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

by John Vorhaus

  THE RUNNING GAG

  A running gag doesn’t run in place. If you’re going to use the same joke again, you have to bend it, tweak it, or take it in a new direction in order to win your reader’s heart or your audience’s loyalty. Why should this be?

  Jokes, as we know, are built on surprise, the unseen twist, the suddenly defeated expectation. Say a joke once and it’s funny. Say it again and it’s yesterday’s news. So unless you change a joke when you repeat it, you offer your audience no new surprise by which to be delighted. As Queen Victoria so apocryphally put it, “We are not amused.”

  How do you twist a joke to make it new? There are several ways. One involves changing the detail of the joke. In Murphy Brown, the running secretary gag is always the same—Murphy can’t find a secretary who works—but it’s also always new. One week the secretary is an obsessive talker, the next week an illiterate or a Satan worshipper or a closet novelist or an escaped convict or the former president of a banana republic. The structure of the joke never changes, but the substance always does.

  In Star Wars, there’s a running gag about Han Solo’s spaceship, The Millennium Falcon, and this quirk it has of not shifting into hyperdrive on command. The first time we see this joke, there’s no real threat associated with its failure, but with every subsequent appearance, there’s escalating danger. Here the running gag is changed by the altered circumstances that surround it. The joke is the same, but its importance has increased.

  Another way to change a running gag is to assign the same line or attitude to a different character. The catch phrase in Catch-22 is, “That’s some catch, that Catch-22.” Sooner or later, everyone in the book speaks this line, and it’s a different joke every time, because whoever says it gives it a different meaning. To some it’s a vexation, while to others it’s a thing of beauty. Changing the source, then, can keep a running gag alive.

  Sometimes the mere passage of time makes an old joke new. Woody Allen opens Annie Hall by telling a joke about a man who thinks he’s a chicken. He ends the film with the same joke, but it carries a lot more weight now, because we’ve been through the hero’s journey with him, and we understand the joke on a different, much deeper level.

  What happens when time is not measured in hours but in weeks? Then you have television, a medium built on creating an expectation, and then meeting that expectation again and again, relentlessly, week after week after week, past cancellation and syndication, and on into the Running Gag Hall of Fame.

  When people tune in Saturday Night Live each week, they expect to see someone like Dana Carvey’s the Church Lady screwing up her face and saying, “Isn’t that special?” Everyone knows it’s coming. They can’t wait to see it again. It turns out that a certain fixed percentage of a certain type of audience seeks not the new thing but the familiar thing. They want the same “buzz,’’ the same triggering of their laugh reflexes that they enjoyed last week and the week before and the week before that.

  So sometimes running gags do run in place. And the very best of them run all the way into the collective memory of pop culture. They cease being lines and tum into icons. Remember T-shirts with Jimmy “J.J.” Walker saying, “Dyn-O-Mite!” or the Fonz saying, “A-y-y-y-y,” or Bart Simpson saying, “Don’t have a cow, man”? There’s a certain lowest-common-denominator thinking about this kind of comedy. You almost never see T-shirts quoting T.S. Eliot, “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” A shame.

  Seek, then, the opportunity to hammer home your funny line, to create within your audience or your reader the expectation that the funny line will come around again. The best of all possible worlds, of course, is to set up that expectation and then defeat it by presenting your catch phrase in a new and different way, like one of those outlined above. In Cheers, it’s a running gag that everyone shouts, “Norm!” when Norm Peterson enters the bar. Then someone gives him a setup line, and Norm cracks a joke. We know something’s coming, but we never know what. Thus is the audience’s expectation met and bested at the same time.

  I have this pet theory that all human experience can be reduced, in one way or another, to creating and meeting repeatable expectations. We seek the same sensations, whether laughter or risk or exploration or sexual pleasure or gratification of the taste buds or what-have-you. For more on this subject, please see my essay, “The Unified Theory of Chasing the Buzz,” published in monograph by the Journal of Esoterica and Obliquity.

  Not.

  CALLBACK

  In using the word, “not,” above, I continued a running gag established by Mike Meyers and Dana Carvey in Wayne’s World. The astute reader will no doubt bust me for trading in clichés. If I may be forgiven, I did so to introduce another comic tool, the callback.

  Close cousin to the running gag, callback works by direct reference to an earlier joke or idea. In Tootsie, Julie asks Dorothy why she uses so much makeup, and Dorothy alludes to a “mustache problem.” Later, Julie kisses Dorothy and says, “I feel that mustache.” That’s callback.

  Callback is a marvelously effective way to finish, or “button,” a scene or a story or a comic essay or a screenplay or even a comic novel. At the end of Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter tells Clarisse that he’s “having an old friend for dinner.” In calling back to his cannibal habits, Lecter buttons the movie, giving the story a wonderfully fulfilling (not to say filling) sense of closure.

  Suppose you’re writing a comic essay about how much you hate to trim the hedge. You might recount how you grudgingly geared up for the job, but had no sooner started than you accidentally nicked a finger with the clippers. So you went inside to put on a Band-Aid, slipped on a wet floor, and sprained your ankle. You went to the hospital for x-rays, had an accident en route, wrecked your car, broke an arm, and put yourself out of commission for ten solid weeks. If you wrapped up the whole affair by saying, “At least I didn’t have to trim the hedge,” you’d be using the tool of callback.

  In fact, why just suppose you’re writing a comic essay? Why not do it for real? Fill in the blank: “I hate to “ and write a brief prose piece that ends up by referring back to something in the first paragraph. If nothing else, this will give you clear awareness of where your essay will end, and that’s an awareness of no small utility.

  9

  Practical Jokes

  Of course, no book on comedy would be complete without a comprehensive discussion of practical jokes.

  10

  Comedy and Jeopardy

  There is a strong causal connection between comedy and jeopardy: The greater the jeopardy, the better the comedy. The more trouble your comic characters are in, and the more they have at stake, the greater your opportunity to create real and lasting comic moments. If you don’t believe me, just think about the last time you rode a roller coaster. What did you do when the ride ended? Laughed, I’ll bet. Or maybe barfed.

  The reason for this is found in a concept I introduced earlier, tension and release. Just as a little tension can generate a little laugh, a whole pile of tension can create a big ol’ pile of laughs.

  This is true whether we’re speaking of Bart Simpson running from his dad in mortal terror, or Dorothy Michaels fending off the rape attempt of Jonathan Van Horn, or Yossarian facing death in World War II, or Holden Caulfield experiencing existential psychic meltdown in Catcher in the Rye. If you really want to make your audience laugh, make your hero sweat. A lot.

  In Lethal Weapon 3, Danny Glover is stuck in a runaway truck with a lusty lady truck driver who has the hots for him. The joke is structured around her wildly inappropriate response, her exaggerated passion in comic opposition to his fear. But what makes it truly funny is that it takes place in the context of a life-and-death struggle. The audience feels incredible tension, wondering whether Danny will survive. That tension underlies and informs the scene, making the driver’s every leering line much funnier. Danny Glover has
a hell of a time, but for the rest of us it’s a joyride.

  The guys in Ghostbusters start out running a harmless little paranormal investigations service. By the end of the movie, a giant marshmallow man is ravaging Manhattan, and the safety of the entire city is at risk. This is called raising the stakes. Do it every chance you get.

  If you have a character winning a trophy, attach a cash prize, too. If your character knows someone with a disfiguring disease, make it the character’s best friend, or better yet, the character’s mom. If your character cheats on his taxes, make sure he cheats big, gets caught, and stands to lose everything in the audit.

  You see this in situation comedies all the time. Let me invent a new one now and show you what I mean. In the imaginary sitcom People Like Us, the comic opposites are a street-wise city kid and his bumpkin country in-law. In this episode, Country tries to cure a cold with a home-brew cold remedy that gets him “TV drunk.” That’s bad, but not as bad as it could be. Suppose City’s up for a new job and he’s bringing his prospective new boss home for dinner. Now Country’s behavior has a huge and direct impact on City’s fortune. This raises the stakes of the story.

  There are two general ways to raise the stakes for your hero. One is to increase the price of failure, and the other is to increase the prize for success. In Trading Places, Dan Aykroyd’s Winthorp falls from privilege. With nothing less than his whole way of life at stake, he has a lot to lose. Meanwhile, Eddie Murphy’s Billy goes from outsider to insider, from con man to competent man. With nothing less than a great new life at stake, he has a lot to win. The stakes are raised in both directions at once, and every time they are, the story becomes richer in comedy. Let’s see how this is done.

  THE PRICE OF FAILURE

  There’s a guy playing roulette in a Las Vegas casino. He’s got two bucks down on double zero, a grand in his wallet, a loving wife by his side, and a house back home that he owns free and clear. We don’t care about the outcome of his puny two-dollar bet because there’s no price for failure. Whatever happens, our boy can’t lose more than two bucks here, and to him two bucks is nothing. There’s no tension in the scene. No tension equals no release. No release equals no laugh.

  Now suppose that the guy’s betting not two dollars but two thousand. Already he has a thousand times as much to lose. But wait, let’s make the bad situation worse. Suppose it’s the last two grand he has in the world. Suppose, further, that he’s in debt to the marinara people to the tune of sixty grand, and the only way he can get even is if his 35 to 1 longshot pays off. To make matters worse (always, always make matters worse), there’s a brute waiting for him outside, and the brute is called “Fingers” because that’s what he likes to break first. As if that weren’t enough, this poor guy has promised his daughter ballet lessons; no, knee surgery; no, a lung transplant, and how’s he ever going to pay for that now?

  Here’s a guy with everything riding on that bet. There’s so much tension in the scene that the audience is practically begging to laugh, just to ease the tension. This is what you want. Insofar as possible, put your comic characters in situations where if they lose, they lose it all.

  This works for more than just comic storytelling. Remember the example I gave in chapter eight about the stand-up comic who pretends to fear hecklers? What if the comic makes it clear to his audience that his price of failure is really, really high? “If you heckle me, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and spend my next five days in a closet, my next five years in therapy, and my next ten lifetimes trying to undo the psychic damage you do here tonight.” He’s raised the stakes. He’s built tension. When the inevitable heckling comes, the explosive release of laughter will be that much greater.

  In Good Morning, Vietnam, Adrian Cronauer’s radio routines are funny in direct proportion to the escalating heat he takes from the Army, and to his escalating emotional investment in his Vietnamese friend and in the woman he loves. In Cat Ballou, Jane Fonda becomes responsible not just for herself but for her newfound friends. In this way the price of failure is increased.

  Making a bad thing worse, then, means mentally shopping for more ways your comic character can be hurt by failure. Not surprisingly, this tool works well as a list.

  Suppose your character is trying to get cash from an ATM. To raise the price for failure, you want to increase the bad consequences of his not being able to get that money.

  He won’t be able to buy the latest People magazine.

  He can’t take out his girlfriend.

  He won’t impress his boss.

  He’ll miss an (already long overdue) alimony payment.

  Street people will harass him.

  A gunman will kill him.

  The world as we know it will come to an end.

  You may not be able to see an immediate connection between cash and the end of the world. I could draw that connection (something about terrorists, plutonium, and a treasure map in a second-hand book store), but it’s not necessary. Logic and comedy are not always close friends, nor often even nodding acquaintances.

  Always remember that genuine raising of the stakes takes place on an emotional level. The closer you can get to a character’s deep inner fears, the greater his or her real risk will be. In the example above, I listed a robber and an ex-wife as possible threats to our hero. Though the robber carries the greater physical threat, the ex-wife probably wields more emotional clout. Hint: To get the best of all possible worlds, make the ex-wife and the robber one and the same.

  Try it. Setting logic aside, and going for her emotional core, consider a situation in which a young woman is trying on a dress in a boutique. What ten horrible things will happen if the dress doesn’t fit?

  Let’s take another situation. You’re writing a sketch about an actress with stage fright. Once you’ve put her on stage, how can you make her bad situation worse? What can you think of that would make yielding to stage fright hurt her worst of all?

  First let’s exaggerate her stage fright so that it’s not just anxiety but full-on cataleptic fear. Next, place important people in the audience: agents, producers, friends and relatives. The more people she wants to impress, the worse her catastrophic collapse will be. Give her allies, people who have a vested interest in her outcome. If there are other actors, and maybe a writer or a director who are counting on her to deliver a bravura performance, she has that much more to lose by disappointing them. Still not satisfied? Throw in a stalker who’s holding her daughter hostage backstage and will kill if he’s not moved by her performance. Now we’re talking risk!

  Try it one more time. There’s a photographer who wants to take a picture of a reclusive star. How can you raise the stakes to make his price of failure horrifyingly high?

  It’s not always obvious how the threat of dire consequence drives a comic scene. It may be that the threat is only implied. Gilligan, for example, faces the direct threat of not getting off the island, but also the implied threat of not pleasing the Skipper. Because this second threat is closer to his emotional core, it provides the sense of jeopardy that drives the comedy forward.

  When we speak of jeopardy, though, we’re not always speaking strictly of a bad thing. The more hope, as well as fear, that your character invests in an outcome, the more jeopardy he feels. Giving your character greater need for, or hope of, a positive outcome is called increasing the prize for success.

  THE PRIZE FOR SUCCESS

  In Casey at the Bat, the Mighty Casey strides to the plate with every expectation of hitting the home run that will inscribe his name forever in the pantheon of heroes. He has no fear of failure, but his need for success is almost unbearably high. Not just his hopes, but those of his teammates, the fans, followers of the Mudville Nine, indeed, the hopes of right-thinking people everywhere rest squarely on his broad shoulders. Ultimate triumph, for him and for everyone, is only a swing of the bat away.

  In Groundhog Day, life becomes
hell for Bill Murray not because he fears living the same day over and over again but because he hopes so much to win Andie MacDowell’s love. And things become funny to us in direct proportion to how hellish they are for him. Remember what we said earlier about a moment not being funny to the person inside that moment? Often that person has so much hope and need invested in the moment that he just can’t see the joke. It’s a sad, pathetic place to be—which is exactly why it’s where you want your characters to go.

  Let’s return to that scene at the ATM. We’ve discussed how to raise the price of failure. How could we also raise the prize for success? What good consequences could result from our hero extracting cash from that ATM?

  He’ll buy a winning lottery ticket.

  He’ll take his kid to a baseball game.

  He’ll meet the mortgage on his house.

  He’ll take himself to a museum, meet an artist, connect with her on a deep emotional and spiritual level, fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after.

  And all because he got cash out of an ATM. Wow. Now go back and look at your photographer again. How can you raise the prize for success, so that success in snapping that photograph will redound to his huge and lifelong benefit?

  It’s hard to find the humor of a scene just by asking, “What’s the humor of this scene?” But it’s easy to ask, “What’s at stake?” And when you know what’s at stake, you’ll know what’s funny, too. People laugh because they care, because they feel your character’s urgency and desire. If nothing’s at stake in a scene, if it’s just some yabbo at an ATM getting cash for dinner and drinks, the scene won’t matter enough to be fun.