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The day that Harvey Korman died, I heard a little excerpt played on the radio of a comedy bit that I’d never heard before, taken from a sketch he performed with Danny Kaye. I’ve located the whole sketch here, but you don’t need to watch the whole thing since other than one funny joke — the one I heard excerpted for the radio — it’s pretty dire. But the joke worked for me. Here it is:

HARVEY
Class, for a baby’s bath, what’s the most important thing you absolutely need?

DANNY
A dirty baby?

Now, listening to this being performed, it’s clear early on what the joke is. It’s one of those “Stating the Obvious” jokes that I’ve talked about before. Once you hit “the most important thing,” you know that’s the joke. You probably already know that the answer is some version of “the baby.” And yet the joke made me chuckle. Because of the adjective.

It’s not just that adjectives make things funnier, although they often do. Moist, bendy, pointy, itchy — they are all great words that spice up any sentence. But in this case, “dirty” is doing something beyond that. Can you bathe a clean baby? Well, if you take bathing to include the idea of removing dirt, then, no, you can’t. So the answer makes literal sense, but it also raises the idea of NEEDING a dirty baby — needing something that is normally undesirable. For me, it even raises the image of someone purposefully dirtying a baby so that they can bathe it. Funny!

The joke isn’t in the words, of course, but in the concept. These are all the same joke (even though they don’t all work exactly the same way — since you can’t purposefully make a chicken raw, for example, it doesn’t quite resonate the way the baby one does):

What do you need to cook a chicken? Raw chicken.
To fix an engine? A broken engine.
To censor a movie? A dirty movie.
To cure the common cold? Well, first you need a cold…

If you wanted to use these, you’d massage the language a bit, but those are the hearts of the lines, right there.

I just did that thing, of course, where I killed the joke by dissecting it. But it’s worth it, because once you figure out how any one particular joke works, you can extrapolate and make jokes of your own. Maybe you’ll find the one your spec script needs.

Lunch: left-over Thai food. Spring rolls and peanut sauce.

Gentle Reader Claire in Massachusetts writes in with a great question. She notes that a lot of drama series are launched with two-hour pilots and wants to know if that means it would be a good idea to write a double-long spec pilot.

It is true that this is happening more and more. One reason for this is so a pilot that is never ordered to series can still be aired as a television movie and recoup some of its cost. I suspect we’ll see more and more of this.

Notice that it also allows writers more time to tell a story despite the fact that they have to do so much character-introducing and world-establishing.

And yet, I wouldn’t recommend writing a two-hour spec pilot. Specs are writing samples and when someone is looking to staff a show or even find a new client or select a contest winner, they usually have to read a lot of samples all at once. In their haste, they’re gonna be grabbing the slimmest scripts, not the fattest ones. And this holds true across genres. Even if you’re writing something with a sci-fi flavor (Sci-Fi network loves the two-hour pilots).

Comedies don’t generally have over-long pilots, but they do sometimes have those extra-long episodes. Don’t take that as an excuse to make your Office spec come in at 50 pages. Shorter is better, in comedy specs even more than in drama.

Lunch: egg foo yung from the commissary. It’s never quite as good as you’d hope.

This is going to be a messy post, I can tell. No theme, no arc. Ah, well.

First: I’m looking at a letter sent to be on behalf of something called Zhura, which is billed as “a new online screenwriting tool.” The idea seems to be that you can write in professional script formats without paying for Final Draft. I have no idea if it works (everyone I know already has Final Draft), but if you’ve been saving your pennies to buy screenwriting software, you can check it out and find out if it works! (It’s at Zhura.com.)

Second: Thanks to Gentle Reader Lila who kept me company on the picket line and who writes thank me for the invitations I issued for aspiring writers to come out and walk with us. Thank you, Lila and everyone else!

Similarly, Matt in England, who is starting what sounds like a rip-snortin’ comedy career over there, writes to thank the blog for guidance in writing a comedy spec script. You’re welcome, Matt! I’m thrilled to hear I helped!

Finally, I’ve been meaning to thank some Gentle Readers for some gifts. Lilia, thank you very much. Also, I have received several interesting books. One of them is at home and I have forgotten the name of the G.R. who sent it, so I’ll add that here when I get a chance. The other is a fine book called “Comedy by the Numbers,” by Eric Hoffman and Gary Rudoren. There is a lot to love in this book, but my favorite bit so far is a list of “Novelty Items That Never Caught On,” which includes, “never-light emergency flares,” “sexy edible shoe insoles” and my all-time favorite, “vomit bikini.” Hee! Vomit bikini. In a way, these items work a bit like that joke we’ve been discussing, in which only part of a story is overheard. Like those story fragments, these items force the listener to construct a whole scenario in which these items are a sensible part. Interesting.

Lunch: avocado, lettuce and tomato sandwich. I’m more and more convinced you don’t really need the bacon.

Friend of the Blog Alex Epstein sends along an interesting contemplation on a certain type of joke. I’m going to let you see his explanation and then present mine, which differs on a certain point. Here is how he explains it:

… Sometimes, I see good writers make fun of bad, obvious dialog and cliche. Saw a bit on Steven Moffat’s JEKYLL, ep. 3. A bunch of suits and techies watching the usual assortment of screens tracking Dr. Jackman:

I bet that sort of retort comes up a lot in story rooms; I wonder how often it makes it to the screen. (Network exec: “But how does the audience know he’s moving?”)

Oh, this is very interesting. I agree that this is totally about subverting the expectations of the listener. It never would have occurred to me, though, that this had to do with a response to exec-driven overwriting. I would have taken this (at least the first joke) more as a response to the real-life human tendency to state the obvious. And the second one I take as a response to the expected structure of normal conversation (i.e. “ever since…” is supposed to lead to a anecdote.) So for me, both of these are about someone reacting to a statement that was deficient in some way, but deficient because of the foible of a character.

However, I’m open to Alex’s interpretation, now that I hear it. Certainly, the first joke illustrates an excellent way to turn a “make it clearer” note into a benefit — have someone hang a lantern on the over-clarity and then, if possible, slap a topper onto it! (So much writers’ slang! Yay!)

By the way, the Buffy example reminds me of another classic Joss joke, in which someone tries to deflect a question by saying “it’s a long story,” only to have another character quickly sum up the situation, leading the first character to lamely say, “Guess it’s not that long.” The standard conventional rule is that “it’s a long story” ends any discussion. To go past it and deflate it is funny.

It’s making me curious about other jokes that do this. Oh! How about the Princess Leia/Han Solo moment: “I love you.” “I know.” That’s certainly a violation of how we know that exchange is supposed to go. If you’re writing a comedy or a drama with wit, it’s worth doing a bit of thinking about this kind of joke since there’s something so ingrained about conversational assumptions that these jokes always pack a nice punch.

Lunch: salad bar, squash soup

How fortuitous! Or is it serendipitous? Perhaps both. Gentle Reader Hilary in Honolulu has sent a letter (thank you, Hilary!) in which she references a comedy bit that has relevance to something we were already talking about. Hilary describes a character (from a British show I’m not familiar with), in this way:

Rowley Birkin sits by the fire, snifter in hand, and tells a story. His speech is so slurred, however, that only tiny fragments of the story emerge, such as “‘don’t point that thing at me,’ she said,” or “three buttocks,” after which he relapses into indistinct speech.

Oh! That’s the same joke as “story fragment” jokes we were talking about on February 25. The reader/listener gets an incomplete part of a scenario and has to fill in the rest.

I don’t suppose there’s much instructional value in this observation except to point out that this is why it’s so often said (falsely, I believe) that “there are only seven jokes.” What writers mean when they say that is that joke types often end up encompassing a lot more different kinds of examples than you notice at first. The general principal that there’s humor in forcing the audience to mentally complete unlikely mental scenarios can be brought to the page in a lot of different forms that are all funny for the exact same reason, no matter how much the execution varies.

By the way, Hilary also mentions that she is making progress in terms of breaking into the business in the UK — she’s got professional interest there and a finalist slot in a competition. Whoo! I hear all the time from readers who are making progress, gaining confidence, creating good work. I couldn’t be prouder!

Go Team!

Lunch: chicken enchiladas, rice, beans

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