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A big thank you to the wonderful group at USC that had me out to answer questions for them this evening. I had a blast! One of the questions made me think about what makes a good joke writer.

There are two ways to be a good joke writer. One way is to be a person-who-says-funny-things. Most sitcom writers fall into this category. They don’t like to analyze jokes because they don’t want to ruin what happens naturally by thinking about it. It’s like when you think too hard about how you’re typing — I’m not thinking ‘b,’ I’m just reaching for the ‘b’, so where is the ‘b’?? — and then suddenly you can’t type. These sorts of people write jokes by thinking of funny things and then writing them down. (By the way, this is a new revelation for me. I never really understood why some joke writers were so scared of joke-analysis. But once I realized how unconscious their process truly is, I got it.)

The other way to do it is the analytical way, like I do. If you don’t think of yourself as a “funny person,” this is the way to approach the job. Analyze jokes, take them apart, put them in categories, find the key to what makes them work. If you have a sense of humor, which is to say, if you laugh at other people’s jokes, you can learn to do this. This is how the rest of us write jokes. We don’t write a joke and then figure out afterwards why it’s funny. Instead, we think of what a funny attitude would be for a character to have, and then construct a joke that reflects it.

Know which kind of person you are. There’s no shame either way. The first kind of person does fantastically well in a sitcom room, where speed is valued. But the second kind of person does well in some sitcom rooms and almost every other kind of room as well.

Lunch: pumpkin-filled raviolis at Ca Del Sole, right near Universal. Sooooo delish!

Clams revisited! Clams, remember, are jokes that have grown detestable through overuse. You know the ones. Ones like “did I say that out loud?” Gahh!

But there’s a certain kind of joke that’s related to a clam, and yet it doesn’t get old. That’s because it has little slots in it into which new material can be inserted. Let’s call it a clamshell. (Thanks to friend-of-the-blog Erin for the terminology assist.)

I’m sure there are many of these out there, but tonight I’m just presenting the first documented clamshell that has captured my attention. Remember these lines?

You smell like aftershave and taco meat. (Blades of Glory)
You smell like beef and cheese. (Elf)
You smell like sweet red plums and grilled cheese sandwiches. (The Wedding Planner)
You smell like old people and soap. (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory)

Fascinating, isn’t it? It’s permafresh!

Lunch: I might just smell like pizza and a peanut-butter cup

CORRECTION: The above quote is from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the newer movie, not Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the Gene Wilder version. Apologies!

Writing on the actual staff of a television show is more about talking than it is about actual writing. After all, you only get to write somewhere between one and, at the outside, four episodes a year on any given show. What you do between those writing weeks (and often during them, too), is work as a group breaking and re-breaking the episodes that others will write. That means talking. Pretty much nothing but.

Those of you who are cloistered at home with your spec scripts might benefit from getting used to talking about writing, to discussing story and all the possible directions a story can take. You have to be able to articulate your idea and to listen to contradictory takes on a story without (visible) clenching. You can do this informally with other aspiring writers, or you can join a class or other group. If you have a writing partner then you already have this built in, of course.

If your inclination while working on a story is to grab your laptop and say, “no, no, I can work it out on my own, just give me forty pages and a couple days,” then you’re going to need to adjust to thinking about the creative process as something more open. Let the sunlight fall across those pages, even if your inclination is to gather them to your chest, screeching, “Don’t look! They’re not quite done yet!”

Lunch: hot dog at the Vegas airport. No jalapenos nor sauerkraut were offered, so I tried those dried hot-pepper flakes that one puts on pizza, but they were strangely undetectable.

Very sad news about Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse Five is a personal fave. Sigh.

Friend-of-the-blog Jeff directs us to this interesting artifact, a list of Vonnegut’s Eight Rules of Writing Fiction, from Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), p. 9-10:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages. — Kurt Vonnegut

These are fascinating, and they can be applied, obviously, to script writing as well as to prose. (Well, except maybe rule 4 — some of your sentences are stage directions, which are a part of different conversation than the one occurring in the fictional world.)

Rule 8 is making me think a bit, and not just about the cockroaches. I assume he meant that readers should be able to imagine a satisfying ending, not that that they would be able to anticipate the exact ending you’re giving them. Don’t you think?

Rule 5, “Start as close to the end as possible,” is genius. Remember when I talked about taking the events that happen late in your script and using them instead as a starting place? Remember when I talked about cutting into scenes after the main action of the scene has begun and joining them in progress? I had never thought of these as part of the same impulse, but they are. They’re part of starting near the end. Beginnings are often boring, endings are not.

And yet there are things we never wanted to see end.

Lunch: salad and some of a jelly doughnut

Generally, it’s a good rule of thumb that shorter jokes are better. But every now and then it’s the length and complexity of the joke that makes it work.

When I worked on Ellen we did a bit once where she was stuck at the top of a rock-climbing wall in a gym. She yells down instructions to her friend. The line was something like this:

ELLEN
Okay. I need you to find out where the manager is, then I need you to go to his office, and ask him to please turn off the gravity.

You may disagree, but I contend that this is funnier than simply:

ELLEN
Turn off the gravity!

For me, this line is funny because she’s presenting it as if it were rational, and the hyper-rational beginning is what achieves that. Here is another joke from Ellen that relies on its sincere and elaborate set up. The line was delivered by Karen, Ellen’s girlfriend’s ex-girlfriend (take a moment to figure it out) who is trying to intimidate Ellen by implying she had a better relationship with Laurie, the girlfriend, than Ellen does. The line was approximately:

KAREN
I remember once I came home to find that Laurie had filled the place with candles, and there was a note that said, “Every one of these flames will eventually burn out, except the one in my heart.” And then we did it.

The sincere build-up makes the crudity hit all the harder. So don’t panic if some of your jokes look a little long. You might be using something like this to your advantage!

Lunch: iceberg salad with chicken. I love warm chicken in a salad.

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