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I had lunch with Lisa Klink today. She is the Trek writer who sent in the “Jesus was not a Zombie” example from a previous post. Delightful! She went from being a name on an office in the Star Trek building, to being a real live person eating sushi. People do that. They sometimes stop being incidental.

Characters in a script can do that too. Remember Jimmy, the gate guard in yesterday’s post? Well, what if he was a minor character in your script, chirping up here and there with a “G’morning, Champ” or whatnot, and then, at the third act break, he suddenly pulls a gun and is revealed to be hugely important?

Well, clearly, he deserves a name at that point. But if you give him a name all the way through the script, you might tip the fact that he will be important later on. And you don’t want to do that. You want to hide him as much as possible.

The answer is simple: you can change the way you identify a character at any point in the script. Even though it feels like you’re breaking a rule, the first time you do it.

If someone you’ve been calling TOUR GUIDE turns out to be KEVIN, a gunman, or, let’s say, um… JENNY, your main character’s long-lost sister, you can do this:

TOUR GUIDE
Don’t you know me? It’s me! Jenny! Your sister Jenny!

Reginald blinks at her. Knows what she’s saying is true. He backs away.

JENNY
Reginald? What’s wrong?

This is similar to the way you reveal the owner of an offstage voice:

VOICE (O.S.)
Hey! What’re you kids doing there?

The kids freeze, turn, and are relieved to see it’s only Kyle, grinning at them from the doorway.

KYLE
Did I scare you?

By allowing yourself the freedom to change the character’s identification, you are allowing the reader to more closely experience what a viewer would experience: suddenly realizing that this character is transforming from a minor element to a genuine player. This makes it easier for them to go along for the journey.

I suppose there is a question about whether or not there should be a (cont’d) on that second line. That’s a question for the philosophers. I say, do as you wish.

Lunch: Sushi at Echigo again. I can’t get enough of that warm rice.

Yesterday, I drove to the wrong place. Most of my meetings lately have been at Universal Studios. The one you’re thinking of, the one attached to the theme park with the Jurassic Park ride. It’s become very automatic to drive to Universal. But yesterday my meeting was actually at NBC. The one you’re thinking of, the one with Jay Leno inside. This led to a very confusing exchange between me and the guard at the gate at Universal. In the end, I got where I was going, and I wasn’t even late. If Jay Leno ever wants to go on the Jurassic Park ride, he can comfort himself knowing it’s only about ten minutes away. (I *knew* the meeting was at NBC. I can only blame motor programming. And my own general hilarity as a person.)

So, let’s talk about the guard at the gate at Universal. How important is it for you to know that his name was Jimmy? Not at all, I’m guessing. In fact, if I had told you this, you might have wondered if there was a reason for my mentioning it. Is he going to show up again later in Jane’s life? (So far… no. He hasn’t.)

When you’re writing your spec, you sometimes need to create incidental characters. Maybe it’s a guard at a gate. Or maybe one of the regular characters goes to the hospital, so you write a scene with a three-line-having doctor in it. A doctor whose lines should probably all be slugged with the name DOCTOR. Even if all the characters in the scene are calling him “Dr. Franklyn,” this is still my personal preference for how to label his lines. He might have gone to fictional medical school, but he’s not very important. Writers will differ on this, but that’s how I do it. Jimmy the guard is named: GUARD unless he pulls a gun and is revealed to be a much bigger part of the story than I thought. Then, he gets a name.

I was recently asked about a different kind of minor character. What about the kind who are introduced, not because your regulars go to a new venue, but because they’ve been there all along? For example, what if you need a Viper pilot for your Battlestar spec beyond those who have been established? Or another doctor we’ve never met before for your House or Grey’s spec? Or a sibling for one of the characters on Veronica Mars? I’m talking about someone whom the regulars are assumed to know, but who will be new to the readers.

Again, if they only have a few lines, I would still slug them as: PILOT or LITTLE SISTER. But if they’re going to be a significant part of the story, which is more likely now that they have an assumed pre-existing relationship with your main characters, then you are getting into the area where they will need a name.

Here’s how I would do it. (Others may disagree.) The stage directions would introduce the character, and they would also make his status clear in the following way:

INT. LAB – DAY
House is looking over the shoulder of the staff urologist, let’s call him DR. PATEL.

That little phrase “let’s call him,” tells the reader that this is a character you are introducing and naming. The dialogue that follows will make it clear that this is someone House already knows. This way, no reader will be confused into thinking that *they* should recognize this person.

The question I was actually asked about these characters had to do with how many of them you can have. A certain friend-of-a-friend-of-the-blog spec writer is finding that they’re having trouble keeping these people out of the story. Well, you don’t want to create bunches of them. If the actual show generally gets by without them, then your spec, ideally, should do so too. If you find yourself needing lots of extra people, lots of extra-canon relationships, then you might be going a bit astray. Cling to your produced examples, cleave unto them and do as they do. What has your show done in the case of stories that require these sorts of introductions? If you can’t find out that they’ve ever done stories that require them… uh-oh. Cleave! Cleave before you drive off the road!

Your one advantage over every other kind of writer is that you have a road map. Reread your produced examples until they fall off their brads. I cannot say this enough.

Lunch: poached eggs on canned artichoke hearts with a layer of taramosalata (that Greek whipped caviar stuff). It was an experiment. Not bad, a little weird.

Oh my. I am having a very busy day today, so I’m just going to offer a simple post. Another example of the principle I discussed in yesterday’s post.

Which two characters on The Office are the most realistic, grounded, identifiable-with, the least broadly-comic?

And which two actually *make* jokes? Compose jokes for each other with the intention of being funny, and then actually are funny?

It’s the same two. Jim and Pam. A-ha! QED.

Keep this in mind not only if you’re writing a spec for The Office, but for any show. You can move characters around on the groundedness scale simply by adjusting their level of joke-making-ness.

I think it’s a point worth making twice.

Lunch: Pho, that Vietnamese soup I like, at a restaurant I hadn’t tried before. It was disappointing. The broth lacked the intense flavor I seek out.

Okay, I just checked out “My Super Sweet 16,” the show about real teens and their ornate parent-funded coronations. My God! The waste of money! The waste of energies! Imagine if those kids put that kind of effort into their college applications, into their creative pursuits, into reading and learning! And the whole enterprise is counterproductive. They think they’re making their peers like them, but instead they’re clearly fostering resentment.

It’s one of those counterintuitive things. What you think makes you likable makes you unlikable. What you think makes you funny makes you unfunny. Which brings us looping around to an important principle relating to the nature of comedy. I was prompted to notice this principle, which I will unveil in a moment, by a question that came in the mail from Jerome in Chicago. He’s looking for techniques like the one I discussed on April 29, (about writing past the punchline,) techniques that work well for using humor in otherwise dramatic spec episodes. I hope you read the previous post, Jerome, about settling for the soft joke, it’s another good trick to creating humor without creating “jokiness.”

Well, Jerome’s note got me thinking. What is the ESSENTIAL difference between comedy-comedy and dramatic-comedy? And what I came up with startled me! It’s crazy, but here it is:

DRAMATIC CHARACTERS ARE INTENTIONALLY FUNNY. COMEDIC CHARACTERS ARE UNINTENTIONALLY FUNNY.

Isn’t that interesting? And counterintuitive? I never noticed it before, but it’s really true. Did everyone else already notice this? The more comedic the character, the less they (successfully) crack (funny) jokes.

Michael on The Office, is a comedic character. He is not usually trying to be funny. And when he does try, he isn’t. Which is an unintended result, and thus… funny. House, on the other hand, is a dramatic character. When he is funny, it’s because he is making a dry observation about something, and he intends it to be funny. The more a character cracks intentional jokes, the less “jokey” a show feels. Wild!

Now, this isn’t a strict half-hour vs. hour distinction. M*A*S*H is one of the most dramatic comedies ever made. Full of intentional humor — Hawkeye cracks jokes constantly, and comes across as war-bruised as a result. While an hour like Boston Legal can be packed with sincere nutjobs — packed with them! As a result, BL ends up feeling, at times, more broadly comedic than the comedy.

Even within the same show, you can see the difference clearly. Some half-hour shows, like Taxi, Bob Newhart or Seinfeld, have a character at the center who is more serious, sane and grounded than the characters around them. They don’t tend to get themselves stuck in bathtubs as often as the whack-a-doodles surrounding them. So how are these characters made funny? By giving them joking comments about the hijinks around them. Jerry comments to George about how crazy Kramer is – that’s intentional humor, making Jerry a more serious character. For me, Phoebe on Friends was at her best when she would suddenly manifest an unexpected awareness of the world that would allow her to make a joke about someone else’s behavior before she would slip back into her own bubble. Joey, the other oblivious, broadly comedic character on that show, rarely made the same jump… UNTIL HE HAD HIS OWN SHOW. Then, suddenly, when required to have depth, to be more serious, he was making jokes like the great one from the pilot where he poked fun at his sister, pointing out that you don’t often hear “the argument *for* teen pregnancy.” With that line he became a different, more serious guy. (Show didn’t work, but in that moment, I had hope.)

Conversely, sometimes hour dramas have one comedic character, or a series of comedic subplots. Again, these are things that happen, funny circumstances unintended by the characters, or ludicrous sincere behavior by those characters, while the supposedly more serious parts of the show are the parts with characters making witty observations. Baltar is unintentionally funny. Adama, making a wry comment about Baltar, is intentionally funny. A combo that works together to bring the house down. (Have I mentioned I love this show?)

Have I over-explained it enough? Sorry. I’m actually just working this through in my head. So how can you use this surprising fact? Use it to modulate the tone of your spec.

Want a character to seem smart… even serious? Make his first line intentionally funny. When Parker was introduced in a Buffy episode, we had to make it instantly clear that she could consider this guy worthy of her. So the first thing he did was ask Buffy if she had any hobbies….

PARKER
…You know, like solving crosswords or spitting off the world’s tallest buildings.

He’s making a joke. So we accept him as intelligent, grounded, not ridiculous and jokey. A serious candidate for Buffy’s affection.

But a character like Principal Snyder says:

SNYDER
Call me Snyder. Just a last name. Like Barbarino.

It is a similarly ludicrous thing to say. But he is sincere, not joking. And therefore the line is jokier. Perfect for a thoroughly comedic character.

Want a really complex character? Mix the two. Jason Bateman’s character on Arrested Development had both kinds of jokes. He was simultaneously appalled by his own family, and just as appalling himself. He could function as a serious character, making aware asides in one scene, and then be the oblivious boob in another. Frasier was a similarly complex character who used both types of funny. Complex and wonderful. High degree of difficulty, that one.

So, to sum it up for Jerome. Give jokes to your dramatic characters, and sincerity to your comedic ones, and you won’t go far wrong tonally. That’s it!

Lunch: Green Corn Tamales at El Cholo on Wilshire with my parents. Sweet and terrific!

Even after I got work on sitcoms, and got too busy to pitch at Star Trek:TNG and its other incarnations, I used to go haunt the halls of the Hart building every time I happened to be on the Paramount lot, just to get that great I’m-almost-on-the-Enterprise feeling. Oh! I was so envious — still am, a bit. One of the offices had a name on it in those years: Lisa Klink. I never got to meet her, but there weren’t many girls on the spaceship in those days, and I remembered the name.

Well, guess what came in the mail? Yessir, that’s right, a note from Lisa Klink! She reads this humble blog. I’m absolutely tickled!

And she brought treats for the class. She submits for discussion another example of funny from the world of hour drama. This is her reconstruction, from memory, of an exchange on Bones:

BOOTH
We don’t believe in things like witch doctors and zombies.

BONES
Didn’t Jesus rise from the dead?

BOOTH
(appalled)
Jesus was not a zombie!

I love this! Although I have to say I disapprove of having two major characters whose names look so similar on the page. Doesn’t that look confusing to you?

Lisa points out that it’s the mixture of the silly and the sacred that gives it its comedic power. Absolutely. And it’s also a great example of using humor to expose character. You can tell a lot about these characters just from this exchange.

This is what we call a “soft joke,” as opposed to the “hard” jokes of sitcoms. A funny exchange without a bing-bang punchline. It’s also very restrained. Personally I would’ve been tempted to extend the exchange. Continuing from where we left off:

BONES
He rose from the dead and walked around. How isn’t that a zombie?

BOOTH
That’s sacrilegious! That’s horrible!

Booth gives Bones a swat.

BONES
Ow! Heal me, Zombie Jesus!

Yep. That’s what I would’ve written. And then I would’ve cut it back again. The shorter version has all the comedy value without getting too broad. It’s more disciplined, it’s more real and it takes up less space. Also, I was working very hard to justify the phrase “zombie jesus,” but a quick Google search reveals a lot of instances of that phrase, so it’s probably not worth doing. This is a classic case of a light touch yielding the better result. It was worth trying the longer version, but then it’s important to know when less is more.

Not every joke worth doing is worth driving into the ground. This is one of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn.

Thanks again to our guest star, Lisa Klink, for providing today’s show-and-tell!

Lunch: chicken with barbeque sauce made according to the South Beach Cookbook recipe. It was only okay.

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