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I made reference, in my most recent post, to a joke feeling “written.” This can happen when a joke relies on very specific wording or a specific structure. The reason that Senator Clinton’s joke “that’s not change you can believe in, that’s change you can Xerox” fell so very flat during last night’s presidential debate had a lot to do with its “written”-sounding parallel structure. This was particularly deadly in a joke whose point was supposed to be to praise spontaneity.

The reason that jokes like this are so tempting is often because when they’re pitched in a room, they aren’t written. Yet. Someone thinks it up and says it out loud, and in that moment it feels spontaneous because it is. And it’s hilarious. In fact, the more structured and elaborate and perfect it is, the more hilarious it is when someone just opens their mouth and produces it. Problem is, it’s only spontaneous once. Every single time it’s said after that, it’s going to sound canned, unless it’s delivered by a very skilled actor who can somehow make you believe they’re finding it on the fly. The classic Friends line: “You’re over me? When were you under me?” might’ve sounded written except that it was so perfectly delivered. From Frasier, Niles’ line “My brother is too kind – he was already eminent while my eminence was merely imminent,” sounds completely written but was delivered with the joy of a pedant realizing he’s just come up with a good one.

Traditional sitcoms provide a natural habitat for this kind of joke. When married with character, they can be the kind of sharp precise jokes — hard jokes — that work perfectly in that heightened world. I’m not putting down this kind of joke. They’re little gems — hard and sparkly.

But, if you’re writing for a single-camera half-hour or a funny hour, you’re usually better off sticking to “soft” jokes that rely on character without relying so heavily on the perfect string of words. Certainly that’s what you should do if you’re trying to make a point about the value of off-the-cuffedness.

Lunch: ceviche from Ralph’s supermarket. It sounds unwise, but it was good.

I’m not done yet with that two-part joke from The Onion that I mentioned in my last post. I think I need to talk a bit now about the joke’s content as opposed to its construction. The joke is based, obviously, on the idea that two participants can have very different views of the same situation. We might call it a mini-Rashomon.

I was trying to think of examples in which this joke has been used in scripts. The most famous example, I suspect, is this instance from Annie Hall in which Alvy and Annie are talking to their therapists at the same time on a split screen. Both therapists ask about their client’s sex life, and the answers come back:

Alvy Singer: Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week.
Annie Hall: Constantly. I’d say three times a week.

Often this joke is done with two characters speaking at once. Someone asks “how did it go?” and someone says “it was fantastic” at the same time that someone else says “it was hellish.”

By the way, this joke has a tendency to feel a little written. So you might want to make it a little less precise… make the characters explicitly react to each other, perhaps, instead of speaking exactly simultaneously.

Despite this one reservation, however, I think that in general this is a very good type of joke since it comes out of character. In fact, it comes out of two characters, revealing a lot about both of themselves in one economical package. If you’ve got characters with contrasting views of the world (and I bet you do), see if you can’t mine humor out of their first-blush reactions to different situations.

Lunch: penne alfredo with spinach and extra parmesan

There’s something very funny in the latest (Feb. 14) issue of The Onion. There’s a small front-page article titled “Conference Call Going Awesome.” It’s funny in the Onion “ordinary events reported as news” mold. Then, inside the paper, there is a second item, tucked into the “News in Brief” section titled, “Employees On Other End Of Conference Call Just Want It To Be Over.”

Hee! Brilliant.

One huge reason that this works is that the first part stands alone. I once had some bosses who told me that they loved it when they saw network executives start to criticize a weak joke, only to pull back when they discovered that there were funny callbacks to that joke later in the script. It always seemed to me that it would be much better if the first joke WASN’T weak! Wouldn’t you love it MORE if the execs had no call to worry about that first joke? It should stand on its own, the way the front-page Onion piece does.

Callbacks, jokes which reference an earlier joke, can only bear the strength of being funny on their own. They can’t retroactively fix the first joke.

A clue that this is happening in your script is that you find yourself reading faster to get to the callback. Be aware of it.

Lunch: spaghetti with marinara

Guess where I’ve been these last two days? Obviously, I, and all my co-workers, have been back at work in the Battlestar Galactica writers’ room. Fun! It’s all rush-rush-rush as we hurry to catch back up with our own brains.

The first thing we did was indulge in a film festival. We watched all the episodes that have been filmed so far. Not only did this remind us of the events of the season so far, but it immersed us in the world of the show: the rhythms of the story-telling and the texture of the scenes. I also found that, especially with the added time, I was better able to judge what worked and what didn’t work in the episodes I wrote. I learn something about the show every day, and I only regret that we’ll be finished with the run of the show before I achieve the level of competence I really want to have.

When you’re writing a spec script for an already-existing show, you should immerse yourself in it as much as possible — both reading and watching produced episodes. And if your spec pilot is similar in tone to an existing show, I would recommend doing the same thing with your doppelgangshow. We watched seven episodes in a row the other day, and when you watch something with focused attention for that long, it’s like being exposed to an intensive language course or to chocolate — you’re going to take it in.

Lunch: veggie sandwich from the commissary. No cheese, extra avocado.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell, when watching a sitcom, that a joke didn’t work. The audience reaction can be sweetened during post-production, or manipulated on the spot by the warm-up comedian. But I have a very specific memory of a joke that fell quite flat on NewsRadio.

The joke was delivered by the red-haired character Beth. It went something like this, “No matter what I do to try to impress my stepfather, he always treats me like a red-headed stepchild!” In my memory, the audience greeted the line with a mild confused pause.

I’ve also heard Mel Brooks talk about a joke in Young Frankenstein that didn’t work with audiences. It’s when Gene Wilder says to bug-eyed Marty Feldman, “Damn your eyes!” and Feldman replies, “Too late.” The audience, although otherwise delighted with the movie, shrugged.

The jokes failed, clearly, because the audience didn’t recognize “red-headed stepchild” and “damn your eyes” as common folksy expressions. Guess they’re not that common.

Now, personally, I love dialogue that is personalized to the actors… referencing their verbal habits or physical appearances. I’ve certainly written a lot of jokes that rely on characters commenting on other characters’ looks. Both of these jokes reference physical traits that happen to fit with ready-made phrases. You can imagine how tempting they must’ve seemed to someone who knew the expressions and assumed they were in wide use.

Of course, the best that could’ve been hoped for, really, was a judgment of “clever.” The jokes don’t delve into character, they just work at the word-level. This makes them extra-expendable. If you’re playing with some word-manipulation clever like this, be very careful. Check it out with some readers, make sure that you’re getting the effect you intend. If some people don’t get it, take note of that and don’t just assume that the person who ultimately reads the script and makes a decision about you based on it is going to fall into the part of the population on which the word-play will work. Better yet, see if you can find a joke that digs a little deeper.

Lunch: proscuitto and red spinach on whole wheat. Fantastic.

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