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

by John Vorhaus

  A man walks into a waiting room and a mirror falls off the wall. He tries to set it right and a book case falls over. A maid comes in to clean up and the man accidentally stabs her to death. Someone comes to investigate and inadvertently plummets out a window. Policemen come to arrest our hero and all have heart attacks and die. The man leaves the waiting room as objects shatter and walls collapse in his wake. Finally, he steps outside and the whole building explodes.

  The man in the waiting room is the comic character. His comic perspective is, “Accidents happen to me.” His force of opposition is the magical power at work in that room. His forced union is the need to wait for his appointment. Escalation happens in a line from the mirror to the bookcase to the maid. The stakes get raised when he’s arrested for murder. His emotional peak is the realization that destruction is all around him and unavoidable. He wins by escaping, and the frame is changed—literally—when the building ceases to exist.

  Another way to look at sketch comedy is to think in terms of creating and then destroying reality. The very act of bringing a reader or a viewer into a scene raises the question, “What’s supposed to be funny here?” or, to put it another way, “What’s wrong with this picture?” The question creates tension, and when you destroy the scene’s reality, you release that tension in laughter.

  A kid goes to a gas station to inflate a basketball. As he wrestles with the air hose, the attendant solemnly informs him that hose only pumps “tire air”; it won’t work in a basketball at all. The attendant is the comic character, the kid is his foil, and the gas-station setting is their forced union. Tension is created by the question, “Is this guy on the level?” He escalates the conflict through increasingly persuasive arguments that tire air won’t work in basketballs. The stakes get raised when a crowd gathers and takes sides on the question. The limit is pushed—and reality is destroyed—when the attendant ultimately fills that ball so full of air that it explodes in the kid’s hands. “See, kid? I told you this air wouldn’t work.” The attendant wins and the kid loses. Finally, we change the frame by revealing that this is a documentary training film on “How to spot morons in the workplace.”

  Try this exercise: Pretend you’re a writer on Saturday Night Live. Create a sketch character who can become a pop icon. Put him or her in a repeatable situation and create a strong force of opposition. Now put them in motion. Write a sketch around the forced union of these incompatibles, escalate their stakes, move toward victory for someone, and then wait for the T-shirt royalties to start rolling in.

  Sketch comedy seems like a place where you can just dive in and swim around and see what you find. Well, yeah, you can, but without planning, structure, and a sense of destination, your sketch is doomed to dissipate its own energy, wasting whatever terrific comic idea you might have had in the first place. You’ve seen this happen a thousand times on television and stage. The heartbreak of bad sketch comedy: Don’t let it happen to you.

  14

  Toward Polish and Perfection

  Kill your ferocious editor! Procrastinate later! Eradicate fear! Don’t judge! Concentrate on process, not product! And quantity, not quality! Get those words on the page! Avoid value judgments! Value judgments are bad! Just do it!

  There, I’ve used up my quota of exclamation points for the year to remind you once again that the death of your ferocious editor is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Now, having helped you kill your ferocious editor, I want to help you rebuild the beast, for finally he has a useful role to play.

  We suspend value judgments and lower expectations because we want our creativity to flow. But once the raw material is assembled on the page, we have to make of it something finished and polished and wonderful. This requires not just a ferocious editor but a hard-eyed and relentless one with nerves of steel and an unflagging commitment to quality. If you want to take your material to the next level, nothing less will do.

  This will engage your ego. It has to. We all fall in love with our work or our words. This joke or sketch or script or comic opera, it’s your baby, and everyone thinks their baby is the cutest in the world. And you’re right; your baby is cute.

  But not as cute as it’s going to be.

  The goal here is to make your work clever and smooth and funny and elegant and just generally unfailingly admirable in every way. How do you achieve that goal? By rewriting and refining your words. By questioning and rethinking every creative decision you’ve made up till now. By fine-tuning everything. By going all the way back to square one, if necessary, in pursuit of comic excellence.

  Let’s not kid ourselves, this is a lot of hard work. Ego questions aside, there’s a huge temptation to say that good enough is good enough and move on to the next project. In general, we all want to be done as quickly as possible.

  But the hard truth is that the real work of comic writing takes place in rewriting. This is where the jokes become three-dimensional, where characters become true and consistent and emotionally resonant, and where stories shake out their problems and start to take on a compelling life of their own. If you’re not willing to commit to rewriting and editing, you might as well go drive a truck.

  You will go through hell in rewriting. You will look at a joke and say, “Hell, it’s fine just the way it is.” You’ll look at a plot hole and say, “Maybe nobody will notice.” You’ll look at story problems and say, “I can’t fix them, so I might as well ignore them and hope they go away.” For every desire you have to improve the work, there will be an equal and opposite desire to protect your ego instead. This creates a dynamic conflict within, and it can make you very unhappy. Eventually you have to decide whom to serve.

  Will you serve your ego, or will you serve your work?

  The line of least resistance is to serve the ego. You risk less and you stay comparatively safe. But the real path to success in comic writing lies in serving the work. Insofar as possible, you have to set your ego aside. Here are a few strategies that I find useful when, having clubbed my ferocious editor like a seal pup, I now find that I must somehow bring him back to full and vibrant and productive life.

  MINING AND REFINING

  You don’t dig a gold necklace out of the ground. First you mine the ore, grinding down a ton of gravel to produce an ounce of gold. Next you refine it, smelting and polishing and working the gold until its quality comes through. Using this model, you can see in an instant that it’s unrealistic to expect your raw material and your finished product to be one and the same.

  And yet we cling to the belief that our raw drafts and first passes are different somehow from humble gold ore. We want it to be that our first effort is our best effort. It saves time and effort, plus wear and tear on the ego. Once you see comic writing as a process of mining and refining, though, you give yourself a way to step past this roadblock and into the world of rewriting, where the true beauty of your work can shine.

  Mining your work means pouring everything out on the page where you can look at it, mold it, study it, move the pieces around, whip it into shape. Refining the work means rewriting small and large pieces, changing a word here, a sentence there, a chapter over somewhere around the corner. Once again, we break our process down into separate steps. Concentrate on mining when you’re mining, then concentrate on refining when you’re refining. The mere act of separating these functions gives a big kick in the quality to both.

  As it happens, our minds process information in many different ways. In creative terms, this means that we can go only so far with material we only think about. To get the most out of your comic efforts, you have to put the words or drawings on the page where you can study them, reflect upon them, and bring them up to the next level.

  Remember, it’s far, far easier to turn bad material into good material, or good material into great material, than it is to get everything (or even anything) right on the first try. Break it down. Mine it, then refine it.

 
Go back now and rewrite any (or every) earlier exercise in this book. I promise that your work will be better for the effort.

  WRITE FAST, WRITE LONG

  It’s easier to cut bad material out than to put new material in. As a function of mining and refining, write everything you can think of now, and sort out later what’s relevant and what’s not. I’m using this tool even as we speak, writing a small discourse on how I’m using this tool even as we speak. I may decide later that this passage is irrelevant. I may decide it’s redundant. I may cut it in the mid—

  If you’re writing a 120-page script, think about letting your first pass run 160, 170 pages or more. If you need five minutes of stand-up material, write fifteen. If you need to fill one newspaper column with copy, write two or three. If you’re doing a comic strips, draw five or six times as many as you need, just to give yourself somewhere to fall.

  At every opportunity, present yourself with the challenge to cut. Why is this a good idea? Because if you force yourself to cut, say, 50% of your existing work, the 50% that remains will have withstood a fairly rigorous test. By natural selection, the strongest material is always left standing. Write long and cut relentlessly, to the benefit of your work.

  When you write long, you can make refining a painless process. Why? Because if you know that the work is a third too long, then you know that you won’t be done until all that excess material is excised. This makes the edited work a happy ending, the realization of a goal, rather than the death, word-by-painful-word, of some close and cherished friends.

  Additionally, when you write long and then cut hard, you find that the work naturally tightens up, becomes sleeker and smoother. If you’ve met the challenge of cutting down a vastly overwritten document, what’s left has to be better than what you had going in. Has to be.

  Just for drill, write a one-page description of a comic character, and then edit it down to half that length. Far from losing meaning and nuance, your half-page description will be all ways a better read than your first pass was.

  GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT

  A lot of times when I’m rewriting, I’m confronted with the challenge of cutting material I like. Maybe there’s a joke that I really love, but it’s not relevant to my story. Maybe I realize that a character I’m really quite fond of needs to be rebuilt from scratch. Maybe I see story problems in an otherwise zippy and satisfying scene. Sometimes I have to go all the way back and rewrite my story before I push on with the script. All of these revelations amount to the same thing: To move forward from this point, I’m going to have to give up some gains. There are two strong disincentives for doing so. The first, of course, is that giving up my gains means more work for me, and generally I’m in favor of less work for me, not more. Second, giving up my gains is a challenge to my ego. Why wasn’t it right the first time, I wonder, and then I feel bad. Can you see my lip pout?

  One strategy for getting over this hurdle is something called the hill-climbing problem.

  Imagine you’re standing on top of a fairly high hill. It’s an okay place to be, but not the best place in the world. From where you stand, you can see the top of a mountain. That, that’s where you really want to be. How do you get there?

  By going down the hill, of course.

  Trouble is, there’s a valley between the hill and the mountain, and that valley is filled with fog. I can see the path leading down off the hill, but I can’t see any sure way through the fog and up the mountain. In other words, I know what I have to lose (the joke, the character, the time I’ve invested so far), but I don’t know for sure if the sacrifice will ever pay off.

  That’s the trouble with rewriting. You have to commit to sacrifice with no certain expectation of reward. Yet even absent that guarantee, there’s one thing we know for sure: If we don’t come down off the hill, we’ll never reach the mountain.

  In the end, we’re faced with a choice between “maybe don’t succeed” and “surely don’t succeed.” When you put the choice in those terms, it’s easy to commit to coming down off that hill.

  Here’s something that makes it easier still.

  When we write a joke or a scene or a story, we’re reluctant to let any of it go, because we’re never altogether sure that we can replace it with something better. We’re informed by the fear that the last idea we had is the last good idea we’ll ever have. This fear makes us hold onto a mediocre joke or essay or cartoon or script or performance or sketch. Even when we know for certain that the work’s not as good as it could be, we fear that it’s already as good as we can make it. If we happened to be right about that, then committing to rewriting any of it would be condemning ourselves to failure, to ego death, and to full-on creative core meltdown.

  But I’m convinced that the myth of the last great idea is just that—a myth. Let me see if I can sell you, too.

  Suppose you wrote a joke, a pretty darn good one, but one that you felt could be better still. The myth of the last great idea will tell you to leave well enough alone. But consider this: When you first wrote the joke, you didn’t have that very joke to draw upon as a resource. If you commit to searching for something better, you’ll bring to the task more experience (specifically, the experience of writing the only-okay joke) than you had when you started out. You have to be more successful because you’ve lived with the material longer, you’re more practiced and experienced than you were before.

  Now extrapolate this thinking to encompass a whole script or novel or work of comic non-fiction. Taking this work to the next level is now a function of drawing on the work at this level. You have more raw material to draw on, more substance to mine and refine; the work can’t help but improve.

  If you haven’t experienced this in your creative work, take the time to prove it to yourself now. Go back and find a joke or comic notion or anything else that you’ve created in the course of reading this book. In fact, search for the work you like best of all. Now rewrite it. It’s unconditionally guaranteed to improve. Try it and see.

  The hill-climbing problem and the myth of the last great idea both resonate of the following Zennish phrase: Good is the enemy of the great. As long as you’re willing to stay comfortable, as long as you’ll settle for something that sort of works, you have no hope of achieving real excellence. The myth of the last great idea helps you to rationalize standing pat, but the hill-climbing problem drags you down the hill and into the fog. You may not reach the mountain, but at least you won’t be stuck on the hill.

  Interestingly, this whole change-is-growth strategy pays dividends in other parts of your life besides writing. We get comfortable. We get stuck in our habits, settled in our ways. Above all, we become reluctant to try for something better for fear of running into something worse. What I’ve tried to show in this section is that there’s always improvement to be had, and that the improvement is grounded in, and aided by, the very set of experiences that seem to need improvement. This takes us right back to process-not-product. Moving forward is moving forward, no matter which direction you choose.

  TRUST YOURSELF

  Still, all other things being equal, we like to move in the right direction, not the wrong one. How do you know if what you’ve written is truly funny or only seemingly funny? In the end, you have to trust yourself, your vision, your judgment. But you want to make sure that that judgment is trustworthy. To validate your “yes,” you have to authenticate your “no.”

  At every turn we ask ourselves the question, “Is that line good enough? Is my work done here? Can I move on?” If you have long experience of saying, “No, that doesn’t work,” and going back and rewriting, then you’ll be able to believe it when you finally say, “Yes, now it works.”

  Evaluate your work with your eyes wide open. Since you didn’t expect to get it right on the first try, it shouldn’t be all that painful to admit that it’s not right yet. And if you can view your own work as flawed and imperfect, and
survive that harsh self-judgment, then you’ll be able to trust the moment when you feel, beyond doubt, that you’ve taken your work into the rarefied air of excellence.

  Avoid falling in love with your jokes. Even though it’s funny, who says it can’t be funnier still? Avoid closure; the longer you put off saying you’re done, the better your finish will be.

  Okay, that’s perfect for a perfect world, but this isn’t one. There are times when you can’t trust yourself. Who can you trust instead?

  YOUR BETA TESTERS

  We get too close to our work. We fall in love with our jokes. We ignore plotholes. We overlook errors. We laugh at jokoids. We imagine that we’ve achieved perfection when all we’ve achieved is confusion. Before we force our work on an unsuspecting public, it’s useful to force it on a few unsuspecting friends or loved ones first. We call these people our beta testers.

  The term “beta tester” comes from computer software development. Beta testers are people outside a company who “test drive” new software and report any program bugs or problems back to the developer. This is exactly what your beta testers do for you. They tell you what’s right and wrong with your work before you expose it to the world at large.

  You probably won’t want to use a beta tester. Your ego will engage, and fear will keep you from exposing your work to anyone, especially someone you like. Once again, then, you’ll have to decide whether you intend to serve your ego or serve the work. If the latter, then beta testing is vital. No matter how good you are at editing your own work, your perspective is limited. You need someone else to tell you where you’ve strayed from your story, or missed your joke, or just gone weird.

  Beta testers aren’t all bad news. Part of their job is to tell you what works in your material and why. The main part of their job is to tell you how to make your good work better. A good beta tester is worth his weight in jokes.