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The day that Harvey Korman died, I heard a little excerpt played on the radio of a comedy bit that I’d never heard before, taken from a sketch he performed with Danny Kaye. I’ve located the whole sketch here, but you don’t need to watch the whole thing since other than one funny joke — the one I heard excerpted for the radio — it’s pretty dire. But the joke worked for me. Here it is:

HARVEY
Class, for a baby’s bath, what’s the most important thing you absolutely need?

DANNY
A dirty baby?

Now, listening to this being performed, it’s clear early on what the joke is. It’s one of those “Stating the Obvious” jokes that I’ve talked about before. Once you hit “the most important thing,” you know that’s the joke. You probably already know that the answer is some version of “the baby.” And yet the joke made me chuckle. Because of the adjective.

It’s not just that adjectives make things funnier, although they often do. Moist, bendy, pointy, itchy — they are all great words that spice up any sentence. But in this case, “dirty” is doing something beyond that. Can you bathe a clean baby? Well, if you take bathing to include the idea of removing dirt, then, no, you can’t. So the answer makes literal sense, but it also raises the idea of NEEDING a dirty baby — needing something that is normally undesirable. For me, it even raises the image of someone purposefully dirtying a baby so that they can bathe it. Funny!

The joke isn’t in the words, of course, but in the concept. These are all the same joke (even though they don’t all work exactly the same way — since you can’t purposefully make a chicken raw, for example, it doesn’t quite resonate the way the baby one does):

What do you need to cook a chicken? Raw chicken.
To fix an engine? A broken engine.
To censor a movie? A dirty movie.
To cure the common cold? Well, first you need a cold…

If you wanted to use these, you’d massage the language a bit, but those are the hearts of the lines, right there.

I just did that thing, of course, where I killed the joke by dissecting it. But it’s worth it, because once you figure out how any one particular joke works, you can extrapolate and make jokes of your own. Maybe you’ll find the one your spec script needs.

Lunch: left-over Thai food. Spring rolls and peanut sauce.

I’ve got a good question here from Thomas in St. Louis who must be a very young writer indeed as he talks about watching Buffy since he was in second grade. Oh lord, is that possible? Dear me. Well, good for you, Thomas! I’m pleased to meet’cha! He’s writing a spec for the ABC Fellowship, and he’s wondering about a specific approach:

As a result of the WGA strike, a lot of shows didn’t get proper season finales. Would writing a spec intended to serve as “the finale that could’ve been,” be original and stand out, do you think, or would it not be enough of a typical episode?

You know, there used to be a lot of rules about specing episodes of shows that already existed. Such scripts were the currency of the town and you had to follow all sorts of rules about which few shows were “specable” and about making your episode typical and yet different at the same time. But now, with ABC/Disney pretty much the only place that still takes this kind of script, I’m starting to wonder if those rules mean anything anymore.

Sure, you still shouldn’t base your script around a guest character, and you still need to demonstrate a thorough mastery of the show’s voices. But do you still have to worry about hitting that exact “typical” vs. “special” bull’s-eye? I’m not so sure. It used to be that your Seinfeld was going to be compared, head-to-head, with hundreds of other Seinfelds and almost nothing else. But now, your “Sunny in Philadelphia” might be up against a “Weeds” and a “Breaking Bad” and a “Tudors”! So you’ve got a little more latitude within the confines of the rules of your show.

So, sure, if you’ve got a great alternate season finale, why not? If the dialogue sparkles and the story-telling is crisp and controlled and the stage directions have both style and confidence, the script is going to stand out. Good luck, young Thomas!

By the way, you know how people always spec brand new shows too soon? Before they’ve had time to secure a second season or even settle into their own patterns. Well, you’re going to want to write a Dollhouse spec as soon as this thing hits the air or even before. No, you are. Resist it. Hang back a little. I think this show is going to take us on a journey, and we have to get a feel for its trajectory before we jump on.

Lunch: cheddar-and-ham Lunchables. I had not tried the Lunchable product before. The ham was appalling. We give this to children? The cheese and crackers, however, were delightful.

I have recently received mail containing requests to post links to a couple of interesting sites. First off, Gentle Reader Claire suggested that I should post a link to the Battlestar Galactica podcasts. Not only will you find Ron Moore’s personal accounts of each episode there, but also a series of recordings made in the writers’ room during the breaking of the “Razor” Battlestar movie. I wasn’t on the staff yet when Razor was being conceived — I was hired almost immediately following that point — so you won’t hear my voice, but you will get to eavesdrop on a actual working session. This should be invaluable for those of you who’ve always wondered about the dynamics of a room, or who are aspiring to work in one and wonder now what you’re getting yourself into. I think you’ll find it fascinating — I listen to these podcasts myself, and I’m startled to realize I never directed you to them before, Gentle Readers.

But we’re not the only show with cool stuff going on. There is also a very nifty blog that takes you behind the scenes of Eureka, Sci-Fi channel’s other hit. Check it out as well, especially if you’re a fan of the show.

Lunch: tri-tip, cauliflower

Gentle Reader Claire in Massachusetts writes in with a great question. She notes that a lot of drama series are launched with two-hour pilots and wants to know if that means it would be a good idea to write a double-long spec pilot.

It is true that this is happening more and more. One reason for this is so a pilot that is never ordered to series can still be aired as a television movie and recoup some of its cost. I suspect we’ll see more and more of this.

Notice that it also allows writers more time to tell a story despite the fact that they have to do so much character-introducing and world-establishing.

And yet, I wouldn’t recommend writing a two-hour spec pilot. Specs are writing samples and when someone is looking to staff a show or even find a new client or select a contest winner, they usually have to read a lot of samples all at once. In their haste, they’re gonna be grabbing the slimmest scripts, not the fattest ones. And this holds true across genres. Even if you’re writing something with a sci-fi flavor (Sci-Fi network loves the two-hour pilots).

Comedies don’t generally have over-long pilots, but they do sometimes have those extra-long episodes. Don’t take that as an excuse to make your Office spec come in at 50 pages. Shorter is better, in comedy specs even more than in drama.

Lunch: egg foo yung from the commissary. It’s never quite as good as you’d hope.

Friend-of-the-Blog Danny Strong wrote the movie RECOUNT that premiered on HBO this weekend. Did you miss it? That’s okay, I suspect HBO will implement some sort of scheme in which they rerun it a couple times. Don’t miss it next time, though, because it’s fantastic.

I read every draft of Danny’s script, and yet I have no memory of giving help of any kind. All I recall saying is, “Wow. This is really good.”

I recommend looking at the movie as an excellent example of how to handle exposition. Danny is telling the story of the 2000 Presidential Election Florida recount. He had lots and lots of very technical material to deliver to the audience. And never once does he just shove a chunk of it at the viewers, hoping to get past it as quickly as possible. It’s usually delivered by one character explaining something to another character who genuinely doesn’t have the information, and there is always an attitude behind either the giving or the getting of the information, usually both. Incredulity, amusement, shock, anger, even blank incomprehension — these attitudes make expositional moments into character moments.

Notice also his use of intercutting. He frequently cuts between the Democratic and Republican camps discussing the same point of law. The intercutting puts the emphasis on the different approaches to the problem and, again, makes the scenes about attitudes, not legal procedure.

He also found real-life obstacles for his characters. The guy who had to chase Gore down to prevent him from making a concession speech? He really did have a busted knee. The lawyer who argued the case before the Supreme Court? He really is dyslexic and has to work without notes. These are the kinds of character details — one more little thing to overcome — that you want to invent for characters that you make up, and Danny was smart enough to discover and exploit them (in a good way) for his script.

Writing scripts based on real events is incredibly difficult. There’s no reason to think that the journey of a real hero actually will conform to the Hero’s Journey, after all. If you’re trying to shape real-life events into a satisfying script, you’re not going to do better than this example.

Lunch: Cup O’ Noodles

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