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

by John Vorhaus

  A conservative C.E.O. takes his radical son into the family business.

  A straight woman and a gay man compete for the same guy.

  An electrician and a magician team up to save the world.

  A doctor marries a hypochondriac.

  A cop gets partnered with a rock star.

  A lady lawyer defends her con artist ex-husband in a murder case.

  Don’t worry if all your pairings don’t seem to fit neatly into this category. As we’ve already discovered, the best comic stories cross boundaries. Is Northern Exposure center and eccentrics, or fish-out-of-water, or character comedy? Answer: D, all of the above. In fact, the best thing to do with an idea that you particularly like is see how many different types of stories you can tell with the same concept. This will add depth and texture to your comic ideas. So now let’s add magic into the mix.

  POWERS

  In a comic story built around magical powers, the comic premise is the power itself. The gap between real reality and comic reality is the presumed existence of some magic or some fantasy element. You may remember an old television show called My Mother the Car, in which the central conceit was that a man’s mother could come back and make trouble for him by living in his 1928 Porter. If you bought the premise, you bought the show; if not, you watched Combat or Rawhide or something on public television. In the same era, you might have watched Bewitched or I Dream ofJeannie or Mr. Ed or My Favorite Martian or 1be Flying Nun. Some have called this era the golden age of TV magic. Actually, no one’s called it that but me, and now you may too, if you wish.

  Alien adventures, as we have already discussed, are almost always fish-out-of-water tales. They’re also, by definition, powers tales, the “magic” of extra-terrestrial life on earth. Other science-fantasy stories are “powers” stories as well. Examples include Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, Honey, I Shipped the Kids to Cleveland, what have you. As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Magic is just advanced technology.”

  Readers and viewers have a tremendous tolerance for magic in their comic stories. This is called their “willing suspension of disbelief.” You establish the rules of your world, ask that your audience take those rules as given, and proceed from there. If the audience knows going in, for example, that this is a story about an invisible man, they’ll tolerate almost any stupid explanation of how that invisibility happened. Stealth technology? Accidental exposure to radiation? Pickled cloves of garlic? They won’t care! If the story is interesting and funny, they really won’t give a damn whether the explanation makes sense or not. They’re along for the ride.

  But once you have them on the ride, you can’t change the rules in the middle. If you write a ghost story where your ghosts can walk through walls in the first scene but can’t at the climax, your audience will get a headache and go out for popcorn. They may even slip over to the next screen in the multiplex, where New Glorx in Town is playing to rave reviews. At least in that picture, a Glorx behaves the way a Glorx is supposed to behave.

  So if you’re interested in building a comic story on magical powers, keep these two thoughts in mind: Use one simple premise to get your story going (“witches exist” or “people can change bodies”) and then be consistent in the way your characters use their magic.

  A fat man and a thin man change bodies.

  The world is threatened by a race of hyper-intelligent wombats.

  James Joyce is reincarnated as a game show host. A woman marries a robot.

  A boy and his dog change places.

  A mime is entertaining.

  I mostly used clash of context and exaggeration to find my magic and put it into play. Also, notice how fine the focus is. I’m only after one piece of information: What’s a story about powers? It’s always easier to find things when you have fewer places to look. Try finding some of that magic now.

  Powers stories are not my personal favorites because they don’t usually lead to deep emotional conflict. I’m sorry, but a talking dog will only carry you so far. But magic does have its place. Just make sure that your magical power is a new and fascinating one, and then be true to your rules. After that, it’s easy. Just twitch your nose, blink your eyes, or wiggle your little finger . . .

  ENSEMBLE COMEDY

  In an ensemble comedy, we have a group of people in conflict with each other and with the world. While it’s possible to identify one main character or hero within the group, the best ensemble comedies dispense with this distinction and engage our interest in all the characters more or less equally. These stories are often “human” comedies, because the presence of this so-called “group protagonist” easily opens the door to discussion of real emotional issues within and among members of the group.

  Examples of ensemble comedies in film include The Big Chill, M”A “S”H, The Return o f the Secaucus Seven, Peter’s Friends, This is Spinal Tap, and Indian Summer. On television, we find Cheers, Murphy Brown, and The Golden Girls. In the funny pages, there’s Doonesbury and For Better or Worse. The key to an ensemble comedy is the group’s commonly held goal or enemy. Cheers is a character conflict when it’s Sam versus Diane but an ensemble comedy when the whole Cheer-screw takes on an unruly customer or a con artist or the crosstown rival bar. Likewise in M”A”S”H, there’s clear character conflict between Hawkeye and Major Burns or Hawkeye and Hot Lips, but when wounded soldiers arrive, the group unites to serve their common goal. In The Golden Girls, the group protagonist struggles against aging. In For Better or Worse, the family struggles to understand what being a family means.

  The trick to making an ensemble comedy work is to layer in sufficient lines of conflict within the group to make the story worth watching. It’s not enough to have a bunch of scientists battling a Japanese monster—you want them at each other’s throats as well. This is a particularly tough nut to crack. You need a whole slate of strong comic characters, each imbued with strong, and divergent, comic perspectives. You have to drive them apart with their differences, and yet link them to an overriding common goal or struggle. Draw your characters too broadly and you end up with a cartoon like Gilligan’s Island, where all the conflict is global conflict, and nothing is at stake except how will Gilligan keep them trapped on the island this week? If your characters are too strident, you kill all their fun. Sure, the people in Poseidon Adventure have a common goal, but are they funny? Well, yes, but only by accident.

  An ensemble comedy is kind of a meta-story, borrowing from character comedy, clash of context, fish-out-of-water, and powers, and whipping all these diverse elements together in a dynamic, organic stew. Because it relies so heavily on authentic comic characters, it’s just about the hardest type of comic story to write. Nevertheless, we shall try.

  A group of Irish schoolboys make life hell for their headmaster and for each other.

  After their mother and father are killed in a car accident, seven sisters try to make it as a family.

  A bunch of hackers get trapped inside a computer.

  A gang of misfits take a second-rate rugby team to a national championship.

  An Indian tribe occupies a New York City skyscraper in an effort to win back Manhattan.

  An art forgery ring is haunted by the ghost of Vincent van Gogh.

  The Mormon Tabernacle Choir gets transported back in time and must sing its way off Devil’s Island.

  It’s not enough to have a great premise for an ensemble comedy. You must also be prepared to do the hard work of treating each of your characters as the hero of his or her own story, and create strong, compelling stories for everyone. Then you must figure out how to interleave these stories to create an interesting and intricate total tale. No one said it was easy. On the other hand, if it’s easy you want, I commend your attention to . . .

  SLAPSTICK

  Slapstick comedy is just about the easiest sort of comedy to get right because, as Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, C
alifornia, “There is no there there.” With slapstick, you don’t have to worry about inner conflict or emotional core issues or any of the things that make all writing, and comic writing in particular, really brutally hard. All you have to do is make it funny in a very superficial way.

  Easy as slipping on a banana peel.

  A slapstick character never experiences self-doubt. In Gilligan’s Island, Gilligan may feel bad about breaking the radio, or sleepwalking through the Professor’s satellite dish, or scaring off the Russian cosmonaut, but he never questions his essential “Gilliganness.” In his own mind, he’s always okay. In a slapstick story or a slapstick moment, then, the comic premise is the gap between the slapstick character’s self-assurance and his manifest incompetence.

  Look at Lucy. The classic episodes of I Love Lucy always find Lucy trying to prove herself capable in a situation that invariably proves the opposite. One week she’s trying to squeeze into a dancer’s costume that is three sizes too small. The next week she’s on the camping trip from hell. But nothing that happens to Lucy can ever shake her essential core of confidence.

  This thread of rock-ribbed self-confidence runs throughout all the slapstick greats: Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau never ever doubts his ability to solve the crime. Dagwood Bumstead takes great pride in his napping and his big sandwiches and his other bad habits. Jerry Lewis may be an inveterate bumbler, but not in his own mind.

  Because slapstick comedy denies self-doubt, slapstick comedy is physical comedy as opposed to cerebral comedy. That’s why you find slapstick in television and film and on stage and in the Sunday funnies, but not in fiction or comic commentary. (The word slapstick, by the way, comes from a tool of the same name, used in vaudeville and elsewhere; it made a loud slapping sound when used by one actor to strike another. An amazing factoid to share with your friends.)

  Slapstick comedy is abuse comedy, but what makes it work is the audience’s awareness that the target of abuse is getting exactly what he deserves. A pie in the face is funniest if the face belongs to a pompous jerk. To create slapstick comedy, then, start by creating comic characters with delusions of grandeur. Then put these characters in situations designed to torment those delusions.

  An arrogant English professor is made to coach a working-class soccer team.

  A decathalete suddenly can’t control his feet.

  A crazy old cat lover inherits a dozen puppies.

  A white-collar criminal does time in a maximum security prison.

  A cagey gambler hits the world’s worst streak of bad luck.

  A spoiled yuppie is cast away on a desert island.

  You’ll no doubt notice some similarity between your slapstick story ideas and those from other categories, notably character conflict and fish-out-of-water. Whether these stories ultimately become slapstick or not depends largely on your treatment of the central characters. If you construct a comic character with no sense of self, and no self-doubt, he or she almost can’t help but become a “tall poppy,” the sort of character we want to see cut down.

  Of course, it’s possible to aim your metaphorical pie-in-the-face at someone or something entirely outside of the story you’ve set out to tell. In this case, you’ve entered the world of . . .

  SATIRE AND PARODY

  Satire attacks the substance of a social or cultural icon or phenomenon. Parody attacks the style of an art form. Vaughan Meader’s The First Family satirized President John F. Kennedy, while Mel Brook’s Spaceballs parodied space-adventure movies. Airplane parodied disaster movies’. You Can’t Take It With You satirized rationalism. This is Spinal Tap parodied rockumentaries. In Living Color parodies other television shows and films, but also satirizes racism, sexism, etc. Political cartoonists are satirists. The Rudes parodied the Beatles. The Capitol Steps satirize politics.

  The common denominator between satire and parody is this: Both find their comic premise in the gap between the world as they present it and the world as their audience understands it to be. This requires the audience to step outside the show it’s watching in order to get the joke.

  If Dana Carvey is doing his George Bush impression, for example, viewers will only find it funny if they have an understanding of how the real George Bush normally talks and acts. Likewise, a parody of horror movies will be lost on someone who’s never actually seen a horror film.

  Parody and satire, then, become a tricky business because you have to gauge accurately how much your audience knows about your target. You might find it hilariously funny to mock the rules of the Malaysian legislature, but if your audience knows nothing of Malaysian politics, the point, and the joke, will be lost. To recall our class clown and class nerd again, the class clown parodies the teacher, while the class nerd parodies a book that no one else has bothered to read.

  Another danger of parody and satire is that they only work when the viewer steps outside the story or the reader leaves the page. Whenever this happens, you run the risk that they might not bother to return. For instance, if you’re writing an otherwise self-contained comic story and suddenly throw in a reference to Mahatma Gandhi, it may be hilariously funny and yet still not work for you. Your reader has to stop and remember everything he knows about Gandhi, “call up his file,” so to speak, and then measure that information against the reference you’ve just made. Even if he gets the joke, you’ve broken up your narrative flow, taken the reader off the page. Unless the joke is a damned good one, you stand to lose more than you gain.

  The best parody and satire operate on two levels at the same time. You might have a fish-out-of-water tale that involves a comic character in a new and challenging world and yet, at the same time, mocks a facet of the world with which we’re quite familiar. The joke takes the reader off the page, but the strong, compelling story brings him back. The Bullwinkle Show always did this very well. On one level, it was a cartoon, showing the resourceful Rocky and the dim-bulb Bullwinkle in dire and comic circumstances. 1be kids loved it. On another level, the show was a dense allusional puzzle, full of delights and surprises for adults: “Oh, Boris Badenov, the bad guy; oh, Boris Godunov, the Russian tsar; oh, bad enough/good enough; I get it. Ha!”

  The key to making your parodies and satires work, then, is to make sure that your target is well understood by your audience and that your framing story works on some other level as well. Also remember to use your tool of exaggeration. Parody and satire require a huge gap between your story and your target.

  A studio executive tries to turn her talentless pretty-boy lover into a star.

  An idiot savant becomes a Wall Street stock mogul. Misguided entrepreneurs open a theme park based on the works of Marcel Proust.

  A Glorxian immigrant in pursuit of the American Dream takes over a McDonald’s franchise.

  Notice that each of the above satires has a clearly defined target chosen from the real world.

  A deaf-mute hosts a talk show.

  A porno movie earns a G-rating.

  A jugband plays Wagner’s Ring cycle.

  Senior citizens star in a teen comedy.

  The life of Buddha is done as a musical.

  In parody, it’s necessary for the parody to be the same in form and structure as the thing it parodies. My last example, Oh, Buddha!, would have the same shape and self-serious tone as Jesus Christ, Superstar. Try some now.

  SATIRE:

  PARODY:

  Notice that if you did all the exercises in this chapter, you now have a working vocabulary of fifty, sixty, seventy different starting points for comic stories. It took no magic to find these stories, no outrageous creative gifts. All we did was swap the large question, “What’s a comic story?” for smaller questions, “What are examples of thisparticular kind of comic story.” I hope that you’re becoming much more confident in your comic abilities, now seeing them to be rooted in logical process and simple, straightforward creative problem-solving.
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  7

  The Comic Throughline

  What’s a throughline? My dictionary doesn’t list the word and silently accuses me of making it up. Well let’s just call a throughline a simple, direct path from the start to the end of a tale. If the tale is a comic one, then the throughline is a Comic Throughline, a phrase I’ve trademarked so that when Comic Throughline sportswear and coffee mugs and Comic Throughline action figures come on the market, I can really cash in.

  Not all forms of comedy involve story, although if you look hard enough, you can find the beginning, middle and end of any comic moment, even a joke, even a pratfall, even the launch, flight, and impact of the lowly pie in the face. Nor is all storytelling comic, although if you look hard enough at this throughline thing, I think you’ll discover that it works equally well with serious stories as with comic.

  In fact, I know it does because I’ve used it myself for dramatic stories, and will probably call it (and trademark it as) the Dramatic Throughline in another book some day. You’ll notice in this chapter that I draw examples from comic and dramatic stories alike and don’t draw much distinction between the two. To my mind, the difference between comedy and drama is a matter of exaggeration, perspective, inappropriate responses, and the wide gap of the comic premise. But these are differences of tone, not structure. About the only place that comic structure veers away from dramatic structure is in the matter of endings, a matter we’ll discuss, well, at the end.

  I could go into a whole big thing about how structure is structure is structure, but let’s just leave it at this: Whether your story is comic or serious, it has to work first as a story. This chapter offers a template for making that difficult thing happen.