by John Vorhaus
Right: “Stop feeling sorry for yourself—you miserable loser!”
Wrong: “You miserable loser, stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
The reader of the second line has to absorb the concept of “miserable loser,” then read the punchline, and then go back and reconsider “miserable loser” in order to get the joke, while in the first instance, “miserable loser” is both the punchline and the key word needed to make the punchline work.
Right: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”
Wrong: “Tell God your plans if you want to make him laugh.”
In this case, the tension is created by the question, “How do you make God laugh?” Turn the joke around and you give away the answer before you’ve posed the question.
Right: “I was voted in high school least-likely to complete the fifty-yard dash.”
Wrong: “I was voted least-likely to complete the fifty-yard dash in high school.”
If the words “in high school” precede the payoff, they amplify the meaning of the joke, but if they follow the payoff, they just take up space. Consider them to be inert matter, like argon gas. Purge them from your work.
Sometimes when a joke doesn’t work, fixing it is just a matter of rearranging the parts. When in doubt, put the funny word last.
TELLING THE TRUTH TO COMIC EFFECT
I’m bald. I don’t mind being bald. I look at it this way: I haven’t combed my hair in seven years, but on the other hand, I haven’t had a bad hair day, either.
This is called telling the truth to comic effect.
Johnny Carson used to do this all the time. Whenever a joke
bombed, he’d make a comment or shoot the audience a look that said, in effect, “Well, that joke didn’t work.” Even though the joke didn’t work, the truth he told behind it almost always did.
You can use this tool in almost any situation simply by stating the obvious. You could say of a two-year-old, for instance, “He has the attention span of a two-year-old.” You could say to a cop who pulls you over for speeding, “I suppose I know why you stopped me.” He likely won’t laugh, but cops are a notoriously tough audience.
Like many cool tools, this one is reversible. Not only can you tell the truth to comic effect, you can also try
TELLING A LIE TO COMIC EFFECT
Suppose you’re standing in a long line somewhere, and you say, “This sure is a long line.” It’s the truth, but it’s not funny. Try telling a lie instead: “If this line gets any longer, they’re going to assign it a zip code.”
Telling a lie to comic effect is like finding the wildly inappropriate response. Simply locate the truth of a situation and then say the opposite of that. “I only want you for your mind.” “Ronald Reagan was smart.” “This book is worth $14.95.”
These two tools work well together; if a situation doesn’t call for the truth, it calls for a lie, or vice versa. As an exercise, then, stick yourself into various situations and hunt for responses that either tell the truth or tell a lie to comic effect.
Situation
Response
At the dentist’s
“Novocain? No thanks.”
In shark-infested waters
“Now I get my period!”
On an answering machine
“I’m kissing up to someone more important than you right now . . .”
At confession
“Trust me, faddah, you don’t wanna know.”
To a deaf person
“!”
Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether you’re telling the truth to comic effect or telling a lie to comic effect. If I stand up in front of a class and tell them that I’m worried about the Fraud Police bursting in and taking me away to fake teacher’s prison, am I telling a lie or telling the truth? Obviously, I don’t expect any actual cops to bust down the door, but on the other hand I am addressing a real insecurity.
In the end it doesn’t matter whether you put the joke in one category or the other, or in neither category, or in both. The point of these tools is not to get all hung up on definitions but to find a reliable place to go when we need a joke and we need it now. If you invoke a tool called “telling the truth to comic effect” and it ends up producing a comic lie, I can’t see that it makes a damn bit of difference. And it’s my book, so I guess what I say goes.
6
Types of Comic Stories
When you set out to tell a comic story, it’s useful to know just what kind of story you’re trying to tell. The rules that govern one sort of story are wildly irrelevant to another. I’m not all that hooked on the notion of following the rules (since rules, in general, are made to serve the rule makers and not you and me), but if you’re writing within a genre such as comedy, you can’t possibly hope to get it right unless you know what the forms and structures of that genre are. True genius works within form.
Plus there’s this: Using categories is yet another way to swap a large, cluttered, unfocused creative problem for a smaller, cleaner, much more tightly organized one. Instead of asking, “What’s a comic story?” or “Where’s my next idea coming from?” you can ask, “What kind of comic story shall I tell?” Science tells us that the universe is moving toward increasing entropy, that is, generally speaking, from order to chaos. In knowing what sort of comic story you’re telling, you fight against entropy. Isn’t that comforting?
On the other hand, if you’re a stand-up comic or a comic essayist or a cartoonist, this chapter may very well be, to quote the phrase, wildly irrelevant to you. If you’d like to go to study hall, I’ll be happy to write you a pass. For the rest of you, skootch your chairs a little closer and we’ll explore the wonderful world of comic worlds.
CENTER AND ECCENTRICS
In a center-and-eccentrics configuration, you have everyman surrounded by comic characters. The function of this everyman is to stand in for you and me, to be our eyes and ears as we visit all the kooky, wacky eccentrics of his, and our, new world.
The comic premise of a center and eccentrics story is found in the gap between our central character’s normal perspective and the uncommon comic perspectives of the eccentric characters who surround him.
In the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Bob Hoskins is Eddie Valiant, an average guy lost in a world of cartoon characters. Roger, Jessica, Mr. Acme, Judge Doom, and the weasels all conspire to give Eddie the worst possible time. We, the audience, see the comedy of this world through Eddie’s bemused and long-suffering eyes.
In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, poor Brian gets chased and harassed and abused by one comic character after another until he finally ends up hanging from a cross, dying horribly while cheery people around him sing, “Always look on the bright side of life.”
Television loves center and eccentrics. Bob Newhart’s shows have always used this structure, as did Barney Miller and everything Judd Hirsch ever did. In Taxi, Hirsch, our everyman, was surrounded by a punch-drunk boxer, an acid casualty, a corrupt little man, and a foreigner. Episodes of that show routinely milked the gap between the way Hirsch’s Alex Rieger viewed the world and the way it was viewed by Tony, Jim, Louie, and Latka in turn. Week in and week out on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, we would see every gal Mary pitted against Ted’s ego, Lou’s gruff exterior, Murray’s nebbishness, Rhoda’s kvetching, etc.
Is Catch-22 center and eccentrics? Only if you don’t consider Yossarian to be eccentric in his own right. Certainly he keeps telling everyone he’s not crazy, but who’d believe a crazy man like that? Columnist Art Buchwald doesn’t have an eccentric point of view per se; rather, he assigns quirky outlooks to the endless parade of fictional acq
uaintances and friends about whom he writes.
The point of identifying center and eccentrics is not so that you’ll know it when you see it, in a self-referential “Where’s Waldo?” kind of way (though, in fact, isn’t Waldo the ultimate center among eccentrics?). The point is to help you build your own strong comic stories, and center and eccentrics is nicely suited to the task.
As you try the following exercise, recognize that the amount of actual writing you’ll be doing is about to go way up. Until now, we’ve traded mostly in lists and lines. For some time to come, we’ll be writing whole paragraphs of comic stuff, so if you’ve been scrawling in the margins or on the back of your hand, now would be a good time to move to the computer or get that notebook going in earnest.
Here’s the task: Name a central character and assign him or her a normal, non-comic perspective. Next, stick him in a situation, the place where he works or lives, for example. Now create about half a dozen other characters, and invest them all with strong comic perspectives. As you do this exercise, keep words to a minimum; if you can’t define a character in one sentence, I don’t think you can define him at all. As I do this exercise, I find that I’ve created a situation comedy called We’re In This Together.
SALLY CROWDER is the long-suffering mom of identical teen triplets. CHIP has made his life a shrine to Elle MacPherson. SKIP should have “Born to ace physics” tattooed on his arm. SCOOTER would sell the cat if the price was right. Sally’s husband is GEORGE, he of the Tefloncoated brain pan, and the next door neighbor, MRS. BRICKLE, thinks there’s no problem so large or complicated that it can’t be cured with fudge.
What I hope you’ll discover is that it’s far easier to springboard into a story with a point of departure like this than with, say, “A guy goes to work in a zoo.” What beginning comic writers, especially in situation comedy, often fail to realize is that a comic story is not about a setting or a situation or a predicament, but about strong and enduring lines of conflict between and among the characters. Center and eccentrics tells you immediately who your hero is, who he’s up against, and where his lines of conflict lie.
FISH OUT OF WATER
In a fish-out-of-water tale, we find either a normal character in a comic world or a comic character in a normal world. You, clever reader, will immediately recognize this configuration as clash of context played out story-wide. You will also notice that fish-out-of-water resembles center and eccentrics, because it often involves planking a character down spang-blam in the midst of some very strange creatures indeed. Right and right again. That’s fine. Remember what we said about pigeonholes and squished pigeons—categories are made to be broken.
Virtually every time-travel story features a normal character in a comic world. Back to the Future, Time Bandits, Sleeper, etc., present us with the clashing comic perspectives of the present versus the future or the present versus the past. To build a story on this structure, simply take a typical dude and put him in a faraway place, either literally or metaphorically.
Turn this structure around and you have a comic character in a normal world. Most space-alien comedies fall into this category for reasons that are self-evident. Mork and Mindy, E.T., My Stepmother Is an Alien, My Favorite Martian, and ALF all find their humor in the gap between the comic character’s comic perspective and the conventional reality (our reality) that now surrounds him. Trading Places and The Prince and the Pauper each feature two characters in one another’s world. Of course, for the ultimate fish-out-of-water tale, look no further than Splash or The Little Mermaid.
Recognize that fish-out-of-water stories don’t require an actual physical change of place. Often a character undergoes an internal change, and that’s what sets the story in motion. In Big, the Tom Hanks character goes from being a child to an adult. That’s what throws this fish out of his water. Likewise in Tootsie: Michael Dorsey gets into drag, which kicks his tale into gear. And then, just to close this circle, put Tom Hanks in drag and you have the short-lived situation comedy Bosom Buddies.
I must tell you that fish-out-of-water is an open invitation to splitting hairs. Is Northern Exposure about a normal character in a comic world or a comic character in a normal world? From Joel Fleischman’s perspective, the answer is the former, but from the perspective of the residents of Cecily, it’s the other way around. Likewise in Sister Act, who’s the comic character, Whoopi Goldberg or all those nutty nuns? Both. Neither. It couldn’t matter less. All that matters is that you get a feel for taking someone and sticking him someplace he doesn’t belong—and the more he doesn’t belong, the better.
What we’re really after here is putting our heroes through hell. We want them in worlds that will give them the worst possible time. I’ve always shied away from this kind of thinking, because basically I’m a nice guy and I want nice things to happen to my friends. But these are comic characters, not friends, and in order to make their story funny you really have to put them in hot water. Once you learn to take sick and twisted pleasure in making their lives miserable, your stories will become much more interesting and funny. Apply exaggeration to fish out of water, and soon you won’t just have a fish out of water, you’ll have a dying and desperate fish flopping around on the beach writhing and gasping for breath. Fun!
It may be useful to boil down some familiar fish-out-of-water stories to one-sentence tellings of their tales. I’ll try a few, and you do a few on your own.
A man who wants desperately to leave his old life behind ends up stuck in a small town reliving the same day over and over again. (Groundhog Day)
A timid romance novelist finds herself on a quest for treasure in a South American jungle. (Romancing the Stone)
An upwardly mobile black family moves into privilege on the Upper East Side. (The Jeffersons)
A stop-at-nothing businesswoman gets saddled with a baby. (Baby Boom)
An ordinary man awakens from a night of fitful dreams to discover that he’s been turned into a giant cockroach. (Kafka’s Metamorphosis)
Metamorphosis?!? Okay, so it’s not a laugh riot. Still, it’s an authentic fish-out-of-water tale, and drama, after all, is just comedy without the laughs. Also, notice how these characters’ new worlds are, in some sense, comic opposites of the characters themselves. The woman who wants a baby least is the one who gets one. The woman who fears adventure stumbles into one. This is the sort of dynamic conflict you want.
Okay, next exercise: write some one-line ideas for fish-out-of-water stories. Try to give them titles as well.
A Martian wins a trip to Earth on a game show and winds up in the Old West masquerading as an Indian. (Cowboys and Aliens)
A nun who doubts her vocation ends up running a casino. (Queen of Clubs)
A downtrodden housewife changes places with Joan of Arc. (Saint Jane)
A wicked old man dies and gets sent to heaven by mistake. (Heaven is Hell)
Again, not all of our ideas will be keepers. That’s okay; we know by now that they don’t have to be. With fish out of water, you often have to throw back the little ones.
CHARACTER COMEDY
Character comedy is direct emotional war between strong comic opposites. If you want to build an enduring situation comedy, or a strong comic film, or a short story, or a stage routine, or even a comic strip, you can do far worse than to invoke the law of comic opposites on the level of your premise. It’s a natural law; there is no right of appeal.
Calvin and Hobbes, in the eponymous comic strip of the same name, wage constant war for control. It’s the same kind of war waged between Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton in The Honeymooners, between Wodehouse’s Bertie and Jeeves, between the Bill Murray character and the Richard Dreyfuss character in What About Bob?, it’s the war fought in Love and War and Chico and the Man, and in about a zillion other stories I’m sure you can also name.
Character comedy is often character romance as well, so that the direct emotional war i
s waged between haters who will become lovers in the end. Sam and Diane on Cheers, Dave and Maddie in Moonlighting, Tracy and Hepburn in everything; the partners in these pairings are designed to give each other hell. Be certain that if they were any less annoying to each other, they’d be a good deal less funny to us.
To make a character comedy work, you need strong forces driving a couple apart, and equally strong forces holding them together. In All in the Family, Archie and Meathead are related by marriage. In 48 Hours, Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy each have life-and-death reasons to stick together and solve the crime, plus a ticking clock to beat. On Cheers, Sam and Diane hate each other, but their sexual chemistry binds them with the power of endocrine superglue. This is a good thing.
Character comedy doesn’t always require diametric comic opposites to work. In K-9, Jim Belushi is a cop partnered with a dog. In Stop or My Mom Will Shoot, Sylvester Stallone is a cop partnered with his mom. In Cop and a Half, Burt Reynolds is a cop partnered with a kid. In each of these cases, the hero’s nemesis is not so much his opposite as his catalyst for misery.
Catalyst for misery. That’s a useful phrase to contemplate as you do the next exercise. Try to build your stories around characters who can be one another’s true catalyst for misery. Don’t be afraid to be mean. These people are figments of your imagination; you can torment them all you like.
Also notice that as we move further from list-making to storytelling, you will be hugely tempted to get caught up in the details of each new story. Resist that urge. At this point, it’s not necessary to know any more about your story than the single sentence that spells it out. In the next chapter, I’ll outline a shorthand for “growing” your story to the next level. For now, though, let’s just keep flexing our comic muscles and see what we get.
