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Hello again! I want to make clear that friend-of-the-blog Lani is not herself compiling a catalog of joke types, but that I am. Or at least, I intend to. Some of the entries in this blog will be devoted to indentifying joke species, as a part of the catch-and-release effort. Others will continue to be about other aspects of spec writing.

I got to interact with two lovely puppies while I was on vacation. Little tiny things that lived in a beach-side café, digging adorably in the sand and eating random bits of dropped starch. So cute! And I had that thought. That one that I think all of us have when we play with a small animal. “I’d agree to give birth, if I could have one of these instead of a baby.”

Oh.

So… that’s just me, then.

That was my attempt to execute a certain kind of tv joke in blog form. I was prompted to try this by a note from friend of the blog Lani. Lani is enjoying the continuing catalog of joke types. She writes:

“One of my favorites is the silent punchline, or what I call a cricket, when someone says something that doesn’t become a joke until the silent beat. They play off the other characters, and the audience, knowing a character so well that comment isn’t necessary.”

Lani calls it a “cricket” to evoke the implied sound of crickets during the silent pause. Some shows use a real cricket sound here, but that’s getting very tired. The joke form itself is evergreen, however.

Lani, bless her, even supplied examples, which Buffy fans may recall. The first is from the Buffy musical episode, in which Anya is wildly off-base in identifying the source of the evil:

“The first cricket that comes to me off the top of my head is when Anya sings, “Bunnies, it must be bunnies” and then there’s the shot of everyone just staring at her on a silent beat. Then back to Anya with “Or maybe midgets.”

She also recalls this one, which is, interestingly, entirely silent, relying on an outlandish costume.

“A great cricket is when Giles opens the Magic Shop and he’s wearing the sorcerer getup and Buffy just stares at him for a beat, and he takes it off.”

Like the analogy jokes that we talked about earlier, I think these jokes work because they come directly out of character. You’re reminded of Anya’s irrational fear of rabbits in the first example, and you’re amused, conversely, by Giles’ out-of-character decision to wear a costume, in the second example. It’s a very common joke form, and I’m sure you can think of your own examples from Friends, from The Simpsons, etc. The Office is almost entirely constructed of crickets, come to think of it. Man, I love the Office.

I have two caveats about this joke form, however. As I was writing this entry, it occurred to me that my instinct is telling me it works better on film than on paper. So much of it is about the literal silence and the facial expression of the actor doing the reacting. On paper, in a spec, it may read not as much as a silent punchline, as it does an absent punchline. Have your friends read it, ask them about it, make sure you’re getting the right effect.

My second caveat. If you do this, make sure you don’t have the character who uttered the original line follow it up with “Did I say that out loud?” That was very funny the first time. (That was on Cheers, I think?) It is no longer funny.

But whatever the hazards, this is one of the joke types that comes out of character. And that makes it good. Look at The Office to see how the pros do it.

Lunch: A weird kind of shake with yogurt and tofu and soymilk and peanut butter and splenda. I want a burger.

/duplicate entry deleted/

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

Hi all! I had the chance to go to a fun and interesting event last night: a party for women televison writers. Since each staff typically only has one or two women writers (although this is changing), it’s not often that we all get a chance to really connect in big groups like this. And the fact that staffing season is just getting underway guaranteed a lively night. We were bombarding each other with questions about pilots we’d read, meetings we’d taken, staff openings we’d heard about, the reputations of various potential bosses… Great stuff. I saw some old friends and met some impressive people I hadn’t had a chance to meet before. Also, there were these mini grilled cheese sandwiches. Fantastic. I had five.

It was fun being in an environment both social and writerly. It reminded me of why I like writing on a staff. So, (awkward transition), this might be a good time to address a question that someone asked me a while back about how the process of writing on a staff differs from writing a spec. Specifically, about the outlining part of the process: how much goes on, and of what kind. I’ve said some of this stuff before, but there’s also new material in here. Check it out.

In theory, there shouldn’t be much difference in this aspect of the job. You start on a whiteboard, or notebook, or index cards, and you get your story in order. You figure out the theme, the basic events, the big turns in the story. The A story, the B story. What the act breaks are, and then what all the scenes are. This is the “break.” It can take, literally, weeks – more time than it takes to write the script. When it’s done, the story is “broken.” The process of the break is one that is almost always executed by the entire staff together, under the direction of the show runner. If you’re writing a spec, this is obviously accomplished by you alone (with input from friends and colleagues) – a harder process, but purer. You get to tell exactly the story you want. You simply have to do it more carefully, since there’s no one there to say, “Gee, we tried telling a story like this once on Nash Bridges, and that third act break never really popped…”

Anyway, now you start creating documents. The first is the famous “beat sheet.” This is, of course, a preliminary form of an outline. It simply tells you the location of each scene and the briefest version of the events in that scene. This is a chance to re-evaluate the breaking of the story. Problems that were invisible during the breaking might become evident here, so changes might have to be made to the story. On an actual staff, this will sometimes involve putting everyone back to work on a rebreak.

The difference between a “beat sheet” and an “outline” is one of degree. Personally, I often find it hard to generate a genuine beat sheet because I think of lines and jokes and details and I write them in there so I won’t forget them. I end up with something in between the two stages. But a real outline is long, many many pages. Mine come out somewhere between 9 and 14 pages for an hour episode. Some shows seem to lend themselves to shorter ones, some to longer ones. Gilmore Girls outlines are incredibly long and detailed, with whole runs of dialogue spelled out.

Writing the outline, of course, gives you another chance to find problems with the breaking of the story. Sometimes you start completely over at this stage. Plus, on a real staff, this is the point at which the studio and the network start having real input. So that can change everything. All the writers — back into the room for a rebreak!

On an actual staff, there is often not enough time to create a full outline. This is because of all that time spent breaking and re-breaking, of course. So, one often has to write from the beat sheet. Honestly, I always kind of like this, because it leaves me a little more wiggle room in the writing to change my idea of how a scene lays out as I write it. With a long outline, you sometimes feel like the actual writing process is reduced to reformatting.

So now you take the outline and write the script. This part can actually be done in a weekend if you have to. But, here’s the kicker: once you turn in the script, there can often be another rebreak! So all of that rebreaking earlier was meaningless! In theory, all of it represented some type of progress, but sometimes that’s simply not the case. I think the best measure of the quality of a staff/show runner is the ability to solve story problems early in the process. Here’s where you, the spec writer, gain your biggest advantage. That time thing again. You can take the time to fix problems in an unrushed way, whereas the staff writers have the looming blade of the production schedule.

(By the way, there’s another interesting thing that happens as production nears. When the production people are scheduling the actual shooting of the scenes, they have to create a short description of each scene, for all the people involved in production to have at hand. This generates a new document called a “one-liner.” It lists the location and the briefest version of the events in the scene. In other words, they recreate the beat sheet, which they have never seen. I find this amusing.)

To sum it all up: I like little grilled cheese sandwiches.

Lunch: A chicken stir-fry thing I made using something I bought in Tobago called “wet green seasoning.” Unique.

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