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One of the first shows I worked on was a sitcom called Monty. It didn’t last for very long, although the cast included Henry Winkler, David Schwimmer and a very teenaged David Krumholtz. The show runner was the brilliant Marc Lawrence, who was extremely patient and kind with a certain green young writer. He also completely startled me by disagreeing with what I, at the time, thought was one of the unbreakable tenets of comedy writing. You’ve probably been taught to end joke lines “on the funniest word.” Marc preferred lines that continued past the joke. Here’s an example of the kind of thing I’m talking about, taken from a “Jake in Progress” script, because that’s what I have at hand:

MARK
(to Jake, re: Adrian) Geez, when did this guy become such a prude?

JAKE
(absently) 1992. (then) See that girl over there?

And the conversation continues on, now about the girl at the next table. See the effect that you get? “1992” is where the laugh falls. But the line goes past it. This takes the pressure off the joke, allows it to be “thrown away,” tossed out casually by the actor. As a result, the whole exchange feels more confident, less rim-shotty, less desperate. Even when it is just being read, not performed.

Here’s another example adapted from the same script:

ADRIAN
But I thought things were going great with you two.

JAKE
They are! We go to the movies, and we talk, and she’s really cute and funny…

ADRIAN
You want her.

JAKE
Like Robin wants Batman. But she’s so happy that we’re taking things slow.

Here, the joke breaks on “Batman,” but the line continues, driving us back into plot. Notice how even, frankly, a fairly cheap joke like this one feels better this way, when it isn’t left hanging out there in the spotlight.

If you’re writing an hour spec, instead of a half-hour, the same thing applies. Even more so, since very jokey humor is probably going to feel wrong in an hour, but thrown-away humor might feel just right. Here’s an example from an episode of Angel in which Cordelia realizes she needs to cleanse her new apartment to get rid of a certain ghost.

CORDELIA
This is easy! Little old lady ghost. Probably hanging around ’cause she thinks she left the iron on. Let’s get us a nice cleansing spell and do this thing!

It would’ve been easy to end the line with “left the iron on.” But it would’ve felt jokier.

You can’t, and shouldn’t, do this with every joke in your script. But if you have a joke in your spec that’s always bothered you because it feels too ba-dum-dumpy, try shooting past it a little bit. See how that feels.

Lunch: Scrambled eggs with salsa and canned diced chilies. Humble and homey.

Well, everyone, first of all I should tell you that Tobago was swell. The water was warm, the fish were spectacular, the food was starchy and delicious. Go there at once, have a wonderful time!

The best moment came as I was snorkeling along, peering though my beloved prescription swim mask, when something came into view through the murky water in front of me. It was getting clearer as I drew closer. Soon, I made out a collection of dark objects, hovering there in close formation. Twenty of them, each about four inches long. They looked more like a squadron of one-man space fighters than you can possibly imagine. They moved off – backwards — in perfect unison, still in their formation, as I approached. And I saw that they were squids. Caribbean Reef Squids, actually. As they hovered off, I could almost hear the hum of their tiny impulse engines. Simply perfect.

I cannot imagine describing these guys to anyone without employing the analogy of the little space squadron. It’s how I saw them in that moment, and it’s the only way I can convey what they looked like. This made me think. I was already aware that I used analogy in writing all the time, so I did a little search work with my old Buffy files to see how I used it. Interesting…

Sometimes it’s the basis for a joke. Here’s a line from the Doublemeat Palace episode of Buffy, in which Buffy struggles to come with a positive spin on the orientation film she just watched about the fast food joint’s signature beef-and-chicken burger.

BUFFY
The cow and chicken coming together even though they never met… It was like Sleepless in
Seattle if Tom and Meg were, like, minced.

There’s almost always humor in someone making a link between things that have one small point of similarity. Here’s Willow, describing the Sunnydale High marching band. They march, she observes…

WILLOW
(not listening to
herself)
Like an army. With music instead of bullets and usually no one dies.

Here’s an exchange between two characters in “End of Days” as they improvised medical supplies to treat injured comrades:

ANDREW
I liked the real bandages better. This bed sheet is awfully festive.

ANYA
I know. They’re all gonna look like mortally wounded Easter baskets.

There’s something I love about the unexpected point of comparison. The incongruity of an apt-but-unlikely comparison is often naturally quite funny. Of course, it doesn’t have to be. It can be character-y, like this line from “After Life,” that compares time to physical space.

TARA
I like sunrise better when I’m getting up early than when I’m staying up late, you know? It’s like I’m seeing it from the wrong side.

It can even be sad, like this line from the same episode when a Demon taunts Buffy:

DEMON
You’re the one who’s barely here. Set on this earth like a bubble. You won’t even disturb the air when you go.

I want to point out that I located each of these examples by opening my old Buffy files and simply searching for the word “like.” I was surprised to discover at least one example in every script I tried. I use this structure all the time and I find it quite powerful. Comparisons, like pictures, are worth a thousand words. They’re part of how we understand the world, by conceptualizing things in terms of other things. Why do so many of us pepper our speech with “like”? I think it’s because we’re actually struggling in that moment to find the next word, the one that really will literally tell our listeners what something is “like.”

Think about how your characters are understanding their world, and you’ll find analogies. When you show those analogies to the readers, you’re letting them into the characters’ heads. Knowing that I saw the squids as tiny space fighters may tell you as much about me as it does about the squids, right? Powerful stuff.

Lunch: Asian noodle soup made with something I’ve just discovered recently: noodle-shaped tofu. It’s good!

Hi Everyone! Sorry for the long silence. The hotel at which I stayed on vacation had one internet terminal for everyone to share. I didn’t feel I could justify spec script tips under such circumstances. Also, there was important snorkeling that I had to get done. Know what’s cute? Carribean reef squids are cute.

Apparently, while I was gone, the trades announced my new deal. So I guess it’s official and I can tell you all about it now. It’s a two year development deal with NBC/Universal television. I’m very excited about it, and cannot wait to start work!

I’m exhausted from travel right now, but actual writing discussion will happen again soon. I promise!

Lunch (not today’s lunch, but a recent lunch): “Crab ‘n’ dumplin,” a traditional Tobago treat… huge sections of crab stewed in the shell in a kind of green curry sauce, served with pale and doughy flatbread. It’s sold from beach-side stands. Hot and green and intense and very messy. Wow. Magnificent.

… that I’m heading out of town for a week starting tomorrow. I don’t know if I’ll be able to post at all while I’m gone. Can’t wait to talk to you all again when I return!

Hang on, everyone. I’m about to take an unpopular position. I’m going to advocate analyzing comedy. This is, in general, thought to be a very bad idea. Even dangerous. Once you start trying to figure out why something is funny, the reasoning goes, you lose the sense of whether it is or not. The enterprise is, at best, fruitless, and at worst, a path to the numbing loss of comedy sensation.

Well, it’s true that once you start taking apart a joke to learn how it works, you do lose track of your natural unselfconscious sense of what’s funny. The sensation of it is unmistakable. And, to me, very familiar. Before I was a comedy writer I was a student of Linguistics. We had to talk about language all the time, asking ourselves questions about which utterances were a part of our own natural idiolect and which ones weren’t. Even a few minutes of this kind of thinking tended to lead to blunted judgments about what one could or could not say. I have heard this referred to as “Scanting Out,” the name coming from the result of trying to figure out when one would naturally use the word “scant.” Would you naturally produce the utterance: “His entrance was greeted with scant applause”? “I had scant time to prepare”? How about “there was scant butter in the storehouse”? Or “She gathered her scant dress around her”? Or “He was a man of scant talent”? Or “Any loss of water will reduce the supply to scant”? Hmm… lose your sense of it yet?

And still, we do not stop analyzing language. It’s valuable and worth the effort. I think joke analysis can also be worth more than a scant effort. (See… the instinct is back again. It bounces back!)

I would love, someday, to create a Field Guide to Jokes. A real inventory of types of funny with lists of examples. Much of the skill that makes a good joke writer is clearly subconscious, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be sharpened. And for those of you who are new to joke writing, I think this kind of guide might help you a lot, giving you a mental check-list of possible funny approaches to a moment.

So let’s start.

One of the entries in the Field Guide would have to do with taking cliches and altering them, usually by simply reversing the intent. For example, when Buffy was battling an especially ugly monster she once said: “A face even a mother could hate.” And I vividly remember Joss pitching that in another script someone should say, “And the fun never starts.” In another, I riffed off the old Wonder Bread slogan “Builds strong bodies eight ways” to describe a weapon that “Kills strong bodies three ways.” This one was less successful since no one but me remembered the old Wonder Bread slogan. They can’t all be winners. The headline of this entry, a punnish play off a title, is one that I simply cannot believe we never used.

It’s a fun type of joke. Breezy, a little dry, kind of smart. You might want to play around with it. If you’ve got a character who needs a wry observation on what’s going on around them, this might be the joke type for you.

Lunch: Took the leftover chicken, tomato and eggplant from yesterday’s Mediterranean Salad, and heated it up with a bit of spaghetti sauce. Ate it with pita bread. Nothing wrong with that.

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