my own little brain, I think of these as “truth” jokes, because in the middle of writing them, I realize what the truth of the situation is, as I see it.

Here’s a truth joke:

JAKE
She’s fascinating. She designs computer programs for a civil engineering company. She makes a typo, a bridge collapses.

ADRIAN
Really?

JAKE
Or it’s extra strong. Could go either way.

I wrote the first line, just thinking that it was amusing that Jake would be impressed by a woman who can make a bridge collapse. And then I thought about the truth of the situation and realized that math errors don’t only go one way. Suddenly I had (what I think is) a much funnier joke.

The same thing happened in a Buffy episode in which Xander is looking at a magic talisman that turns out to be simply a flattened nickel. I wrote the first sentence of what follows. And then I looked closer at my nickel.

XANDER
Washington’s still there, but he’s all smooshy. And he may be Jefferson.

I decided it would be funnier – and truer — to make Xander as dumb as I was, and have him make the realization, than it would be for him to get it right in the first place.

I was surprised how many of these I found in my writing. Apparently I do a lot of just random starting out of jokes, letting them turn into other jokes along the way. Here’s another truth joke from an Animated Buffy in which she’s been shrunk down very small – like to about 6 inches tall. She’s trying to climb a staircase, and reacting to what she sees. I knew the riser would look tall. And then I realized it would also look irregular…

BUFFY
Boy. Everything’s so tall. And… textured.

Sure, it’s not really a laugh-out-loud joke, but I kept it in the script because I was kind of tickled at the thought of Buffy noticing that and being distracted by it, in the middle of her shrinking crisis.

If you’ve written something that seems true for a character, and then you have a realization, maybe the character needs to go through the same thing. It’s a good way to keep the writing from seeming “pat,” like the characters are too smart and prepared.

Lunch: Another delightful lunch with Jeff Greenstein! I had a big bowl of pasta and the waiter brought me additional parmsesan when I asked.

Because of my new deal, I’ve been driving up to Universal a lot. The first few times I had to do this, I was late for my meetings. Traffic extended the trip to well over an hour. So I made a note: leave early. So then, of course, I started arriving at my meetings a full hour too soon. Because, of course, all the traffic evaporated. Have you ever realized, half-way to somewhere, that you’re absurdly ahead of schedule, so you start looking for things to slow you down? You stop fighting the traffic. You let people in. You move into the lane that’s mysteriously slower. You just stay behind that truck – why not? In LA, this feels like a big infraction of the rules, because you’re supposed to want to be moving as fast as possible at all times.

But it feels good. Good things come from breaking the rules.

Here’s a rule. Or at least a rule of thumb. In general, we try to keep from reusing the same word, especially when the uses fall near one another. In the paragraph above I used “early,” “too soon” and “ahead of schedule” quite consciously, to keep from repeating “early,” “early,” “early.”

So what happens when you break this rule? On a recent episode of Family Guy, the mayor, Adam West, asked:

“Anyone want to play Stratego? I have Stratego!”

And on Buffy (in a Joss-written line), a college girl once scoffed at Willow, who had proposed a spot of spell-casting, by saying:

“Oh yeah, then we could all get on our broomsticks and fly around on our broomsticks!”

Also on Buffy, an enthusiastic minion once promised to eliminate a perceived threat by saying:

“We will get Bob Barker! We will bring you the limp and beaten body of Bob Barker!”

Here’s how I think this one works. Because we tend to try to avoid repeated words, in careful speech as well as in writing, when a character repeats a word they naturally sound either generally inarticulate (like the college scoffer) or over-excited, like the mayor and the minion. Or nervous, as when the earnest suitor in a Firefly episode said:

“…the honor that you do me flatters my… my honor…”

Once again, character traits and comedy are one and the same. The repeated word joke can be funny because it contains a funny reference, like Stratego or Bob Barker, but it also contains the extra funny that comes from revealing character. Want to expose a dumb or flustered character to amusing ridicule? Give them a repeated word. Works like a charm.

Lunch: Forced to skip lunch by the meeting up at Universal! Made up for it with a hearty burrito-and-a-malt dinner.

Tonight: a simple example of comedy done well. I just now heard this, off tonight’s broadcast of the Dodger’s game. It started out, as comedy often does, with pain. A broken bat, flying through the air, clocked the pitcher on the back of the head, sending him to the ground. As he was tended to, the venerable Dodger’s announcer, Vin Scully, vamped. Vin has been around forever. I suspect he once whispered “Hey, I’ve got a good idea” to Abner Doubleday. Vin always has a story.

Tonight, indeed, he had a story. About a worse thing that could happen when a broken bat is flinging through the air. He had all the details, as he was there. The year, the venue, the names of all the players. And the fact that the sharp end of the broken bat pierced the injured player THROUGH THE CHEEKS. “It was awful!” he concluded with a sort of satisfaction in his voice. Yes, yes, I imagine it was.

So why was this funny and not simply strange and terrible? Why was I, in my living room, driven to my knees as surely as that poor pitcher was? Well, for character reasons. Knowing Vin, one couldn’t help but hold one’s breath, knowing a story was coming. And that it would be a humdinger. But, beyond that, I think it was funny because of exactly one letter. The “s” at the end of “cheeks.” Cheek, we expect, we can picture… it came at his face from the side, sure I see that. But cheeks — wow — that just paints a whole new image, doesn’t it?

I don’t know what you all can learn about spec writing from this that you don’t already know: capture well-defined characters so that the audience has expections about them, choose the perfect word, seek the suprising image… So if there’s nothing to learn, I simply invite you to enjoy.

Unless your brother died from double-cheek-bat-having-through. Then I’m very sorry.

Lunch: broiled chicken with a sort of mediterranean salsa: black olives and tomato and lime juice. Nice. Almost bought one of those great “Take 5” bars, but resisted. Do you know them? Candy bars with salted pretzels inside. You’ll love ’em.

Remember what I did in that last post? I mentioned the grilled cheese sandwiches early on, and then I mentioned them again at the very end of the post. This is called a “callback.” A callback is a reference to a joke earlier in the scene, or earlier in the script… or sometimes, earlier in the run of the series. The “We were on a break” callbacks between Ross and Rachael on Friends extended over a remarkable length of time. But usually, these will refer to something in the same episode.

I looked around online, and found some transcripts of Friends episodes, to find some good universal examples for you guys. They are, of course, all over the place. In one early episode, Chandler is appalled to see Joey lick a spoon clean and put it back in the silverware drawer. Later in the episode, when Joey has a chance to move out of their shared place, Chandler makes a joke about having to invite someone over to lick his spoons now that Joey won’t be there. This is a callback. Then, even later, Chandler gives Joey a box of plastic spoons. At this point, this is a “comic runner.” Less than a story, it’s a series of non-adjacent jokes that follow from and build on each other. (By the way, if the first joke does not work, then none of the callbacks to that joke will work. A failed comic runner of this variety is called a Nakamura. Seriously, it is. I think the original reference was to a series of jokes about a Mr. Nakamura on some show — the Bob Newhart show? I’m not sure. Anyway, the failure of the callbacks was so legendary that the name stands to this day.

Comedic dramas use this technique too. In my Buffy episode “Pangs,” every time a new character saw that Angel had returned to Sunnydale, they assumed he had turned evil. This quickly formed into a comic runner.

Callbacks are especially useful as “blows” to a scene — the last line of a scene. Because they require no additional set-up, they’re fast and punchy, which is the best way to blow out of a scene. They also tie off the scene really neatly, by turning it back to an earlier point. If you ever watch comedy improv, you’ll notice that the improvised scenes finish on a callback even more often than scripted material does. It’s the simplest way to make a scene feel complete.

So, the next time you’re watching tv, pay attention to the callbacks. You’ll be amazed at how often they are the solution to the tricky how-to-get-the-hell-out-of-this-scene problem. If I’m in a writers’ room and we’re having trouble finding that last line, I will automatically start scouring the early part of the scene — either looking for something to call back, or, if there’s nothing useful there, looking for a new place to put a joke up there so that we CAN call it back at the end. It’s not always the best solution, but the success rate is such that it should be one of the first ones you try.

Lunch: turkey meatballs from the South Beach Cookbook

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