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A couple weeks ago, I was sitting in the audience at a classic film festival in here in L.A. and I overheard two young women having this exchange:

BOSSY
Have you seen “Seventh Heaven”?

DITZY
I’ve seen the television series.

BOSSY
Have you seen director Frank Borzage’s classic 1927 film “Seventh Heaven”?

DITZY
No.

You’ve probably got a good sense of how these lines were said. I’ve helped cement this impression with the names. But here’s how they were actually said:

BOSSY
Have you seen “Seventh Heaven”?

Ditzy hesitates. She knows this isn’t the right answer, but:

DITZY
(tentatively)
I’ve seen the television series.

BOSSY
(affectionately amused)
Have you seen director Frank Borzage’s classic 1927 film “Seventh Heaven”?

DITZY
(laughing at herself)
No.

What I love about the way this exchange actually happened is that it was unexpected and warm and human. It’s got subtler shadings than just a dumb girl irritating a bossy one. Sure, Ditzy is still a little ditzy and Bossy is still a bit bossy, but they’re tempered and real, more like people we know. That makes me more interested in getting to know them. Some might say that drama has been lost, but I think the old “drama is conflict” mantra can be a dangerous oversimplification. Simple conflict is less interesting than subtle conflict, even if that subtler conflict is less conflict-y. And you don’t need conflict between every pair of characters that has a scene together. Complicated shaded friendships are really interesting to watch, too.

I chose this example because I enjoyed overhearing this interaction. It made me start speculating about the girls. I imagined them to be college classmates who didn’t know each other very well. Perhaps they’d met up at the theater by chance, not design? I got curious because the interaction seemed to reveal so much about them — about Ditzy’s desire to be liked, about Bossy’s ability to make clear she was laughing with, not at, the other girl. There was a lot going on in a very few lines.

Pay attention to conversations around you when you’re out on your own. See if you can identify conversation molecules, the smallest pieces of conversation that capture important facets of all the characters involved. It’s really good training to help you write conversations that sound like they were lifted from real life, not from other writers’ screenplays. Even without collecting examples, I think you’ll find it’s a simple adjustment to look at dialogue you’ve written and play around with subtling up the attitudes.

Lunch: a BLT with a fried egg. It would be a BTLE, but the E is silent. Delicious!

It’s not often that a joke becomes an instant classic. But let us now discuss the joke from Glee that goes like this:

SUE
I will go to the animal shelter and get you a kitty cat. I will let you fall in love with that kitty cat; and then on some dark cold night, I will steal away into your home, and punch you in the face.

The beauty of the joke is that, unlike the joke from the McDonald’s ad that I talked about last time, this one WANTS you to get ahead of it, and then subverts your expectation. This is extremely hard to pull off because you have to make certain that the audience is going to get ahead of the joke, but you can’t be so obvious about it that you know they’re going to anticipate the switch-up. This particular version is a thing of joy. I think a lot of what makes it work is the violence of the final image — you lose nothing of the force of the threat by not getting to any violence against the kitten.

It can be easy to be too heavy-handed with this joke. Whenever a character on a sitcom is about to say an obvious swear word but is interrupted by another character, or quickly turns “ass” into, say, “asphalt,” the laugh is supposed to lie in the failure to reach the anticipated ending, just as in the kitten joke. But I generally find that in this form it feels forced and self-aware.

One time that I did see this version done well was in an old episode of the British series “Are You Being Served” in which the character of Mr. Humphries describes a quaint verse on an old calendar. He relates it as: “Monday is for Meeting. Tuesday is for Talking. Wednesday is for Wishing. Thursday is for Touching. Friday for some reason was torn out.” This works very much like the kitten joke — the sudden swerve off the well-worn track of the joke is in itself the source of the humor. Note that the delivery, without a pause after the word “Friday,” is an excellent example of throwing the joke away.

The other danger with this joke is being too subtle with it, so that the audience doesn’t have the replaced punchline clearly in mind. A friend of mine once created a single-panel cartoon that showed an egg-shaped Federal Express truck. On the side of the truck was printed “FederEGGal Express.” The joke, of course, is that the joke should be “Federal EGGspress”. I think that this probably escaped many readers, although I’m tickled by it. (In my mind it’s a character joke all about the cartoonist who made the mistake.)

So Sue Sylvester wasn’t really doing anything new, exactly. The joke form is established. But the joke hit a very small, hard to hit target perfectly and is perfect for modern savvy audiences who have become adept at anticipating punchlines. Give it a try. Tee up a joke and then let the ball fall off the tee.

Lunch: Back to Susan Feniger’s “Street” for more of that Kaya Toast. Wow.

Here’s how NOT to tell a joke. There is a currently running McDonalds commercial in which customers talk about bad situations. A man talks of “… when my luggage went to the Bahamas… And I didn’t.” Oh, the attempted joke is so painful! Jokes are about surprises. What is the surprise in the second half of that line? There is none. Of COURSE he didn’t go. If he’d gone to the Bahamas he wouldn’t have worded the first part that way! You don’t say, “My luggage went to the Bahamas and I had a great time there.” Nonsense.

The thing that makes this really shameful, of course, is the ellipsis. The pause is a very interesting comedy device. You can only use it when what follows is really good. It’s an investment that the writer (or actor) is making in the joke. If it pays off, then if pays off bigger because of the pause. But if it fails, you lose everything. In this particular ad, the pause isn’t just a short pause either, but a long one, with the actor turning to look down, then a WIDEN TO REVEAL shot change, which shows us that the actor is standing at an almost-empty luggage carousel, and then he looks back into camera for the “And I didn’t.” That is way too much weight for almost any joke! Especially for one with the fatal flaw of not being a joke.

I give this example to illustrate the opposite of what is called “throwing it away.” Throwing a joke away usually refers to the performance end of the deal, to delivering a joke in a casual off-handed way, without a pause or other tee-up, and without any apparent awareness of having said something funny. It can also refer to the way a joke is directed (for example, without changing the shot). And, important for our purposes, to the way a joke is written.

One way to make sure a joke is thrown away is to make sure you leave out that ellipsis. You can also use parentheticals or stage directions to tell the actor how to deliver the line: “Casually,” “Without pause” or even “Throwing it away” can help. Since you’re probably writing a spec script, intended to be read, not performed, you don’t even have to worry that you’ll piss off the actor who doesn’t want to be told how to deliver a joke.

I realize now that this is what my showrunner on a show called Monty meant when he told us not to put the funniest word at the end of the line, but to make sure the line continued past it. This seemed to me to go against one of the basic principals of joke writing, but now I see the value in it. He wanted casual, easy, “thrown away” funny, not needy rim-shot comedy, begging for laughs by hitting every comedy-made-easy rule.

If you want to be funnier than McDonald’s, write actual jokes, and if you really want to be classy, throw them away.

Lunch: beef shabu-shabu with an extra side of clear noodles.

So I watched another episode of Community last night, and I realized something wonderful and deep about the way complexity of character interacts with theme. More complex characters = more precise themes. Okay, maybe it’s not that deep, but it is wonderful.

The episode had to do with Jeff realizing he’d lost his position of authority over the group. Thematically, it was very similar to the episode I talked about a couple weeks ago, that was about Jeff resisting a challenge to his inflated perception of himself. Similar. But not identical. One was about needing to be in charge, the other was about needing to project coolness. And that’s marvelous, because if you can write your episodes with enough focus that those become distinct character flaws, then you get two great precise stories instead of one mushy one about Jeff feeling usurped in some general way.

When you’re looking for a story to tell, you may want to think of it as looking for a way to provoke your character. Look for their weaknesses, but do so with precision. This may lead you to despair that you haven’t created a complex enough character, but that’s okay — the secret is that it’s stories like this that CREATE character. If you don’t know how your character would react to a very specific provocation, then this is your chance to find out and tell the viewer/reader about it. You’ll look like a genius and your character will grow.

The other really good trick that the writers of Community use is that it’s never just one character acting out. Get two characters provoked at once, spurring them into actions that put them in conflict and you’ve got a lot of activity — with all of it coming out of character. Beautiful!

Lunch: I was a baby shower where I ate many exciting cheeses, veggies, chicken satay and a delightful scallion pancake!

There’s a good example out there right now of what my friend and fellow writer Jeff Greenstein (@blue439) calls “Clams Casino” — that is, an old over worked joke (or “clam”) used as an ingredient in a new exciting mixture. Note that Clams Casino is a classic garlicky recipe, presumably good for making sure dinner guests don’t realize how old the clams were until they’re halfway home.

The clam dish in question is featured in the latest Progressive Insurance ad. This is the series of ads featuring the perky salesgirl, Flo. I often find that these ads have the rhythm of jokes without being genuinely funny, but this one worked for me. In the ad she cracks some kind of mild joke and then adds, “I’m here all week.” This particular phrase has been clammy for at least a decade. It’s often accompanied by “Try the veal,” and/or “Remember to tip your waitress”.

The commercial rescues itself by having the girl continue, a bit abashed, “I will. That’s my schedule.” This is a great save. Not only is the attitude right, clam-shamed, but the word “schedule,” by referencing the *actual* venue that’s represented, a retail store, pulls us out of the implied world of 1980s comedy clubs in a grounded way. The joke was made literal and became a joke again. Nice work, some ad writing person!

You can do the same thing if you find yourself in a clammy situation. Look for a way to make the joke literal by tying it to the setting, character or plot that’s specific to your script. Here’s another example in which the same trick was used. Strikingly, it’s also a comedy club reference — because that is of course the source of the clammiest clams. This is in an episode of the Simpsons: Moe tells a joke, gets no reaction from a crowd, taps his mike and nervously jokes, “is this thing on”? Angle on Barney, who realizes the mike is in fact unplugged. He apologizes and plugs it in. Just as in the Progressive ad, the joke is saved by making it literal.

An aside: What I find interesting about both of these clams is that they are clams ABOUT clams (or at least about failed jokes). The “here all week” joke is used exclusively as a follow up to a joke that the speaker is trying to gently disavow. By pointing at the image of a hacky standup from the age of hacky standups, the joke is designed to allow the speaker a chance to gently distance him or herself from what was just said. The fact that this clam occurs so often tells us, I suppose, that there’s a real social function being served here. We clearly need jokes that fill this ecological niche– can you be the one to coin the fresh replacement?

Lunch: whitefish with artichokes and string beans at Toscanova at the Century City Mall. So fresh and delicious!

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