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Did you read Dilbert yesterday? In a lovely coincidence, yesterday’s strip provides an excellent example of a way to revitalize a clam. Amazingly, it’s a close cousin of the exact example that I discussed in Monday’s post. Here’s how the strip lays out:

First Panel: The pointy-haired boss thinks to himself: “It’s time for some generic management.”

Second Panel: He approaches an employee and says “Did you talk to what’s-his-name about the thing?” She replies, “Um… yes.”

Third Panel: He walks away, self-satisfied, thinking, “There should be some sort of award for avoiding minutiae.”

What I like about this is that the purposeful vagueness is being put to a new and more subtle purpose than just a character excusing himself from conversation so that he can pull his friend aside. This is about using a vague question to demand a vague answer, thus excusing both parties from a conversation neither wants to have. That’s less familiar, more complicated and more interesting.

It’s the illustration of dynamics like this — ones that are recognizable but haven’t been mined to the point of exhaustion — that make good shows and good comic strips feel fresh. Recognition is at the heart of comedy. That’s why Jerry Seinfeld impersonations always start with “did you ever notice…” The problem is that after you’ve recognized something once, you no longer get a thrill of connection when you recognize it again. Dilbert and The Office are both great at finding these fresh dynamics. Once you find them, you can put familiar comedy conceits into them, like the self-conscious use of “thing” as above, and it won’t feel tired, because the overall point is new and fresh.

Lunch: enchiladas

What do you get when you get when you breed clams? Strangely, sometimes you get a genuinely fresh new joke. Gentle Reader Sarah in Washington state writes in with a great example of this phenomenon, which I had not consciously noticed before. She doesn’t know on which show this occurred, but she brings us the line, “After all, it’s not rocket surgery.” Hee! I love that! Two clams getting together to create new life.

It occurs to me that I even know of a three-way menage a clam. The not-very-smart character Mark on Roseanne once said something like, “He’s not the brightest tool in the deck.”

To be fair, I suppose these aren’t really clams that are being combined, they’re simply cliches, and the idea of malapropisms as comedy dates back as far as humans had sayings to screw up. But let’s not pop my parade here; I think there’s something to be learned from these. Lots of you will be writing specs in which you have to convey something of a character’s essential nature very quickly. Malapropisms like these can be very useful for establishing a certain type of character. Give ’em a try!

In other news, I’m pleased to find a letter today from Mark, also in Washington, who writes representing the Northwest Screenwriters Guild. This is a mysteriously apostropheless group that helps professional screenwriters get started at making a living. He wanted to let me know that a link to this very blog has been added to the site’s Resources page. Thank you, Mark! I’m always happy (as a clam) to be listed as a writing resource.

Lunch: bean and rice burrito

Clams! Yes, there’s always room for clams. I’m talking of course about old and overused jokes and joke forms, known as clams, which need to be expunged from your spec scripts. It’s shockingly easy to write a clam since you’ve heard it work before and it just lays itself out on the page so easily.

Here’s one that’s currently bothering me. Three people stand together. Two of them (Persons One and Two) want to get away from the other one.

Now, right away, I want to point out that this is not the same joke as the line from “Broadcast News” in which a character off-handedly says: “I’ll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time.” That’s a joke about two people who know each other so well they share both their reference points and their internal labels for those reference points. The clam joke is about the opposite, two people trying to coordinate through their closeness and not doing it very well.

Both concepts are amusing, but this particular expression of it has simply become overly familiar. It also requires that reality-challenging conceit of the on-looker who doesn’t notice the very obvious strange behavior of his companions. So what should you write if you want to exploit the humor of the three-person situation? Well, instead of a halting bad lie, how about a fast glib one? It’s also been done, of course, but it has the advantage of being constantly made new because of the exact nature of the lie:

Or whatever. That’s really just to give you the idea of a shape of it.

To clamtinue, a recent letter from Gentle Reader Amanda (Hi again, Amanda!) in Eureka, comments on another clam I discussed a while back, the facetious use of “I said good day, sir!” She mentioned that there is an interesting discussion of exactly this clam on line. I poked around and found it here. As you can see, the joke dates back even earlier than I had realized, although it looks at though “Tootsie” might be the first use of it in its current form. Fascinating. Someone needs to do a comprehensive study of the modern American clam. Until then, use your own instincts to smell them out and cut them from your script. This was a great joke in Tootsie, but as you can see from the long list of uses, it’s become distinctly smelly since then.

Lunch: meal #10 at Del Taco (featuring two kinds of soft chicken taco)

Are you working on a lightly-humorous hour-long spec pilot? Are you finding yourself getting bogged down in plot moves and client-story elements that fail to even capture your own attention? Are you longing to bring the focus back to the main characters? Here’s a crazy thought: maybe your show isn’t an hour. Maybe it’s a (single camera) half-hour.

This won’t work for all shows, of course. If you’ve got a cop or lawyer show that hangs on dense plotting, or if it’s dark drama, it clearly won’t feel at all like a half-hour. But if it’s got a light tone, some funny, and doesn’t necessarily hang on lots of plot moves and suspense-filled act breaks, then it might work well as a half-hour.

Imagine that you were given the job of going through a stack of “Ugly Betty” scripts and cutting them down to a half-hour length. What would you lose? You’d probably cut all the arc elements, the running mystery stuff. You’d simplify the A-story too, reducing plot complications while trying to keep all the funny character moments. “Ugly Betty” obviously works well as an hour, but I suggest that if it were a spec script, that a half-hour version of it would have definite appeal as a little gem of characterization: funny, fast, and short.

[CLARIFICATION: I am not suggesting writing spec Ugly Betty scripts as half-hours. I was unclear here. What I meant was that if Ugly Betty had been a spec pilot, it would have worked well as a half-hour spec pilot.]

It’s not a prescription, but it’s an option.

Lunch: Vietnamese pho, this time with tripe in it. Yum! Tripe’s fantastic!

There is a thing that happens sometimes when you’re coming up with a story. If you’re still convincing yourself you can write without an outline, then it happens a lot. I’m talking about when a character doubles back on their own arc, ending up emotionally back where they started. A woman in love with her husband is told he’s been cheating. She leaves him, then learns she was lied to and goes back to him. She’s in love with him again just as she was at the beginning. It might feel like emotional movement as you’re writing it, because she’s angrily backing her bags at one point, and begging him to take her back at another, but since the beginning point and the ending point are the same, the story feels like a big never-mind.

Sometimes something similar happens with a pair of characters in conflict, who both change position and then both change back, twisting around each other in an awful double helix.

The problem actually grows out of good writers’ instincts. You want to write scenes in which something changes. So you have your character change. But then there’s another emotional scene. So you have them change back. It’s a yo-yo. Add another character and you can see how the helix thing happens. When I tried writing my very first spec script I had two characters switching positions so often that I ended up titling the script, “The See-Saw,” hoping that hanging a lantern on the problem would make it a virtue. It didn’t.

Keep a watchful eye out for this. Complicate your character’s emotional life so that going back to the starting place isn’t an option, put them in a three-dimensional world so that they can move off in unexpected directions, plan your scenes so that you aren’t improvising moves that you haven’t thought through.

Ban the yo-yo!

Lunch: butternut squash soup, edamame

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