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

by John Vorhaus

HUMANITY:

  EXAGGERATION:

  CHARACTER:

  COMIC PERSPECTIVE:

  FLAWS:

  HUMANITY:

  EXAGGERATION:

  CHARACTER:

  COMIC PERSPECTIVE:

  FLAWS:

  HUMANITY:

  EXAGGERATION:

  People are always asking me how to make a script funny, or a scene, or a story, or even a single line. People stop me in the supermarket. They say, “Hey mister, I can tell just by looking at you what a funny guy you are. How can I be funny, too?” The answer, I tell them as I tell you, is to invent characters, invest them with strong comic perspectives and flaws and humanity, exaggerate those attributes, then turn these creatures loose upon the world. Then I ask them if they know what aisle the peas are on.

  If you want to be more consistently funny, start building a library of comic perspectives and start noticing how almost every joke or funny situation you encounter is a function of someone’s comic perspective.

  As the husband said to his wife, “I can think for myself—can’t I, dear?”

  The husband’s strong comic perspective is dear: The decision of the wife is final. His flaws and humanity are implied: He’s meek, yet loyal to the woman he loves.

  Which raises an interesting question: What is your strong comic perspective? How do you look at the world in a way that is unique, exaggerated, and at far variance from normal reality?

  The first time I asked myself this question, I was wandering around a casino in Las Vegas, taking endless delight in the pit bosses and the poker players and the blue-haired slot-machine queens and the change girls and the gakky carpet and the noise and the lights and everything. I almost imagined that they’d built the whole darn casino just for me. With a flash of revelation, it hit me that this was my strong comic perspective: The world is my circus. Everything I see or hear or experience, everything that happens anywhere on earth, is just for my amusement. There’s a guy in Colombia who considers it his mission in life to grow great beans for my coffee. DJs play my favorite songs without my having to ask. The IRS would never audit my taxes, unless they thought I’d get a kick out of the experience.

  Of course this is an exaggeration, and of course I don’t carry this attitude with me everywhere I go. But when I need a comic perspective, it’s useful to have “the world is my circus” handy. At least I know where my next joke is coming from. Take a moment to ponder your own strong comic perspective. You don’t have to settle on one, and you can always change your answer later, but if you’re trying to be funny, it’s useful to know what part of your personality already is funny.

  Find your comic perspective and you have found your comic voice, the platform on which your humor can reliably and consistently stand from now until the day you die. Maybe even beyond.

  Beyond? Oh, yes. Consider W.C. Fields. His strong comic perspective was that of a gruff curmudgeon. With the words on his tombstone, “On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia,” his comic perspective transcended his own death. That, folks, is a strong comic perspective.

  5

  Some Tools from the Toolbox

  There’s such a thing as delivering on the promise of a title. If I go see a movie called, for example, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, I expect, if nothing else, an excellent adventure, and I’ll be disappointed if the movie doesn’t deliver the goods. Likewise, a TV show called Family Ties figures to deal in some way with family life. Either that or some odd bondage thing. James Thurber’s story The Defenestration of Erminitrude Inch promises that someone will get thrown out of a window.

  Every title makes a promise, and the film or show or book or cartoon strip or one-man mime troupe that fails to deliver on that promise risks losing its audience altogether.

  As an exercise, spend a few minutes brainstorming titles for situation comedies and ask yourself what sort of promise your title implies.

  Out of Her League, for instance, might suggest a long-suffering, sympathetic female lead who has trouble coping with the challenges of work and family and a 1975 Dodge Dart that stubbornly refuses to start.

  Our Hundred Years’ War promises some sort of domestic struggle, probably between an old married couple who have been loving and hating each other since roughly the dawn of time.

  New Glorx in Town pledges a story about something called a Glorx and his or her or its efforts to adapt to a new and challenging environment.

  What we have here is another back-door route to comic brainstorming. Instead of thrashing randomly for inspiration, we can simply generate a list of titles, ask what promise each title makes, and then develop the most promising premises among them.

  Okay, so now here comes a book called The Comic Toolbox: How to be Funny Even if You ‘re Not. What promises does that title make? That you’ll be funnier going out than you were coming in. That you’ll get a laugh or two along the way. And that you’ll get some tools. If you don’t, sooner or later you’ll break faith with me and go back to watching New Glorx in Town or whatever the heck you were doing before. Well, the fact is we’ve used some of these tools already, but the time has come to start naming names.

  CLASH OF CONTEXT

  Clash of context is the forced union of incompatibles. Clash of context takes something from its usual place and sticks it where it doesn’t fit in. A hooker in a convent is clash of context. So is an elephant in a bathtub. So is a new Glorx in town.

  Northern Exposure takes Joel Fleischman out of his normal context, New York, and places him in the new and challenging world of Cecily, Alaska. Crocodile Dundee takes its title character out of his normal outback context and dumps him in New York.

  There’s a newspaper ad for hair transplants with the headline, “Flirt With Confidence.” If you cut the headline from the hair transplant ad and paste it on the impotence ad on the next page, that’s clash of context.

  Consider song lyrics. They make sense within their context, but take them out of context—speak them or write them down—they can look fairly strange and comical indeed:

  My name is Lenny Lunghead, I’m a fan of nicotine.

  I been smoking cigarettes since I was seventeen.

  You ask my why I do it,

  There’s really nothing to it.

  I smoke ‘cause I like to cough.

  Clash of context works at all levels of comedy, from broad storytelling to simple verbal wordplay. It can be the premise of a comic novel, like Gulliver’s Travels, or of a comic film, such as Big, in which Tom Hanks is taken out of his normal childhood context and placed into the foreign context of adulthood. Clash of context drives such TV shows as The Beverly Hillbillies (country folks in the city) and Green Acres (city folks in the country). You can build a sight gag on clash of context, like the final moment in City Slickers, when Billy Crystal shows up back in New York with a calf in his car. Clash of context tells jokes: Marry in haste, repent in Reno. Oxymorons are little clashes (clashlets? clashettes?) of context: honest larceny; drowning in the fountain of youth; television reality.

  Clash of context, then, works by moving a thing from where it belongs to where it doesn’t. And there are so many more places where a thing doesn’t belong than where it does. For instance, a wedding is typically held in a church or a park or a private home. Where would a wedding typically not be held? How about a car wash or a pawn shop? In freeway traffic? Via computer? At a ball game? In a shopping mall? Clash of context turns out to be a surprisingly easy tool to use.

  kid president

  Albert Einstein in drag

  lunar golf course

  beauty pageant in prison

  Donald Trump on skid row

  Picasso painting velvet Elvises

  Madonna sings opera

  Michael Jackson versus Michael Tyson

  Clash of context isn’t always a physical juxtaposition; it can also
be emotional or attitudinal juxtaposition, also known as . . .

  THE WILDLY IN APPROPRIATE RESPONSE

  In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, there’s a scene in which Brian is running for his life from Roman guards. He hides in a gourd shop where the shopkeeper browbeats him into haggling over the price of a cheap gourd. Here we have the shopkeeper’s petty attitude played off against Brian’s dire circumstance. This is clash of context expressed as a wildly inappropriate response.

  Notice that you could turn the clash around and play off a dire attitude against a petty circumstance, like investing someone with a fear of heights so strong that she can’t step off a curb without fainting. In fact, you can play off any attitude against any circumstance, so long as the attitude and the circumstance aren’t naturally compatible. And the more incompatible they are, the funnier the scene or the joke or the notion will be.

  If you see the tool of exaggeration at play here, slap a gold star on your forehead and go to the head of the class. We want a wildly, not a mildly, inappropriate response. You may also notice that a wildly inappropriate response is a function of a character’s strong comic perspective. The gourd seller wants to haggle because his strong comic perspective tells him that haggling is God. It’s okay that these tools overlap; an ocean is blue, but it’s also wet.

  The wildly inappropriate response is really pretty simple to use. Just pick a situation and ask yourself what the logical response to that situation would be. Then find the opposite of that response, or any of a host of other equally wrong answers, and you’re in business.

  Silent respect, for example, is appropriate to a funeral, so we go looking for noisy disrespect. Give all the mourners kazoos. Or tubas. Or automatic weapons.

  Suppose you wrote a love scene in which the man asked the woman if it was good for her, too. If you wanted the woman to say yes in a comic way, you could have her hold up a card with the number 10 on it, like an Olympic judge. She would be using both an inappropriate response and a physical clash of context. Applying exaggeration to the scene, you’d end up with not just Olympic-style cards but actual physical Olympic judges (and the more the merrier!) in bed with the happy, loving couple.

  Suppose you were an actor asked to improvise the following set of scenes. How could you use the wildly inappropriate response to create a comic attitude to play within each scene?

  Scene

  Inappropriate Response

  backyard barbecue

  militant vegetarianism

  at a baseball game

  cheering for the vendors

  death row

  a giggle fit

  firing an employee

  sadistic delight

  wedding night

  vow of celibacy

  at the beach

  church service

  scientific convention

  aerial combat

  in a nightclub

  asking for a date

  a television newscast

  fixing a car

  accepting an Oscar

  buying a computer

  When movie people talk about high concept ideas, they mean ideas that can be pitched and understood in a sentence or less. Often they end up talking clash of context: a boy in a man’s body (Big); a man in women’s clothing (Tootsie); a mermaid in Manhattan (Splash). Clash of context is a high-conceptician’s best friend.

  But it’s cool to have more than one best friend, so let’s check out another tool.

  THE LAW OF COMIC OPPOSITES

  To use this tool, first create a comic character and identify her or his strong comic perspective. Then seek the diametric opposite of that perspective and assign that opposite to a second character. Now lock them in a room together. Now sit back and watch the fun.

  In The Odd Couple, Felix Unger is all anal all the time, and Oscar Madison is the creme de la slob. These are comic opposites, comic characters in opposition. In Midnight Run, Robert de Niro plays a super-rational bounty hunter and Charles Grodin is a world-class neurotic. For much of the movie, the two are literally handcuffed together. That’s a forced union.

  Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn are comic opposites in The African Queen, likewise trapped together by circumstance. If Gracie Allen is the ultimate naif, it follows that George Burns is the ultimate cynic, bound to Gracie by holy deadlock, I mean wedlock.

  Try this exercise: Imagine that your car has just been totaled by a BMW driven by the powerful head of a major movie studio. Seize the moment to pitch some high-concept movie ideas using the law of comic opposites.

  A scrooge marries a spendthrift.

  A college nerd and a party beast are roommates.

  A priest inherits a brothel.

  A debutante takes a street punk to the prom.

  A construction worker adopts a spoiled rich kid.

  Another way to discover strong comic opposites is to ask of your comic character, “Who could give this person the worst possible time?” A priest is going to have more trouble with a hooker than with, say, an insurance salesman. Who would give a self-centered, arrogant football star the worst possible time? A self-centered, arrogant diva?

  Obviously, not all comic opposites lead to full and complete comic stories, high-concept or otherwise. But again, notice how much easier it is to answer a simple, concrete question like “What’s the comic opposite of a scrooge?” than it is to answer a broad, vague question like “What’s a good idea for a movie?”

  TENSION AND RELEASE

  Every time you start a joke, you create some tension. The tension often develops in the form of a question: “What’s this joke about?” If the joke works, then all that stored tension is released at the punchline in the form of laughter. In general, the more stored tension there is, the greater will be the comic release.

  Last night I had this dream where I was doing stand-up comedy, and I got up and introduced myself and said, ‘My name is john Vorhaus, and of course that rhymes with whorehouse, and it’s been that way all my life, and frankly, I’m sick of it, so now I’m changing my name.”

  This is in a dream, mind you.

  “My new name? Vordello.”

  The tension in this joke is created by the awareness that the joke teller has a problem with his name, and by the underlying question of how is he going to solve that problem. The solution, which, of course, is no solution at all, releases all the stored tension. And the longer one can delay the payoff, the funnier the joke will be.

  Is this true? Well, suppose I had said instead, “My name used to be Vorhaus but now it’s Vordello,” I might get a laugh, but it wouldn’t be as big because I’d given the tension no chance to build. The mind has to contemplate the question of the joke in order to benefit from the buildup.

  This is why I set that last joke in a dream, and why you see stand-up comics taking such long, roundabout routes to the point of their stories. They know how useful it is to milk the moment.

  Tension and release is not only a function of time, it’s often a function of circumstance as well. Any time you have an audience or a reader or a viewer concerned about you or your characters, you have a certain amount of tension stored in the form of fear. The more dire the circumstance, the greater the tension; the greater the tension, the bigger the comic relief.

  There’s a moment in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when Butch and Sundance are pinned down by a posse and trying to decide whether to jump off a cliff into the river far below. Even though their lives are on the line,
they spend several minutes wrangling back and forth before Sundance announces that he flat won’t jump. Butch asks him why. “I can’t swim!” shouts Sundance. “You stupid fool,” says Butch, “the fall will probably kill you.” As the audience bursts into laughter, our heroes hurl themselves off the cliff.

  Bottom line, then: To make a joke funny, delay the payoff; to make a situation funny, create dire circumstances. We’ll talk more about this later as we discuss ways of raising the stakes in a comic story. For now, just think maximum tension, suspended release.

  Sometimes you can get more out of a joke or a funny notion simply by saving the funny word for last. This is called positioning the payoff. There are three strong arguments for doing so. First, you get the most benefit from release of stored tension. Second, if the joke is truly funny, your audience will laugh at the punchline, and the rest of the line will be lost in the din. The third and most important reason for positioning the payoff at the end of the line is to make sure that all your critical setup information has been delivered. Consider this line:

  If the universe is constantly expanding, why can’t I find a place to park?

  The word that makes the joke work is “park”; it’s the one that answers the question “What’s this joke about?” If you phrased the joke this way, “Why can’t I find a place to park, since the universe is constantly expanding?” your audience would have to wait past “park” and go all the way to the end of the line before they had enough information to get the joke. It’s as if you’ve answered the question before asking it. And since the answer is what’s funny, you squander the joke by positioning the payoff too soon.

  Here are some more examples of positioning the payoff correctly.