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

by John Vorhaus

  Is one beta tester enough? Yes, if he or she is smart and honest and clear-eyed and hard-working. More is better, because no one beta tester will see everything there is to see in your work. Eventually you’ll reach a point of diminishing returns, though; just as too many cooks pop the souffle, too many beta testers will just confuse and contradict and dismay.

  Finding Beta Testers

  Who makes a good beta tester? A husband or wife? Parents? Friends? Paid professionals? These are all options, but all have their drawbacks. Paid readers, for instance, may be knowledgeable but cost too much. Your mother will be far more likely to feed your ego than to improve the work. Spouses or lovers make excellent beta testers because they’re already part of your life and (presumably) supportive of your creative goals. On the other hand, the relationship between writer and tester can be a tumultuous one; friendships, even love affairs, have been known to die in that fire.

  Must your beta tester be an expert in your comic genre? No, but it helps. If you’re writing stand-up comedy, for example, you want your beta tester to be at least a fan of stand-up so that he or she can make informed, useful comments on your work. You don’t want a beta tester who says only, “I liked it,” or, “This didn’t work for me,” or even, “Are you out of your freaking mind?” Your beta tester should be able to articulate full and concrete responses to your work.

  On the other hand, you want a beta tester who can read you without prejudice. That is, you don’t want a tester who’s a potential employer or client or buyer of your work. Beta testers see raw material and rough drafts. Show this unpolished material to a highly placed person in your field and you risk queering that person’s opinion of you and your work. You want to save these valuable contacts for later, when you’ve sharpened your material to a rapier point and you’re ready to blow them away with your brilliance.

  Peers make your best beta testers. Find people working at about your level and within your area of interest. Be willing to return the favor and beta test for them. This not only puts them in your debt, but also gives you a chance to learn from someone else’s mistakes besides your own. Look for beta testers among fellow students in classes you take, or seminars you attend, or dive bars where you hang out. Try to find people who share your sensibility and your sense of humor, but don’t get too hung up on that. The most important quality for a beta tester is a willingness to help.

  Training Your Beta Tester

  The last thing you want is someone who loves every word you write, or every joke you tell, or every cartoon you draw. The point of using a beta tester is to improve your work, and how can you improve on something that someone loves unconditionally? Then again, you don’t want your beta tester to tell you he hated your work unless he can tell you why. The ideal beta tester gives detailed notes on your work, tells you specifically what he did or didn’t like, and why. People like these are made, not born.

  So tell your beta tester what you’re looking for: not a pat on the back nor a blanket rebuke, but a clear path to improving your work. Give him as much information as possible about what you’re trying to accomplish so that he can tell you whether you’ve done it or not.

  Train your beta tester to think in terms of large notes and small notes. Large notes are general comments about the structure and theme of your work, about your story and characters. Small notes are line notes: This joke works, that scene direction is unclear, this paragraph seems redundant, etc.

  Also train your beta tester to be honest. He won’t necessarily want to be honest, especially if he thinks he’ll hurt your feelings. Tell him you don’t want a cheerleader; that’s what mom is for. The key phrase here is constructive criticism. Explain to your beta tester that all news is good news if it helps improve your work. If you can demonstrate to your beta tester that you’re serving the work and not the ego, he is likely to do the same.

  Recognize that a relationship with your beta tester is a long-term one. Just as you don’t master tools on the first try, your beta tester won’t give you at first the sort of useful, detailed critique that you’ll get later on. This is one reason why it’s better to train a friend or a lover or a peer to be a beta tester than it is to hire someone to do the job. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life.

  Let your beta tester know which of his comments you find most useful and why. Seek detail at every turn. It’s useful to know, for example, which lines made your beta tester laugh so that you can study those lines and write more like them. It’s also useful for your beta tester to tell you where he got confused or unamused or just plain lost interest. The more clearly you can tell your beta tester how he’s being helpful, the more helpful he can be in return.

  Using Your Beta Tester

  Using your beta tester is really about training yourself how to accept his notes. This isn’t easy. When your beta tester tells you that he doesn’t get a joke, and it happens to be your favorite joke, you’ll be inclined to tell your beta tester, “Well, then you must be stupid,” or words to that effect.

  You can see how this might not be the best thing for a working relationship.

  I try to say as little as possible when my beta tester is giving me notes. I’m not there to argue or defend or explain; I’m only there to listen. There’s no point in asking for an opinion if you’re not going to listen to it.

  You don’t have to agree with everything your beta tester says. You don’t have to agree with anything your beta tester says. No matter how well-considered his opinion is, it’s still just an opinion. You are the creator, which means in at least one sense that you are God. God may take advice from cherubim and angels, but in the end what God says goes.

  So don’t rewrite to please your beta tester. This isn’t always easy to do. Since your beta tester is your first audience, and you want to please the audience, you run the risk of following his vision rather than your own. Resist this temptation, for you’ll only end up trying to serve two masters, to the detriment of the work. Adopt those suggestions you find useful and set aside (after careful consideration) those that you decline to use. Make it clear to your beta tester that you haven’t ignored his notes; above all, treat him with respect, for his is a truly thankless job.

  If a beta tester rejects a joke, take it as a challenge. Even though you love the joke, replace it with something else, just to prove to yourself that it can be done. Even if you think the joke works-especially if you think it works-seize the opportunity of making it better still.

  What follows now may be the toughest exercise in this whole book: Take something you’ve written recently, give it to someone, and ask them to give you detailed notes. Then rewrite the piece from those notes. For the purposes of this exercise, assume that everything your beta tester tells you is dead-on useful and correct.

  HOW DONE IS DONE?

  How do you know when you’ve taken your comic masterpiece as far as it can go? I wish I could give you a tool for this, but I can’t. I can only tell you from my own experience that sooner or later I always “hit the wall” with my projects. Sooner or later I know that I’ve rewritten and tested and rewritten and tested and rewritten the work to the best of my good faith and ability. I reach a point of diminishing return. Past that point, no matter how long I continue to noodle with the work, it’s just that: noodling.

  I also always know when I haven’t hit the wall, when I haven’t pushed myself as hard as I can. I think we all know when we’re cheating the process, but ego and inertia keep us from admitting this to ourselves. When you push yourself to the limit, you not only improve the work, but you also improve your awareness of what your limit is. To put it another way, if you push your limits, they become less limiting.

  Winston Churchill said,

  Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to becom
e reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

  This chapter, for instance. I think I’ve flogged it long enough, and that I shall kill it now and fling it to the public. My beta testers, of course, may disagree . . .

  15

  Scrapmetal and Doughnuts

  Fresh out of college, armed with a virtually worthless degree in creative writing, aspiring to no loftier goal than making the world safe for advertising, I interviewed for a job as a copywriter. To say that the pay was meager makes meager look good, but I was eager to prove my corporate mettle, so I solemnly declared my willingness to work, as I put it then, “for scrapmetal and doughnuts.” I don’t know what impressed them more, my elegant turn of the phrase, or my naked lust for indentured servitude. In any case, I got the job, went on to a meteoric eighteen months in the ad biz, named three automatic teller machines, wrote a recruitment campaign for flight attendants, crashed and burned in spectacular fashion, and moved on to the challenge of unemployment.

  But that phrase “scrapmetal and doughnuts” has always stayed in my mind, and it’s always stood in my mind for the leftovers, the corners of things, that which is overlooked. Here, then, are the scrapmetal and doughnuts of the comic toolbox, stuff that I couldn’t find a place for elsewhere and didn’t want to leave for the sequel.

  THE WINCE FACTOR

  A songwriter friend of mine always used this trick to check out the lyrics of her songs. She’d sing them to herself and listen for the words that made her wince. She figured that if they made her wince, they’d probably have the same effect on others. She used the wince factor to edit her work. I do the same, and so can you. This has less to do with how to be funny than with how not to be not-funny.

  When you’re reading your work for quality and style, pay attention to your own wince factor. If you’re clear-eyed and honest in your appraisal of your own work, you’ll know when a joke is flat or a line goes clang. Be rigorous. Don’t let yourself off the hook. If you’re at all uncertain about whether something works, spend some time and skull sweat, and wipe that uncertainty away.

  The thing about the wince factor is that you can use it to turn a bad thing into a good thing. Learn to take pride in your ability to ferret out the winces, chase them away, and change them into lines you like. You could even keep score.

  Above all, remember this: It’s far better for the line to make you wince now than to make someone else wince later. Police your prose.

  And speaking of police, let me introduce you to

  THE FRAUD POLICE

  The first time I ever taught a class, I found myself standing before a large group of students who expected me to be funny, witty, entertaining, knowledgeable, and intelligent. Because I feared I was not these things, a huge amount of tension built up within me, like the electrostatic charge in a Van de Graaff generator. That tension was obvious to everyone and made the entire class feel uncomfortable. This, of course, made me more uncomfortable, which in turn made them more uncomfortable, which made me more uncomfortable still, and so on and so forth until we were all a bunch of frantic Chicken Littles, sitting around waiting for the sky to fall.

  I had this deep, primal fear that someone would discover that I had no business teaching the class I’d been hired to teach, like those dreams where you show up naked and unprepared for final exams in high school. I also had a hunch that as long as I tried to hide my fear, it would haunt me, degrade my performance, and possibly ruin the class. So I copped to the fear. I told my students that this was my first time teaching, that I was swimming in strange waters, and, in fact, expected the fraud police to kick down the door any moment and haul me away to phony-teacher’s prison.

  Well, you know by now that I was telling a lie to comic effect, using exaggeration and detail to make the gag bigger and clearer, and releasing the stored collective tension. I got a laugh, but more to the point, I stumbled on a truth and pain common to creative people: We all fear the fraud police. Why? Because creative people naturally seek challenges larger and more daunting than ones they’ve mastered before. This means we’re always swimming in strange waters. Which means that the fraud police are never far away.

  But here again, giving a thing a label helps us deal with it constructively. Just as we invoke the wince factor to attack bad writing, we summon the fraud police to unmask our fears. Once you tell people what you’re afraid of, you no longer have to worry about their finding that thing out. They already know. And since they’re most likely afraid of the very same stuff, they sympathize and empathize. You become their hero.

  Any time you’re in a new situation, fear is present. It has to be, based on the newness of the situation alone. If you deny or repress that fear, then it becomes hidden tension. It increases your anxiety and degrades your performance. But as soon as you admit your fear, the tension goes away, anxiety lessens, and performance improves.

  Suppose you’re doing stand-up comedy for the first time. Suppose the audience knows it’s your first time. They’re aware that you might bomb horribly and that they might have to serve embarrassed witness to the unsightly mess you make. They feel tense. Relieve that tension and they’ll be your friends for life. Say these words: “Be gentle with me, it’s my first time.” The audience will laugh at the clash of context, but more important, they’ll be grateful to you for acknowledging the fraud police. You’ve taken them off the hook. They no longer have to judge; now they can just enjoy.

  It’s a situational oxymoron: To divert the fraud police, invite them into your home. If you reveal your secret, no one can find it out. This is wildly liberating, both to you and to your audience.

  Finally, recognize your own inner fraud police. Think of them as the goon squad of your ferocious editor, always willing to judge and condemn, judge and condemn, to haul you off to a small room someplace where bad things happen. They tell you in secret, silent voices that you have no business doing the very thing you want most in the world to do. They’re trying to get you to admit that you’re unworthy. But if you already know that you’re unworthy, then they lose all their power over you. Launch a pre-emptive strike on the fraud police and the fuzz becomes your friend.

  CHARACTER KEYS

  Character keys are the small ways a character behaves that tell us the large ways he’ll behave as well. Think of a character key as the intersection of microconflict and comic perspective. Character keys are useful ways to introduce characters to a reader or an audience at the beginning of a story or a script. At their best, they tell us in an instant what we can expect from a given comic character in almost every situation.

  If, for example, we have a character whose strong comic perspective is innocence, then we might meet her in a moment when she opens her mail, reads a letter from Publisher’s Clearinghouse, turns to her husband, and cries excitedly, “Look, honey! Ed McMahon says I may already have won!” Through this character key, this small, revealing action, we know this character instantly to be naive, unworldly, borderline stupid. It will not surprise us, then, to find this naivete informing all of her actions.

  In Tootsie, we first meet the character of Sandy at Michael Dorsey’s birthday party. She concludes her birthday toast with, “I’m sorry, this is a really stupid speech.” In this moment, we know Sandy to be neurotic and insecure. We have a line on her. In the same scene, Michael’s roommate, Jeff, solemnly declares that he doesn’t want people to like his plays. He wants people to say, “I saw your play, man. What happened?” His auteur pose is instantly, permanently, and crystally clear.

  To build audience allegiance early in your story or script, lay in precise and powerful character keys that give readers or viewers an immediate grasp of your characters’ attitudes and attributes. You might say that I did this on the very first page of the book, introducing myself as someone who blurts things out. Isn’t this true? Aren’t I still blurting? Have I not blurted all along?

  A characte
r key is a small, defining action. As an exercise, pick a character you’ve previously created and describe in a sentence some action that will make his strong comic perspective vivid and clear to us. Oh heck, do a couple.

  FRAMES OF REFERENCE

  Comedy is a popular art form. To succeed in comedy, you have to be popular. That means that your humor has to work for a broad audience, or at least for its intended audience. In assimilating your audience’s frame of reference, there are two things to be aware of: what your audience knows and what your audience accepts.

  We’ve already talked about knowing what your audience knows and about the difference between the class clown and the class nerd. But what your audience knows is a dynamic thing. It’s constantly changing. New information becomes available, and old information becomes tired and fades away. Today’s hot topic is tomorrow’s yesterday’s news.

  On the other hand, if the topic of your humor is so hot and new that your audience hasn’t heard of it yet, you’ll be left all alone way out ahead of the curve. Talk about the latest findings in The New England Journal of Medicine and you’ll likely face blank stares at best, empty seats at worst. You have to strike a balance.

  How can you know your audience’s current frame of reference? You can’t, not always and never absolutely. The best you can do is guess and conjecture, and above all test. Test your material with as many people as possible and find out what they find funny and what they don’t. Be prepared to change your material, either in structure or in substance, in order to hit your target. Here’s another strong argument for not falling in love with your jokes: If you do, you’ll go on telling the same jokes long after they’ve stopped being funny.