The Comic Toolbox: How to be Funny Even if You're Not

by John Vorhaus

Exagggerating.

  Exagggggggggggggerating.

  Too much!

  All right, let’s try another exercise. This time we want to take a comic perspective and push it to its limit. If your character’s comic perspective, for example is, she likes cats, then an exaggeration of that would be feline-obsessed; has twelve dozen of them. If the comic perspective is parental disapproval, the exaggeration is hates everything kids do, from their music to their food to the little lights they have in their shoes these days. Let’s look at a list.

  Comic Perspective

  Exaggeration

  fearful

  jumps at shadows

  joyful

  all manic all the time

  drunk

  stewed to the gills

  thrill seeker

  adrenaline junkie

  eccentric collector

  accumulation of nose hairs

  tone deaf

  Roseanne Barr

  Tackle this one like those old SAT questions: A is to B as C is to __.

  Comic Perspective

  Exaggeration

  Exaggeration, by the way, is a tool that pays dividends all over the comic world, and we’ll come back to it again and again. For now, though, let’s look at the third facet of a comic character’s construction, something without which no comic character would be complete . . . flaws.

  FLAWS

  What’s wrong with this picture?

  A comic character is funny as a function of his flaws. Flaws are failings or negative qualities within a person’s attributes or aspects. In Cheers, Sam Malone’s egomania is a flaw and Diane Chambers’ snobbishness is a flaw. In P.G. Wodehouse’s works, Bertie Wooster’s fecklessness is a flaw, and his butler Jeeves’s fastidiousness is likewise a flaw. Hamlet’s indecision is a flaw. My lack of speling skils is a fla.

  Flaws in a comic character work to open emotional distance between a comic character and viewers or readers so that those viewers or readers can comfortably laugh at, say, someone slipping on a banana peel. Without this emotional distance, the truth and the pain of a situation hit too close to home for an audience to find funny. A thing is only funny if it happens to the other guy, and flaws in a character work to make him “the other guy” in a reader’s or viewer’s mind. When I freaked out over Leslie Parker in seventh grade, my flaw of indiscretion (and massive stupidity) separated me from my audience (the sadistic weasels) and allowed them to laugh at my discomfort in comfort. Oh joy.

  Sometimes flaws are subjective; one man’s flaw is another man’s social outrage. In the film A Fish Called Wanda, the Michael Palin character was a stutterer. To some people that was a comic flaw. To others it was abusive. And unfunny. Remember that a joke always takes place in the context of an audience’s expectations. When assigning flaws to your comic characters, you must always keep in mind what your audience will accept, tolerate, or just plain get. Also remember that a physical attribute can be a flaw without being a bad thing. Baldness, shortness, tallness, fatness, skinniness, excessive nose hair . . . these all work to distance the comic character from the audience: Whoever that guy is, he’s nothing like me.

  The more flaws you can find for your comic characters, the more interesting and complex and funny those characters will become. Al Bundy on Married . . . with Children is sloppy, sexist and selfish. He also has smelly feet and excessive nose hair. Louie DePalma on Taxi is venal, corrupt, lecherous, mean-spirited, etc. A comic character, in at least one sense, is the sum of his flaws.

  A flaw can also be a positive aspect that’s taken too far. Kindness, love, a giving or a trusting nature all turn into flaws when exaggeration makes them abnormal simply by writing them large. Charlie Brown’s trusting nature is a flaw because he trusts too much. This lets us laugh when Lucy pulls that football away for the umpteen zillionth time.

  Just as you can build a comic character from his comic perspective outward, so can you with his flaws. Find a flaw and you’ve found a comic character.

  Hey, there’s a mind-boggler, huh? Find a flaw and you’ve found a comic character. If this is true, then you could go to a simple list of nouns, pick ones that appeal to you, and use them as little comic launching pads. How hard can it be to find a noun?

  Comedy is tools. If you have the right tools, you never have to stumble through the mirror-house of unfocused writing. It’s a powerful thought. Perhaps we should all meditate on it for a moment, hmm?

  Hmmmmmmmm-mmmmmmmmm-mmmmmmmmm-mmmmmmmmm.

  Okay, back to work.

  Greed is a flaw; Scrooge is a character. Wild abandon is a flaw; John Belushi is a character. Drunkenness is a flaw; Dean Martin is a character. Laziness is a flaw; Andy Capp is a character. Stubbornness is a flaw; Murphy Brown is a character.

  To see this relationship more clearly, take a moment to generate a list of flaws and then extrapolate an appropriate comic character for each one. It should all look something like this:

  Flaw

  Comic Character

  fearfulness

  multiphobic weenie

  insecurity

  nervous nelly

  dementia

  psycho killer

  envy

  covetous co-worker

  drug abuse

  total stoner

  artificial leg

  world’s worst hurdler

  fecklessness

  silly uncle

  baldness

  wannabe sex symbol

  It’s not quite as easy as one-two-three. To generate this list, you have to go “shopping” in your head for appropriate nouns to put in column one and then find characters to link them to in column two. But isn’t it a darn sight easier to think of mere words than to think of whole comic notions? You could even flip through a dictionary. None dare call it cheating.

  Also notice that it’s not necessary to link flaws to an “appropriate” character. It’s logical, for example, to assign prudishness to a schoolmarm, but what if you assign that flaw to a stripper instead? An air-traffic controller? President of the United States? The possibilities are endless.

  Sometimes flaws and comic perspective complement one another. Diane Chambers has the strong comic perspective of a drawing-room intellectual and the complementing flaw of snobbishness. Gracie Allen’s comic perspective is innocence, which is a flaw as well. But what you really want is a kind of synergy between flaws and perspective so that some flaws conflict with the perspective while others reinforce it. Lucille Ball’s comic perspective, “There’s nothing I can’t do,” is aided by her flaw of impulsiveness, and thwarted by her flaw of incompetence. In the best comic characters, flaws and perspective go to war.

  Think about this in terms of inner conflict. When a character is at war with himself, there’s a sort of psychic no-man’s land between where he is and where he wants to be. Flaws reflect his true nature; comic perspective is his fantasy self-image. Here, then, is another comic premise you can exploit, the inner comic premise, the gap between how a character sees himself and who he really is. This doesn’t hold true for all comic characters. Think of it as an angle you can sometimes play.

  Fantasy

 
Reality

  war hero

  4-F weakling

  beauty queen

  plain jane

  genius

  stupid

  loved by all

  loner

  Flaws, then, serve two purposes: They create conflict within characters, and they create emotional distance between character and audience. Having created this distance, oddly, it’s now necessary to remove it. That’s where humanity comes in, the fourth and final facet of a comic character.

  HUMANITY

  I like him; he’s like me.

  We used flaws to drive a wedge between the character and the audience so that the audience could laugh. Now we use humanity to build a bridge between the character and the audience so that the audience can care.

  Story-structure gurus will tell you that it’s vital for an audience to care. The central character or hero of any successful story, they’ll tell you, must arouse in the reader’s or the viewer’s mind both sympathy and empathy. That is, you’re supposed to like the hero, and he’s supposed to be like you. If that happens, you engage emotionally with the hero and gladly undertake his quest with him; you care.

  The same is true with comic characters, and logically so. After all, if you want to find someone consistently funny for the life of a story, you’d better feel a part of his experience somehow. So what it comes down to is this: In some way, all comic characters have humanity. If they don’t, we don’t care. It’s as simple as that.

  Simple, yes, but why? Remember that comedy is truth and pain so that without some means of connecting a comic character’s truth to our own experience, we have no way of knowing what we’re supposed to find funny. A character’s humanity is the bridge we need. Recall the difference between a class clown and a class nerd. The class clown was funny because his experience was your experience. The class nerd was an object of scorn and derision because he stood apart; you couldn’t relate. In the cruel Darwinian quicksand of junior-high school, the nerd had no humanity.

  So what is humanity, anyhow? Can we look at a creep like Dan Fielding on Night Court and find his humanity? You bet your inflatable rubber love-doll we can. Sure, he’s a slime bucket, venal, sexist, corrupt, all of that. But when push comes to shove, he’ll do the right thing, even if it means giving up his smarmy goals. That’s a classic definition of humanity: He’ll do the right thing in a pinch. Louie DePalma has the same humanity. But of course that’s not the only kind of humanity.

  Look at Otto in A Fish Called Wanda. What is his humanity? He’s a romantic. He has a romantic soul. We forgive him his flaws, and root for his cause, because secretly he’s a romantic, and secretly so are we all.

  Here are some comic good guys and their humanity: Charlie Brown is vulnerable. Robin Williams is energetic. Jonathan Winters is a teddy bear. Goldie Hawn is bubbly. Lily Tomlin is insightful. Arnold Schwarzenegger is strong. Hannibal Lecter is charming . . .

  Hey, hold on, hang on, Hannibal Lecter is a comic good guy? Hannibal the Cannibal from Silence of the Lambs? How could he be a good guy? For that matter, how could he be a comic character at all? Well, let’s take a closer look.

  Hannibal Lecter’s strong comic perspective is “People are food.” His flaws include arrogance, malevolence, psychotic behavior, no self-awareness, immorality, amorality, overwhelming evil, and really bad eating habits. He probably does not floss.

  To be a comic character, he’ll need a mountain of humanity to counterbalance his flaws. His positive qualities include intelligence, urbanity, poise, wit, good manners, loyalty to his friends, a sense of fair play, self-confidence, and an incredibly strong will to win: He’ll stop at nothing to eat your face. Even as we abhor his flaws, his humanity makes us like him and want him to win.

  To make Hannibal Lecter work on a comic level, it was necessary first to make him disgusting, make us revile him, and then pile on the humanity to counteract our revulsion. It’s almost physics: For every flaw, there is an equal and opposite humanity. The worse you make some aspects of a comic character, the better you must make others.

  One of the surest ways to create humanity is to give your comic character an indomitable will. No character is more compelling, more engaging, than the one who will stop at nothing to achieve his goal.

  Be careful in assigning humanity. It’s not enough to say of a character, “Sure, he’s a hit man, but he loves his mother so he’s okay.” A character’s humanity must be a real part of his character. If it’s pasted on, you get a cartoon and not a character.

  Also be aware that a character’s flaw can also be part of his humanity. Lucy’s impulsiveness, which always gets her into trouble, also makes us love her more. Mork’s innocence creates distance and closeness at the same time.

  Humanity, then, is the sum of a character’s positive human qualities that inspire either sympathy or empathy or both. A list of such qualities might include:

  loyalty

  honesty

  generosity

  humility

  sense of humor

  curiosity

  vulnerability

  strength of will

  innocence

  patience

  physical strength

  physical beauty

  Or, a list of such qualities might include . . .

  Now our picture of the comic character is complete: strong comic perspective, flaws, humanity, and exaggeration.

  Comic Perspective is the unique world-view, at variance with normal reality, that motors the character’s comic engine.

  Flaws are the elements of a comic character that separate him from “real” people. If he has no flaws, he’s generic. If he’s generic, he’s not funny.

  Humanity is the quality of a comic character that unites him with the audience. Building sympathy and empathy, humanity lets us care.

  Exaggeration is the force that works on all three-comic perspective, flaws, and humanity—to move a normal character further and further into the comic world. Exaggeration widens the gap upon which the comic premise of the character is built.

  Let’s look at some famous comic characters now and track their comic perspective, flaws, humanity, and exaggeration.

  Groucho Marx is a leering cynic, whose massive misanthropy is counteracted by his unbridled wry wit.

  Sam Malone, that wild egomaniac, is supremely sexist, but when he reveals his insecurity, we all fall in love.

  Diane Chambers is a hyperintellectual whose snobbishness is not attractive, but whose generosity of spirit is.

  Charlie Brown is a perennial loser. His self-pity would alienate us were it not for his long-suffering patience.

  Bertie Wooster views the world through the prism of privilege. His flaw is his classist attitude, but at least he knows how to accept help when he needs it.

  Jerry Lewis is bumbling and incompetent, yet sincere. Hamlet, that wacky Dane, is vengeful and indecisive, yet noble, strong-willed, and loyal to his dad.

  It might be useful for you to do a few more on your own. Jack Benny? Charlie Chaplin? Lenny Bruce? The Tin Man? Mike Doonesbury?

  You’ll notice that it’s possible for a comic character to have many comic perspectives, flaws, and human qualities. You want this. You want your comic characters to be interesting, complex, dynamic people full of rich potential for inner conflict, and this only happens when you build their personalities in layers. But for the purposes of simple comic construction, you don’t have to go any further than hitting the marks: comic perspective, flaws, humanity, exaggeration.

  I promised at the top of the chapter that by the end of it you’d be able to build comic characters with assembly-line speed, if not precision. Try it now. Create some comic characters. Give them names, comic perspectives,
flaws, humanity, exaggeration.

  As you do this exercise, look for lines of conflict between and among your categories. If you create a character whose comic perspective is fearlessness, for instance, go out of your way to assign phobias as a flaw and a superhero’s desire to serve others as a humanity. This dynamic inner conflict will mean that some part of your character must naturally be wrong when everything else is right. Like Hamlet, he’ll never be at peace.

  To take another example, if your character’s comic perspective is “love conquers all,” give him selfishness as a flaw and guilelessness as humanity. This synergy will put such a character in a painful box, and a painful box is exactly where you want your comic characters to be.

  CHARACTER: Spenley Cruntchwhistle

  COMIC PERSPECTIVE: expert on everything

  FLAWS: know-it-all attitude, massive holes in his knowledge

  HUMANITY: well-meaning, sincere, helpful

  EXAGGERATION: knows the seven chief exports of Bulgaria

  CHARACTER: Ophelia Barnette

  COMIC PERSPECTIVE: body is a temple of the holy spirit

  FLAWS: shyness, smoldering libido

  HUMANITY: loyal to her friends, desperately wants love

  EXAGGERATION: undresses in the dark, even when alone

  CHARACTER: Peter the Puppy

  COMIC PERSPECTIVE: born to chew shoes

  FLAWS: curiosity, no bladder control, sharp teeth

  HUMANITY: playful, affectionate, soft and cuddly

  EXAGGERATION: pees every five minutes

  CHARACTER:

  COMIC PERSPECTIVE:

  FLAWS:

  HUMANITY:

  EXAGGERATION:

  CHARACTER:

  COMIC PERSPECTIVE:

  FLAWS: