JaneEspenson.com

You know what’s always bothered me about that story about Solomon? You know, the one where he suggests cutting the disputed baby in half, knowing the true mother would give the child up rather than have that happen? The fake mother who goes along with the verdict. “Oh. That sounds fair. At least I’ll get a half a baby.”

And yet… sometimes cutting the baby in half is exactly the right answer.

Remember the jokes in the Jack Benny radio script archive? Remember how labored they were? We already discussed one example with a set-up that seemed endless.

Here’s another example lifted from the archive:

Jack: How many kids have you got now?
Dennis: Thirteen.
Jack: Thirteen kids?
Dennis: Yup, one for every month in the year.
Jack: Dennis, there are only twelve months in the year.
Dennis: NOW HE TELLS ME.

Okay. So what do those last two lines add to the joke? I submit that if you’re going to laugh at all, you’re going to do it after “one for every month in the year.” The rest is an explanation of the punchline. And sure enough, as audiences got more and more used to broadcast comedy, set-ups got shorter, and post-joke explanations started to fall away. And half a baby was, indeed, better than a whole one.

And yet, that baby can be cut back even further. How many times have you had to sit through a set-up that seems to go on forever:

CLUMSY HUSBAND
Honey, you don’t have to warn me that a Sloppy Joe is “sloppy.” I know the meaning of the word. Besides, I’m not six. I think I can manage to somehow maneuver a sandwich into my mouth without–
(He drops the sandwich onto himself)

And explaining the punchline? That’s actually a mistake I’ve made myself. Here’s an exchange adapted from one of my Buffys:

WILLOW
(to Xander)
I wish Buffy was here.

Buffy enters.

BUFFY
I’m here.

WILLOW
I wish for a million dollars.
(off Xander’s look)
Someday it’ll work.

Looking at this now, I should not have had Willow explain. It was clear enough what she was doing. She did not need to spell it out to Xander.

The people who are going to read your spec are smart and they will get the joke without a lot of set-up or explanation. In fact, more than anything, this lack of these things is what makes a script feel smart.

Lunch: A wonderful Sloppy Joe, which made me start thinking about messy sandwiches and jokes about same.

I had the most delightful lunch today with friend-of-the-blog Maggie from the bootstrap-productions blog . How exciting to be just starting the journey! And, from my point of view, there’s this interesting thing that happens, like when you’re showing the new foreign-exchange student around the high school, where you start seeing everything with new eyes. Hollywood looks like HOLLYWOOD again.

But then, I’ve had that feeling for a while now, because of this blog. It’s totally envigorating to look at the process of writing from the beginning again. You start thinking consciously about things that have become entirely subconscious.

Like jokes. Jokes have different functions. Some are hammers. Just old-fashioned put-downs used against other characters. And almost all of them are flashlights trained on the character that says them. You learn something about a character every time you laugh at something they say.

And a few jokes… A few jokes are explosives. They hit every one in the room. They change the way all the OTHER characters look at something. They turn the story. This is the most difficult kind of joke I can imagine.

Remember on Sex and the City where the women were talking about a baby boy with an unpleasant demeanor? One of them (Samantha) finally said: “Maybe he’s just an asshole.” I have heard so many people remember and comment on that line. It was written by the wonderful Alexa Junge, by the way. In that line, she didn’t just shock us with using that kind of language to discuss a baby. Instead, she hit on something we’d all observed but that no one had said out loud before: babies are not equal. Other people are allowed to have bad qualities, why not babies? And, as I remember the moment, you can SEE that insight hit all of the other characters.

Usually jokes are not bendable to this purpose. When Radar announced that Col. Blake’s plane was shot down, the line affected all the characters. That moment was so big and so tragic that it obviously would have been impossible to do that with a joke. But when it IS possible to bring emotional impact and humor together, it’s magic.

On Friends, there was a moment when fighting between the friends became intense and Phoebe shouted “Stop! Look what we’re doing to Chandler!” And we then saw that Chandler was capering frantically, like a little boy trying to get his parents to stop fighting. Funny and heartbreaking. The moment hit the audience and it hit the characters and it still managed to play as a joke. Fantastic.

I bet we could find moments like this from All in the Family, Cheers, Taxi and Frasier. And I bet it wouldn’t even take us that long to remember them. Those are the moments you remember.

If you’re writing a comedy spec, and you want to try for the highest degree of difficulty… wow. Good for you.

Lunch: Eggs and mimosas and sherbet and good company.

Does your cell phone ever say this? “You have one unheard message. The following message has not been heard. First unheard message…” This is the kind of detail of daily life that stand-up comics seize on. It’s totally familiar, ridiculous, and laughable when pointed out. I recommend that you take note of these little details of life. Collect them as if you had a set at the Improv to prepare for. And look around to notice the new trends. What silly fashions are starting to show up? What are the new slang words? What do people do at the gym? What are the current topics of dissent in your workplace? What new daily-life hassles are peeving you? What’s the new limited-time offering at McDonalds? What’s the food allergy everyone suddenly seems to have?

These are the observations that will improve the jokes in your comedy spec scripts, because they will create jokes taken from life. Too many spec scripts seem to use jokes that have been adapted from other jokes in other scripts. Like last year’s coat, they’ve been cut and resewn to try to look new. There is very little new comedy ground to plow in the area of white people saying “bling,” for example. And there is positively no tillable land in “what part of ___ don’t you understand”, unless it is twisted in some very unexpected way. (What part of Burrata Frittata don’t you understand?…Hmm. You MIGHT be headed for a joke. Maybe. Still smells old to me.)

Some observations were funny when they were new, but now have become overused. The idea that having a third child makes you “outnumbered”? I’ve heard it on several shows. First time, great. Subsequent times, not so good. Observations about sweatpants with words across the butt are a little old now. Jokes about how your parents can’t set the VCR. Done. “Does this dress make me look fat?” Over. Bearded men in a dress. Not fresh. A dog that covers his eyes in embarrassment. No. Shatner has a hairpiece. We know! We know!

Friends was a show that did a really good job of finding joke areas that hadn’t been worked to death. When Chandler railed against the kind of people who say “supposably,” it led to Joey, alone later, tentatively checking a few sentences out loud to check if he used it. That was new and very funny. I think of it every time I hear someone say “supposably” (which is appallingly often). But I’d never heard anyone COMMENT on that word before. If the joke had been built around, say, people who say “irregardless,” it would have been eleven per cent less funny.

Exactly eleven.

Lunch: A sandwich from Bay City Imports in Santa Monica. The best sandwich shop / grocery in the world. Veggies and hot pepper salad and parma proscuitto and horseradish cheddar all on a crusty italian roll. Best sandwich EVER!

Hi all! I came across the neatest thing today. A website at which one can be entertained and appalled in a number of different ways. The site is tobaccodocuments.org and it’s fascinating!

As part of some settlements reached between states and tobacco companies, the companies were required to make documents available. They’re all on this site. There are some very interesting things there if you can wade through a lot of gibberish in between the goodies. The best part is an amazing archive of old Jack Benny radio shows. Complete with lots and lots of ads for Lucky Strike cigarettes.

You can find the scripts here: Jack Benny radio scripts. Just scroll down until they appear.

What’s especially cool about these, is that they are photos of the original scripts, with pencilled-in corrections, rewrites, additions and cuts. Wow.

There’s even one script in which Mary has been cut and Rochester has taken her lines without any changes being make to them. Sloppy characterization? Or surprising color-blindness for the time? I’m torn.

What I find interesting, in addition to the sheer, gee-whiz time capsule aspect of these, is that there is virtually nothing to be learned about comedy here except how not to do it. I’m perplexed as to why this is the case. Here’s one of the jokes. A girl at a passport office is helping Jack fill out a form:

Girl: Age?
Jack Benny: 39
Girl: Occupation?
Jack Benny: Comedian.
Girl: I thought so.

Now, I KNOW it was a running gag that Benny perpetually claimed to be 39. But still.

Also, the jokes in these scripts seem to have awfully long set ups. In one, a character enters and announces he’s going on a trip to Waxahachie, Texas. Benny asks him a long series of questions about why he’s going. Friends? Family? Business? No, no, no. So why, Benny belabors, if it’s not friends, if it’s not family, if it’s not business, WHY then, is he going to Waxahachie, Texas? WHY? Punchline: The name fascinates me.

Oh dear god. This is an ostrich straining to lay a jelly bean.

So far, the joke I like best is one that got cut:

Mary: Say, Jack, in Alaska, do they really use fish for money?
Jack: Uh-huh. It works out pretty well, except they have the sloppiest juke boxes.

Once you get past the ludicrous premise that she might actually believe in the fish money, you get a pretty funny and surreal image.

Anyway, check them out if you’re interested in how the currency of our business (and, apparently, the currency of Alaska) has changed!

Lunch: tomatoes, sliced paper-thin, broiled, then served on rye toast with homemade white sauce. Mmm. Family recipe.

What show do you think this exchange came from?

Coroner: I have to go take care of the guy with the javelin in his chest.
Cop (shuddering): Why’d you get into this line of work in the first place?
Coroner (deadpan): Free javelins.

Answer: Law and Order.

I probably got the words a little wrong, but I know I’m not far off. I know, because the joke made me laugh. Laughter is one of those visceral responces that help cement memories into place. Do you remember strangely specific jokes from sitcoms you watched when you were a kid? Well, then.

The lesson here is that even if you’re writing a spec for a notoriously humorless show, like L&O, it will serve you well to look for a funny moment or two. If the show you’re specing EVER does comedy, EVER, then you have the total right to put it in your spec.

The specs that were submitted to Joss when I was trying to get onto Buffy included an NYPD Blue spec. The first thing he said to me about my writing was to compliment a joke from the spec. Not a tense moment or a bit of action or a reveal, but a joke. Jokes stick.

Usually, in a cop show spec, you will have a serious A story, balanced with a funny B story or runner of some kind. Spend a lot of time on the funny bits. They may very well be the thing that gets your script noticed. B stories are sometimes neglected by the writer, since they take up less acreage, but they are the spice that makes the dish.

Lunch: Chicken in Mole sauce (is that redundant?) The Mole was sweeter than I’ve usually encountered. Can’t say I’m against it.

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