Deadline's Drawing Nigh
- Thread starter Birol
- Start date
I wrote a stage sketch, but the landscape setting of the posts makes scripts difficult to read (and to post). So I went with my other idea.
Not gonna post it yet
. Still have miles to go...
Not gonna post it yet
. Still have miles to go...
Will's post made me think of ALL the books I've bought on writing comedy...oy....
One of my favorites is The Comic Toolbox by John Vorhaus. Here are a few excerpts:
Comedy is truth and pain. ........................even greeting cards boil down to truth and pain. ..cover of a card reads, (I'll bet you think this envelope is too small for a present) Inside reads, (We'll you're right.) (doing some paraphrasing here.... I'm cheap - the truth You lose - the pain....
What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with an agnostic?
Someone who rings your doorbell for no apparent reason.
The truth is that some people strive for faith. The pain is that not everybody gets there. And ...people who don't get a joke or who take offense to it, often feel that way because they don't accept the truth that the joke presents.
You can also find truth and pain in small events: Why does the dieting man never get around to changing a lightbulb? Because he's always going to start tomorrow. The truth is that the human will has limits, and the pain is that we can't always transcend those limits. ......We know from the communative property of addition that if comedy = truth + pain, the truth + pain = comedy as well. So, if you're dying to be funny and you're not, simply pick a situation and seek to sum up it's truth and pain.
Any situation will work ...a trip to the dentist, a family vacation, getting money from an ATM, doing your taxes......anything, anything. Because every situation has at least some implied truth and pain.
The comic premise is the gap between reality and real reality. Any time you have a comic voice or character or world or attitude that looks at things from a skewed point of view, you have a gap between realities. Comedy lives in this gap.
Some tools:
The comic perspective .The heart and soul of any comic character is his strong comic perspective. ...his unique way at looking at his world. ...Gracie Allen's comic perspective was innocence. Jack Benny, tightwad.
Exaggeration - The tool of exaggeration ...simply takes the comic perspective and pushes and stretches and accelerates it until it's sufficiently far from our perspective that it starts to be funny.
Flaws...A comic character is funny as a function of his flaws. In P.G. Wodehouse's works, Bertie Wooster's fecklessness ia a flaw. Hamlet's indecision is a flaw.
Humanity...In some way, all comic characters have humanity. If they don't, we don't care.
Clash of context. ..takes something from its usual place and sticks it where it doesn't fit in. A hooker in a convent... an elephant in a bathtub.
Clash of context isn't always a physical juxtapostion; it can also be emotional or attitudinal juxtapostion, also known as ...The Wildly Inappropriate Response........
....silent respect, for example, is appropriate to a funeral, so we go looking for noisy disrespect...Give the mourners kazoos or tubas or automatic weapons...
Suppose you wrote a love scene where a man asks the woman if it was good for her, too. If you wanted the woman to answer in a comic way, you could have her hold up a card with the number 10 on it. She would be using both an inappropriate response and a physical clash of context.
---------------------------------------------------
Interesting stuff, huh?
Well, sorry to go on so.....I'm doing anything to keep from doing what I should be doing....
Cassie
One of my favorites is The Comic Toolbox by John Vorhaus. Here are a few excerpts:
Comedy is truth and pain. ........................even greeting cards boil down to truth and pain. ..cover of a card reads, (I'll bet you think this envelope is too small for a present) Inside reads, (We'll you're right.) (doing some paraphrasing here.... I'm cheap - the truth You lose - the pain....
What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with an agnostic?
Someone who rings your doorbell for no apparent reason.
The truth is that some people strive for faith. The pain is that not everybody gets there. And ...people who don't get a joke or who take offense to it, often feel that way because they don't accept the truth that the joke presents.
You can also find truth and pain in small events: Why does the dieting man never get around to changing a lightbulb? Because he's always going to start tomorrow. The truth is that the human will has limits, and the pain is that we can't always transcend those limits. ......We know from the communative property of addition that if comedy = truth + pain, the truth + pain = comedy as well. So, if you're dying to be funny and you're not, simply pick a situation and seek to sum up it's truth and pain.
Any situation will work ...a trip to the dentist, a family vacation, getting money from an ATM, doing your taxes......anything, anything. Because every situation has at least some implied truth and pain.
The comic premise is the gap between reality and real reality. Any time you have a comic voice or character or world or attitude that looks at things from a skewed point of view, you have a gap between realities. Comedy lives in this gap.
Some tools:
The comic perspective .The heart and soul of any comic character is his strong comic perspective. ...his unique way at looking at his world. ...Gracie Allen's comic perspective was innocence. Jack Benny, tightwad.
Exaggeration - The tool of exaggeration ...simply takes the comic perspective and pushes and stretches and accelerates it until it's sufficiently far from our perspective that it starts to be funny.
Flaws...A comic character is funny as a function of his flaws. In P.G. Wodehouse's works, Bertie Wooster's fecklessness ia a flaw. Hamlet's indecision is a flaw.
Humanity...In some way, all comic characters have humanity. If they don't, we don't care.
Clash of context. ..takes something from its usual place and sticks it where it doesn't fit in. A hooker in a convent... an elephant in a bathtub.
Clash of context isn't always a physical juxtapostion; it can also be emotional or attitudinal juxtapostion, also known as ...The Wildly Inappropriate Response........
....silent respect, for example, is appropriate to a funeral, so we go looking for noisy disrespect...Give the mourners kazoos or tubas or automatic weapons...
Suppose you wrote a love scene where a man asks the woman if it was good for her, too. If you wanted the woman to answer in a comic way, you could have her hold up a card with the number 10 on it. She would be using both an inappropriate response and a physical clash of context.
---------------------------------------------------
Interesting stuff, huh?
Well, sorry to go on so.....I'm doing anything to keep from doing what I should be doing....
Cassie
Last edited:
the one i ordered just berates the reader:
chapter 1: you're not funny
chapter 2: you'll never be funny
chapter 3: coping with the reality that you're not funny
chapter 4: that last paragraph you wrote was dumb
chapter 5: bet the next one's dumb, too
...and so on.
chapter 1: you're not funny
chapter 2: you'll never be funny
chapter 3: coping with the reality that you're not funny
chapter 4: that last paragraph you wrote was dumb
chapter 5: bet the next one's dumb, too
...and so on.
Will, you're a perfect example of a character with a unique way of looking at the world... That's why I laugh when I read your posts... I'd love to read a "essay" on funerals/cemeteries from your comic perspective. ....hell, I've been waiting for you to do a humor piece since this contest began....just what you need to hear one day from deadline. No pressure.
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As I attempt to polish a purely silly piece, the voice in my head says, "Why can't you write something more sophisticated?"
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