JaneEspenson.com

Ever go on vacation and realize you haven’t packed quite enough clothing to get you through the trip? Turn something inside-out and it’s fresh again!

The same trick can work for jokes. Here’s a very old joke form:

WOMAN
He’d never go out with me. I’m old and fat and I can’t dance.

HER FRIEND
I think you can dance.

This form is very very familiar, and you wouldn’t expect to find it on a show like The Office. But what happens if you turn it inside out?

SYCOPHANT
You don’t find a lot of people who are as attractive and generous as you are, who are also so talented!

BOSS
Oh, I don’t know if I’d say ‘talented.’

Now that it’s a list of positives, not negatives, is it a totally fresh joke – so fresh it’ll pinch your bottom? Not really, but it feels a little fresher, I submit, than the original. Not because of anything inherent in the joke, just because of degree of familiarity.

Here’s another example. The original joke:

PERSON ONE
What a disgusting harpy!

PERSON TWO
That was my mother.

PERSON ONE
Lovely woman.

Here it is, turned inside out:

PERSON ONE
What a lovely woman!

PERSON TWO
That wasn’t my mother.

PERSON ONE
Thank god.

Maybe it’s just me, but the second version is slightly less familiar, slightly fresher. If the first joke is from the 50s, the second one is from the 80s. Is there a thoroughly modern version of this joke? Maybe this?

PERSON ONE
So, I met this woman in the lobby…

PERSON TWO
Are you being noncommittal until you find out if she was my mother?

PERSON ONE
I thought it would be wise.

That might be the 90s. Kind of Frasiery. Anyway, it’s worth looking hard at jokes with a familiar structure. Play around with them, flip ’em this way and that… see what they’ve got on the other side!

Lunch: Lamb chops.

So. Project Runway. Don’t you think Robert’s last two outfits have been too similar to each other? It was the same coat. Well… not the SAME coat. But both coats filled the same square in the great cosmic fashion grid. Know what I mean? Well, it’s just like with jokes…

Sometimes a room full of television writers will look at two jokes in the same script and realize that one of them has to be cut. Why? Because “they’re the same joke.” It seems weird the first time you hear it. They’re not the same. All the words are different! What is meant is that both jokes have the same *point*, they’re funny for the same reason.

Here’s an example. Consider the following sequence of lines. (Remember, this is an exhibition only. It is not real professional comedy.)

TEENAGER
Mom! I can’t find my phone!

MOM
Dig through the stuff in your room. When you hit Indian artifacts, you’ve gone too far.

TEENAGER
I looked through everything!

MOM
Better you than me. I’m always afraid I’ll find the puppy we lost when you were three.

Both of Mom’s lines are jokes. But they’re the same joke. Both have the same point: the kid’s room is a dump.

These two jokes are especially identical. They even exaggerate the messiness in the same way – by suggesting that things are buried in the mess. They clearly cannot both remain. Comedy relies on freshness of observation. If the observation has just been made… well, you’re not going to get a laugh on the second joke.

Sometimes, the one-joke-or-two issue is not as clear cut as it was in the example. Sometimes a writing staff will disagree about whether or not two jokes are the same. In your spec, if two jokes are far apart in the script, if one is an escalation, if the point is similar but not exactly the same… then you’ll probably get away with it. Note that Friends could load up a script with Joey-is-dumb jokes and every one would be delightful. But if they had two really specific Joey-can’t-count jokes on the same page? Nope. Same joke.

I think sometimes, in writing a spec, a writer can’t decide between two jokes. Which one will the readers like better? So he puts ’em both in, thinking he’s building a joke run. It can be very tempting. Resist the temptation. Close your eyes and point if you have to, but make the choice, Sophie.

Lunch: Hot polish dog from a little food stand/restaurant with the best name ever: Pappoo’s Hot Dog Show. I was hoping for puppets.

Friend-of-the-blog Lani wrote to me with a contribution to the ongoing discussion of when one cuts out of scene early versus when one cuts late. I thought her analysis was so good, not to mention poetic, that I’m presenting it to you here. Take it, Lani!

Lani: “You can cut on the lightning or you can cut after the thunder. I don’t think choosing one is a criticism of the other, but they definitely do give a different flavor to each choice. I haven’t seen “Little Miss Sunshine,” but I think that method [cutting early] would work because it’s so engaging. The viewer has to actively participate, to anticipate, in order to get it. And it’s interesting that directors are trusting their audiences’ sophistication and ability to do that. Yay for that! But with “The Office,” it’s more real. In real life, we can’t cut at the lightning – the thunder’s always coming. And even though we know it’s coming, there’s something that bonds us in the experience of it. The same way we’ve all lived through the awkward aftermath of a Michael Scott moment.”

Wow. Well said. Thanks, Lani!

Now, moving on a bit, I want to address a question I was asked recently about scene length as seen in a more mathematical light. A writer noticed that the produced scripts they’d acquired for the show they were specing had scenes as long as 4 pages in them, and asked me if that was unusual. Actually, it is not. Have no fear of writing scenes of any particular length, as long as the show customarily does so. Buffy sometimes had big group scenes that could be as long as 6 or 7 pages, while Gilmore Girls scenes often ran –and run — far longer than that! Do as your show does and you won’t go wrong. Some scenes simply contain a lot of stuff that needs to happen. If you get really nervous about it, break the scene up by making the characters move to another location during it, or maybe cut away to another story in another location and then come back to your monster scene.

Lunch: Chicken salad sandwich and pie, purchased from — get this — a Marie Calendar’s guy who came to our office to sell stuff directly from his travelling caravan of coolers! Wonderful!

Hi all! This is a brief supplemental post to remind everyone that I am recommending an amazing book called Prisoner of Trebekistan. It’s coming out next month and is available for pre-order now. I have read it, and although I don’t want to give too much away, I think I can promise that those of you who enjoy this site will have reason to feel affection for this book. Pulse-pounding game play! Jeopardy backstage secrets! Funniness! Baboons!

Click on the book cover in the “Jane Recommends” box at the top left of the site to be taken to the appropriate Amazon page.

In other promotional news, you might be interested to read about this very blog in today’s LA Times. A very nice piece. You are all involved in this blogging transaction with me, gentle readers, so congrats to us all!

Lunch: It’s, like, midnight… no lunch since the last time I wrote. I can only do so much.

One more word about Little Miss Sunshine, if you will indulge me, gentle readers. The movie is as good an example as you’re likely to find of cutting out of a scene at the earliest possible moment. The INSTANT that a scene has done its job, we’re moving on. And the implied sentiment of “you don’t really need to see what happens next” is funny in itself.

I was going to praise this dynamic as an unimpeachable positive. Who wouldn’t want to write a script full of scenes that march along in this swift and entertaining manner? But then I realized there is another type of aesthetic. Does The Office cut out of scenes at the earliest possible moment? Or does it wait up for agonizingly funny awkward pauses and horribly diverting endless embarrassments? Albert Brooks movies also can live in those moments that never end, and that get funnier the longer they hang there.

The first kind is funny because it suggests what happened in the missing moments, and you laugh at the way the situation has led to an inevitable and universal moment that we all understand without seeing it. It’s the funny of understanding — a conspiratorial wink at the audience. The second kind, the late cut, is funny — I think — because it tends to be about the utter relentlessness of human nature. The hapless tourist just keeps arguing with the unmoved casino boss. Michael Scott won’t give up his determination to make an employee concede a point. It’s less of a wink and more of a pointing-at, I’d say. A “look at this guy not giving up” kind of funny. At any rate, that’s my first guess. Feel free to discuss this among yourselves.

I’m reminded of the rule about jokes. Tell a joke once, it’s funny. Twice, it’s not funny. Eight times… it gets funny again. (The oft-cited example of this is the Simpsons bit in which Sideshow Bob steps on a very long sequence of rakes.) Could it be that the rules of cutting out early versus cutting late follow a similar pattern? Short good, long good… medium bad. Hmm?

At any rate, if you’re writing a spec of an existing show, do whatever your show does. Pay close attention to the moments in which their scenes end – do they end with everyone exiting and one character left alone to settle back into their chair? Or with everyone still up on their feet? With the sense that something is about to happen, or the sense that it just has? With a focus on inevitabity of the outcome? Or on the nature of the character in the situation? Emulate!

If you’re writing your own spec pilot, you get to find and apply your own style here. Which aesthetic speaks to you? I’m a early cutter outer myself. But your mileage may vary.

Lunch: Half a pastrami sandwich and a cucumber salad from Art’s Deli.

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