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Comedy shows (and many dramas, as well) hold “table reads,” in which the writers, producers, directors and executives get to hear the actors read the script out loud. As the writers sit and listen, they make a check mark next to every joke that gets a laugh. (For extra precision, many of us vary the size of the checkmark to reflect the intensity/duration of the laughter.)

Usually, at the end of a table read, every script page has at least one check on it, and many have three or sometimes even more. And the general rule for evaluating a script is usually “more = better.” Check marks are treasured like gold, uncomplicatedly loved and desired. And yet…

A script can be overjoked. A script in which every line strives to earn a laugh is as effective as a football team in which every play is an attempt at a touchdown. You end up with an exhausting, overreaching mess that doesn’t have room to slow down and breathe. And it doesn’t feel like it’s about anything other than its own pace.

Something that I myself have witnessed is a progression that sometimes occurs during the production week of a pilot. Writers are brought in to “punch” the script, to make last moment changes intended to sharpen the script. Invariably, piles of jokes are inserted into the script at this point. And sometimes, the show gets worse as a result. Funnier, perhaps, but more manic, less thoughtful.

It’s worth being careful about this when you’re writing your specs. It’s so imperative that the spec be your very best work, so it’s easy to push. Letting a joke have some breathing room, letting characters have a real moment, letting an emotional moment land for a second before you undercut it, these can all be powerful events in a script. Even if they don’t earn themselves a check mark.

Lunch: Sushi at Echigo. I’ve told you before about how their morsels recline on tiny beds of slightly warm rice. Holy cow.

When I was in school, pretending to learn things about Cognitive Science, we spent some time talking about “basic level” concepts. “Furniture” is superordinate. “Coffee table” is subordinate. “Table” is basic level. It’s not an arbitrary division, by the way. The basic level is that level of categorization that meshes with human experience in such a way that it intuitively has a special status. Basic level items are generally given short, simple names, for example, because they’re so central to human experience that they need easy-to-grip handles. Shoe, chair, dog, bird, cloud… these are all “basic level” concepts.

So what does this have to do with comedy writing? Well, the basic level isn’t funny. There. I said it. Deal with it, basic level.

Remember Spinal Tap? Remember what “St. Hubbins” was the patron saint of? “Quality footwear,” that’s right. Not shoes. Superordinate. And, at the other end of the very same spectrum, remember this Buffy line? “I’m not exactly quaking in my stylish yet affordable boots”? Subordinate. The too-general is funny. The too-specific is funny. But, sorry, Goldilocks, just right is not funny.

This can provide you with a quick and easy shortcut to humor, even if you’re not terribly comfortable with joke-writing. And remember to dig around at both ends of the spectrum.

Lunch: a burrito

Imagine you’re faced with writing a scene in which a character needs to be, say, resentful. (Or bored. Or very tired. But let’s go with resentful for now.) You might well be concerned that the scene will be weighed down with a sullen, quiet, humorless presence, unlikely to engage the other characters. This could well be true, unless you realize that “resentful” tells you how the character *feels* but it doesn’t limit you in terms of how the character *acts on* how he feels. Instead of making the resentment manifest itself in uncommunicative grunts, you might end up with a more active, more fun scene if the character adopts an attitude of forced joviality to hide his resentment. Or maybe he starts spouting flippant sarcastic jokes that attack his enemies while he hides behind the wall of “I’m only joking”. Or perhaps he misdirects his resentment in the form of cruelty toward an innocent third party. All of these are a heck of a lot more interesting than slouching and grumbling.

It’s really worth taking some time, as you’re mapping out a scene, to think not just about the emotion, but about how it manifests. Anger can emerge as humor. Self-doubt as clinging affection. Fear as overblown bravado. Boredom? Well, we all know that’s often expressed with minor random destructiveness. And tired doesn’t have to mean sleepy, it can mean jittery and punchy — so much more fun!

The scene is almost always much more interesting when these more varied expressions of emotion are present. You can pick a reaction that makes the character more active, for one thing, and for another, the character is made more complex. Also, the characters around him are forced to be more intuitive, and even story possibilities open up, since there are now hidden motivations, and possible moments of quiet revelation and other interesting things.

Maybe there’s something deep here about what makes some people interesting to us in real life: not that they *feel* anything any differently than other people, but that they just *wear* their feelings in ways that surprise us and challenge us?

Lunch: Again with the Vietnamese food. A pork sandwich on toasted French bread.

So, tonight, I stumbled upon a rerun episode of “Scrubs” on Comedy Central while waiting for The Daily Show to start. And I saw a lovely example of a neat trick that can be a real help when you’re writing a spec script. It’s the ol’ unanswered question trick. And it’s based on the notion that you don’t need to explicitly give the audience any information that they can figure out on their own, because audiences like to figure things out. And, even more importantly, that they secretly like to be kept waiting.

It’s such a simple trick. If the story’s been building up to a big question like “Are you leaving me?,” “Will you marry me?,” or “Are you a vampire?,” you can have a character finally get up the nerve to ask it, and while the audience is waiting, breath all bated, pulse all poundy, you cut away to some B-story scene. Then come back to the character who asked the question, behaving in a way that tells you what the answer was: they’re crying, dancing, or lying bloodless in an alley. There’s something totally compelling about never having to hear the actual answer. This is *even though* it seems as though you’re violating one of the basic principals of screenwriting by moving a big moment off-screen.

The truth, is, of course, that the big moment, in this case, is not the action, but the reaction. And it’s made all the more powerful because we join it in progress, and because we aren’t given it when we’re braced for it, but somewhat later. It’s like that trick where someone pretends to punch another person, then pulls the punch, and then sucker-punches ’em real fast as soon as they relax. Neat, huh?

Lunch: Tamales at “Mexicali.” Get this, they were totally over-salted. That never happens. Weird.

Hello, Gentle Readers! I’ve been shamefully absent recently, as a fierce writing schedule and the holiday left me unable to blog. But I have returned. And I’ve got a good one for you today.

I was talking with a producer of feature films the other day who was raving about a script she had just read. She commented, with some surprise, on the fact that she wasn’t just enjoying the movie that the script could become, but that she was actually enjoying the script in and of itself. Scripts, she pointed out, aren’t usually the most satisfying form of written literature.

But they can be. A spec script is the only kind of script in the whole world that is ultimately intended for a READER, not a VIEWER. If you can make it read like a short story, with a sense of flow, of narrative verve, you’re going to positively delight your readers. One way to do this is to try to give the script a sense of a conventional flow of sentences, allowing them to bridge over the different tiny units that make up a script. Here’s what I’m talking about. Let’s suppose you’re writing the last action line in a scene. Try adding a little bridge into the next scene. Like this. (Keep in mind that these entries aren’t good at depicting script format.)

—

She closes the book, looking troubled. And then suddenly we’re in…

INT. HOSPITAL

—

See how that worked? You can also do something similar to lead from action into dialogue. Like this:

Davis SMACKS the club into his hand as he says:

DAVIS
You’re a very unlucky man

—

Another good place to do this kind of thing could be at the end of an act:

And before we’re even sure what we’re seeing, we:

CUT TO BLACK.
END OF ACT ONE

—

You can still obey all the conventions of script writing, while sort of laying standard sentence structures on top to produce sentences that would almost read uninterrupted if all the choppy script formatting stuff were taken away.

You don’t have to do this all the time. You don’t want the script to read as if you’re so new to the script form that you’re simply over-elaborating. Just throw this technique in here and there to give the script some readability.

For some reason, this technique also seems to convey confidence. There’s something about it that suggests the writer is loose and relaxed. That also will impress a reader. Which is a very good thing.

Lunch: A piece of homemade pumpkin pie. Mmmm.

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