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There’s a funny book called “Artistic Differences” by Charlie Hauck, which is a novelized account of working as a television comedy writer. I read it years ago and I remember enjoying it a great deal. It spins out into fantasy toward the end, but the stuff early on is gripping in its truthfulness.

I don’t seem to own a copy any more, and I can’t find excerpts on line, but I seem to remember a certain list in the book. It was a list of signs that you’re working on a bad sitcom. I might have this quote slightly wrong, but I remember that the gist of one of the listed signs was “You’re on a bad sitcom if characters use the word ‘bingo’ to mean ‘yes.'”

Well, yes. No one is going to laugh, hearing someone say “bingo” instead of “yes,” or “you got it.” It’s not a joke. And it doesn’t help define a character except to suggest a certain flippancy which most sitcom characters have built-in anyway. And it’s not novel. We’ve all heard it before. AND YET…

I’m not sure I’ve ever worked on a sitcom in which someone HASN’T used “bingo” in exactly this way, at least in some stage of some draft.

Here’s how that happens. When a roomful of writers is punching up a script, they’re looking for any way to put a comedic twist on every line they can. And the little humorless “yes” is unlikely to escape untwisted. We all know it’s not a big laugh, but the “bingo” seems to add… hmm… flavor, you know? And ever since I read that list, I’ve cringed when I’ve seen it make its way into the script. It feels so cheap now. So limp and exhausted and “written.”

As you’re going through your own spec script, watch out for these little temptations. Bingo and its friends. A room full of exhausted writers trying to wring every chuckle out of tomorrow’s run-through may end up with “bingo.” And I don’t blame them one bit. But if you find yourself putting in tired old twists like this, dig a little deeper, see if you can find something new. Your spec is a sparkly thing, treat it well.

Lunch: Mm. Thai food. Sticky rice and pad thai and tofu salad and basil chicken and thai ice tea. Now that everyone has peanut allergies, should we worry about the future of Thai food? I wonder.

Have you noticed the change in the air, that certain feeling that a new season is upon us? That’s right. It’s Pilot Season! Table reads are busting out all over!

A table read is a pre-filming exercise in which the actors sit around a table and read the entire script out loud. Writers and executives listen and use what they have heard to improve the script. When a table read is held before a pilot, it’s usually the first time that the actors have all assembled together, so you’re also looking for how they mesh together as an ensemble.

These events aren’t just called “table reads” out of tradition. There really is a big table at the center of the room. Usually just the actors, director and executive producers are actually seated the table. A wider circle of chairs surrounds the table. Everyone else, including non-exec-prod writers, sit in these chairs. This means that when you become a staff writer, you will spend some time looking directly at the backsides of a cast of actors. This often means you are privileged to an array of thong underpants. Try to stay focused.

Comedies always have table reads. Dramas sometimes do. (Gilmore Girls does. Buffy didn’t.) What I’m going to talk about applies to comedies and the funniest of the dramas. If you’re writing a 24, you don’t have to worry too much about this.

There’s an interesting thing that happens when an episode goes from being an script to being an oral performance: subtler aspects become clear. A joke that seemed hilarious on the page can feel heavy-handed when performed, while a subtler moment that just sort of sat there when read silently, can get a big laugh at the table. This effect gets even more pronounced when the actors get up on their feet on the stage. At Gilmore Girls and at Ellen, those two shows in particular, I was struck by how a subtle actress could take a simple observational moment and make it the biggest laugh at the table or at a run-through, with a tone of voice or a facial expression. When you’re working on a show, it’s worthwhile to remember that sometimes the funniest moments aren’t the hard jokes that shine like diamonds on the page.

But here’s the rub. You, as a young writer just starting out, are not writing a script to be performed. You’re writing a spec. All you have is the page. This is one of the ways in which the spec script system is imperfect. Really subtle emotional writing will be noticed, but really subtle joke writing might very well simply fade into the page. Use those produced scripts you’ve acquired as your guides for how many jokes to have on a page, and for how “jokey” those jokes should be. But if there’s any question in your mind, I would err toward the ha-ha-ha side.

In my opinion, it is probably better to be considered a funny writer who might have to be reined in, than to be considered a writer who will have to be pushed toward the funny.

Note to Nicole in Germany: I lost your address and cannot send you a script. Sorry! Check out scriptcity.net to order a Gilmore Girls in pdf form. You can even get one that I wrote! Thanks for the letter!

Lunch: Spicy noodles with pork from Noodle Planet, a wonderful place near UCLA. Noodle Planet. Even the name is satisfying.

Does your cell phone ever say this? “You have one unheard message. The following message has not been heard. First unheard message…” This is the kind of detail of daily life that stand-up comics seize on. It’s totally familiar, ridiculous, and laughable when pointed out. I recommend that you take note of these little details of life. Collect them as if you had a set at the Improv to prepare for. And look around to notice the new trends. What silly fashions are starting to show up? What are the new slang words? What do people do at the gym? What are the current topics of dissent in your workplace? What new daily-life hassles are peeving you? What’s the new limited-time offering at McDonalds? What’s the food allergy everyone suddenly seems to have?

These are the observations that will improve the jokes in your comedy spec scripts, because they will create jokes taken from life. Too many spec scripts seem to use jokes that have been adapted from other jokes in other scripts. Like last year’s coat, they’ve been cut and resewn to try to look new. There is very little new comedy ground to plow in the area of white people saying “bling,” for example. And there is positively no tillable land in “what part of ___ don’t you understand”, unless it is twisted in some very unexpected way. (What part of Burrata Frittata don’t you understand?…Hmm. You MIGHT be headed for a joke. Maybe. Still smells old to me.)

Some observations were funny when they were new, but now have become overused. The idea that having a third child makes you “outnumbered”? I’ve heard it on several shows. First time, great. Subsequent times, not so good. Observations about sweatpants with words across the butt are a little old now. Jokes about how your parents can’t set the VCR. Done. “Does this dress make me look fat?” Over. Bearded men in a dress. Not fresh. A dog that covers his eyes in embarrassment. No. Shatner has a hairpiece. We know! We know!

Friends was a show that did a really good job of finding joke areas that hadn’t been worked to death. When Chandler railed against the kind of people who say “supposably,” it led to Joey, alone later, tentatively checking a few sentences out loud to check if he used it. That was new and very funny. I think of it every time I hear someone say “supposably” (which is appallingly often). But I’d never heard anyone COMMENT on that word before. If the joke had been built around, say, people who say “irregardless,” it would have been eleven per cent less funny.

Exactly eleven.

Lunch: A sandwich from Bay City Imports in Santa Monica. The best sandwich shop / grocery in the world. Veggies and hot pepper salad and parma proscuitto and horseradish cheddar all on a crusty italian roll. Best sandwich EVER!

I had Indonesian food with a friend the other day. You remember the lunch entry. There was much interesting conversation and laughter and a really gorgeous dessert. This was one of those little restaurants that also has a small selection of imported grocery items for sale. I bought myself a bag of garlic-and-tapioca-coated peanuts and they’re mighty good. I’m eating them now and enjoying the packaging very much. You should see this logo. It seems to be two Easter bunnies astride a swimming peanut that is arching out of the water like a breaching whale, or maybe like a speedboat. Seriously. They’re certainly bunnies, and each is holding a basket. And that peanut that they’re on is almost completely out of the water. Two small fish jump alongside and a pine forest is arrayed behind the whole scene. And there’s a big setting sun, too. Wow. That’s one hard-working logo. Words are not adequate.

But when you’re writing a spec script, all you have are words. And you need to deploy them with maximum efficiency. Here’s another neat little trick that can help you. This is from Joss’s script for the Firefly episode called “Objects in Space.” Jayne has been complaining about River, who recently came at him with a butcher’s knife. Zoe defends River to Mal:

ZOE
Sir, I know she’s unpredictable. But I don’t think she’d harm anyone.

JAYNE
(“Hellooo…”)
Butcher’s knife.

Joss has done a beautifully efficient thing here. The one word “Hellooo” in the parenthetical does the work of a much longer explanation. Even the longer alternative “pointing out the obvious” doesn’t really get the job done, since it doesn’t necessarily convey that distinct exasperated tone of voice that “Hellooo” does.

By the way, the quote most often used in this way is probably “Yeah, right,” since sarcasm is needed so often.

Keep in mind that this is not a very commonly employed technique. This is the only time Joss uses a quote inside a parenthetical in this whole script, and a quick look through my own scripts didn’t reveal ANY, although I know I have used it on occasion. So don’t go looking through your spec for places to use this. But if you find yourself struggling to efficiently convey in a parenthetical the tone you need, then this might be the answer.

Maybe you thought scriptwriting would be all about learning lots of rules. But look at how many of the really expressive ways of doing it are all about creative variations on the standard ways of doing things! Don’t you just love that?

Lunch: Sashimi with a nice little serving of warm rice.

So. Is anyone (or, possibly, everyone) else completely obsessed with Project Runway? This is what reality television was born to do. It’s got actual documentary value, since you learn about a world you previously knew nothing about, plus it’s got that contest element that makes for tremendous suspense. If you haven’t seen the latest ep yet (the first half of the finale), and you don’t want to know the latest, then skip the following paragraph.

Did you notice how everything is conspiring to make us think Daniel V isn’t going to win? I have this strange suspicion that they’re doing it on purpose to throw us off the track. If that’s the case, then that would mean that producers told Tim Gunn to withhold praise from Daniel just to manipulate us. I love the show, but I feel a little bit like that would be cheating. Tim Gunn is supposed to be on THAT side of the camera, uninfluenced by gross matters of commerce and storytelling. I feel like there should be an information curtain between him and the producers, don’t you? Ah well, perhaps there is, and Daniel V really has failed to impress. We may never know.

All right. Back to spec scriptwriting. There is a connection to what I just wrote, but it’s tenuous… something about an information curtain. We all understand that a reader of script shouldn’t be allowed to know more than a viewer of the eventual filmed product would. Thus, we purposely withhold information when we write our stage directions. It would be very strange, for example to include the following stage direction:

Jeremy sits up and notices that his tent smells strongly of boyenberries. His hair is then tousled by a shockingly warm wind that makes him think of his childhood in Florida.

The reader of such a direction is going to rightly wonder how the viewer is supposed to know about the scent of boyenberries and the temperature of the wind and the childhood memories.

None of you would, I’m confident, write such a direction. That isn’t the danger. The danger is over-correction. In an effort to avoid telling too much, sometimes new writers tell too little. It turns out that it is perfectly all right in many cases to explain what a character is thinking. Here’s a stage direction I’ve adapted from one I wrote for an episode of Buffy. Xander is in a phone booth, calling Buffy to warn her that he’s been duplicated. Then his double walks past the phone booth. The stage direction reads:

The phone’s still ringing and Xander is torn — wait for Buffy to pick up? Or follow his double? He hesitates, then hangs up and follows Xander-Double.

In a script that is going to be produced, these kinds of directions help the director and the actor know how to play to moment. In a script that is going to be READ, they help the reader imagine an actor playing it, and thus tell the reader how to interpret the moment. There is nothing wrong with doing this.

In fact, you can do more than this. You can tell the reader not only what the character is thinking, but you can also tell them what they, the reader, should be thinking. From earlier in the same script:

The dump is empty now. Except that something lies half-buried in garbage, unnoticed. We push in. IT’S XANDER, still lying unconscious where he fell. So who just went off with Buffy?

That last question, “So who just went off with Buffy?” is what I want the reader of the script to be asking. I include it so they understand that it’s all right for them to have this question at this time — that I WANT them to be asking it.

Putting in little signposts like these will assure the reader that they’re following the story.

Here’s another, hypothetical, example. Suppose you’re writing a spec for a medical show and you have one of your major characters suddenly say something wildly out of character. You’re HOPING that the reader will notice that it’s out of character and begin to suspect that the character has become infected with the brain disease that’s sweeping the hospital. But what if the reader simply thinks you’ve written a crappy line? Well, it’s all fixed if you can include a stage direction like “no one around him seems to notice that what was just said has a tinge of insanity to it.”

Letting the reader know that they’re following the story as you are intending them to, is a special kindness when you consider the constraints on time and attention span that a show-runner will have when they’re reading your script. Make it easy!

Lunch: Indonesian food. Mmm. The best part is the dessert, a mountain of pink ice with bits of confetti-colored goo and fruit inside.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: It occurs to me that this entry may be confusing to those who have paid attention to my repeated warning that readers skip the stage directions. Hmm. Good point. But still, if they do read ’em, it’ll be good if they’re helpful.

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