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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.

I had Indonesian food with a friend the other day. You remember the lunch entry. There was much interesting conversation and laughter and a really gorgeous dessert. This was one of those little restaurants that also has a small selection of imported grocery items for sale. I bought myself a bag of garlic-and-tapioca-coated peanuts and they’re mighty good. I’m eating them now and enjoying the packaging very much. You should see this logo. It seems to be two Easter bunnies astride a swimming peanut that is arching out of the water like a breaching whale, or maybe like a speedboat. Seriously. They’re certainly bunnies, and each is holding a basket. And that peanut that they’re on is almost completely out of the water. Two small fish jump alongside and a pine forest is arrayed behind the whole scene. And there’s a big setting sun, too. Wow. That’s one hard-working logo. Words are not adequate.

But when you’re writing a spec script, all you have are words. And you need to deploy them with maximum efficiency. Here’s another neat little trick that can help you. This is from Joss’s script for the Firefly episode called “Objects in Space.” Jayne has been complaining about River, who recently came at him with a butcher’s knife. Zoe defends River to Mal:

ZOE
Sir, I know she’s unpredictable. But I don’t think she’d harm anyone.

JAYNE
(“Hellooo…”)
Butcher’s knife.

Joss has done a beautifully efficient thing here. The one word “Hellooo” in the parenthetical does the work of a much longer explanation. Even the longer alternative “pointing out the obvious” doesn’t really get the job done, since it doesn’t necessarily convey that distinct exasperated tone of voice that “Hellooo” does.

By the way, the quote most often used in this way is probably “Yeah, right,” since sarcasm is needed so often.

Keep in mind that this is not a very commonly employed technique. This is the only time Joss uses a quote inside a parenthetical in this whole script, and a quick look through my own scripts didn’t reveal ANY, although I know I have used it on occasion. So don’t go looking through your spec for places to use this. But if you find yourself struggling to efficiently convey in a parenthetical the tone you need, then this might be the answer.

Maybe you thought scriptwriting would be all about learning lots of rules. But look at how many of the really expressive ways of doing it are all about creative variations on the standard ways of doing things! Don’t you just love that?

Lunch: Sashimi with a nice little serving of warm rice.

So. Is anyone (or, possibly, everyone) else completely obsessed with Project Runway? This is what reality television was born to do. It’s got actual documentary value, since you learn about a world you previously knew nothing about, plus it’s got that contest element that makes for tremendous suspense. If you haven’t seen the latest ep yet (the first half of the finale), and you don’t want to know the latest, then skip the following paragraph.

Did you notice how everything is conspiring to make us think Daniel V isn’t going to win? I have this strange suspicion that they’re doing it on purpose to throw us off the track. If that’s the case, then that would mean that producers told Tim Gunn to withhold praise from Daniel just to manipulate us. I love the show, but I feel a little bit like that would be cheating. Tim Gunn is supposed to be on THAT side of the camera, uninfluenced by gross matters of commerce and storytelling. I feel like there should be an information curtain between him and the producers, don’t you? Ah well, perhaps there is, and Daniel V really has failed to impress. We may never know.

All right. Back to spec scriptwriting. There is a connection to what I just wrote, but it’s tenuous… something about an information curtain. We all understand that a reader of script shouldn’t be allowed to know more than a viewer of the eventual filmed product would. Thus, we purposely withhold information when we write our stage directions. It would be very strange, for example to include the following stage direction:

Jeremy sits up and notices that his tent smells strongly of boyenberries. His hair is then tousled by a shockingly warm wind that makes him think of his childhood in Florida.

The reader of such a direction is going to rightly wonder how the viewer is supposed to know about the scent of boyenberries and the temperature of the wind and the childhood memories.

None of you would, I’m confident, write such a direction. That isn’t the danger. The danger is over-correction. In an effort to avoid telling too much, sometimes new writers tell too little. It turns out that it is perfectly all right in many cases to explain what a character is thinking. Here’s a stage direction I’ve adapted from one I wrote for an episode of Buffy. Xander is in a phone booth, calling Buffy to warn her that he’s been duplicated. Then his double walks past the phone booth. The stage direction reads:

The phone’s still ringing and Xander is torn — wait for Buffy to pick up? Or follow his double? He hesitates, then hangs up and follows Xander-Double.

In a script that is going to be produced, these kinds of directions help the director and the actor know how to play to moment. In a script that is going to be READ, they help the reader imagine an actor playing it, and thus tell the reader how to interpret the moment. There is nothing wrong with doing this.

In fact, you can do more than this. You can tell the reader not only what the character is thinking, but you can also tell them what they, the reader, should be thinking. From earlier in the same script:

The dump is empty now. Except that something lies half-buried in garbage, unnoticed. We push in. IT’S XANDER, still lying unconscious where he fell. So who just went off with Buffy?

That last question, “So who just went off with Buffy?” is what I want the reader of the script to be asking. I include it so they understand that it’s all right for them to have this question at this time — that I WANT them to be asking it.

Putting in little signposts like these will assure the reader that they’re following the story.

Here’s another, hypothetical, example. Suppose you’re writing a spec for a medical show and you have one of your major characters suddenly say something wildly out of character. You’re HOPING that the reader will notice that it’s out of character and begin to suspect that the character has become infected with the brain disease that’s sweeping the hospital. But what if the reader simply thinks you’ve written a crappy line? Well, it’s all fixed if you can include a stage direction like “no one around him seems to notice that what was just said has a tinge of insanity to it.”

Letting the reader know that they’re following the story as you are intending them to, is a special kindness when you consider the constraints on time and attention span that a show-runner will have when they’re reading your script. Make it easy!

Lunch: Indonesian food. Mmm. The best part is the dessert, a mountain of pink ice with bits of confetti-colored goo and fruit inside.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: It occurs to me that this entry may be confusing to those who have paid attention to my repeated warning that readers skip the stage directions. Hmm. Good point. But still, if they do read ’em, it’ll be good if they’re helpful.

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