Laughing Out Loud Read online

  Also by Andrew Horton

  Three More Screenplays by Preston Sturges (editor)

  Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes (coeditor with Stuart McDougal)

  Buster Keaton's "Sherlock Jr." (editor)

  The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation

  The Last Modernist: The Films of Angelopoulos (editor)

  Bones in the Sea: Time Apart on a Greek Island

  Writing the CharacterCentered Screenplay

  Russian Critics on a Cinema of Glasnost (coeditor with Michael Brashinsky)

  Inside Soviet Film Satire: Laughter with a Lash (editor)

  The Zero Hour: Glasnost and Soviet Cinema in Transition (coeditor with Michael Brashinsky)

  Comedy/Cinema/Theory (editor)

  The Films of George Roy Hill

  Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation (coeditor with Joan Magretta)

  ANDREW HORTON

  For Caroline, my very funny and loving daughter

  To the memory of those who made us laugh. The motley mountebanks, the clowns, the buffoons, in all times and in all nations, whose efforts have lightened our burden a little ...

  Preston Sturges, Sullivan's Travels

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  PART I

  Comic Elements and Exercises

  1 Elements of Comedy That Writers Should Know

  2 Exercises to Nurture the Comic Muse

  PART II

  A Writer's Overview of the Traditions and Genres of Comedy

  3 From Stage and Page to Screen: Anarchistic and Romantic Comedy

  4 Physical Humor: From Commedia dell'Arte and Moliere to Vaudeville and Silent Screen Comedy

  5 Sound Comedy: American Screwball Romantic Comedy, Then and Now

  6 Comedy and Television: Stand-up, Sitcom and Everything in Between

  7 Comedies from around the World

  8 Comedy and the Documentary Impulse

  PART III

  Close-ups on Comedies

  9 Feature Film Comedies

  to Television Comedy: Seinfeld and The Simpsons

  PART IV

  Writing Comedy

  ii The Fifteen-Week Feature Comedy Screenplay

  12 The Seven-Week Half-Hour Television Comedy Pilot Script

  Beyond Happy Endings: Toward a Comic Conclusion

  Appendix 1 A Recommended Viewing List of American and Foreign Feature Comedies

  Appendix 2 Networking, Marketing and Making Your Own Comedy

  Appendix 3 Food, Recipes and Comic Screenwriting

  Bibliography

  Index

  To all the great comic writers and filmmakers who have made me laugh so much over the years, from Keaton and Chaplin to Sturges and Lubitsch; Renoir, Bunuel and Wilder; Ernie Kovacs, Lucille Ball, Steve Allen and Sid Caesar; on down to the present. Yes, including but by no means only: Abbott and Costello, Adella Adella the Story Teller of New Orleans, Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, Fatty Arbuckle, Aristophanes, Jean Arthur, Rowan Atkinson, Dan Aykroyd, Beavis and Butthead, Samuel Beckett, John Belushi, Robert Benchley, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Shelley Berman, Boccaccio, Humphrey Bogart, Jorge Luis Borges, James L. Brooks, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, Art Buchwald, Godfrey Cambridge, John Candy, Frank Capra, George Carlin, Bill Cosby, Billy Crystal, Rodney Dangerfield, Geena Davis, Gerard Depardieu, Johnny Depp, Charles Dickens, Phyllis Diller, Doonesbury, Jimmy Durante, Gerald Durrell, Blake Edwards, Chris Farley, William Faulkner (really!), Federico Fellini, Henry Fielding, W. C. Fields, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Giancarlo Giannini, Mel Gibson, Jackie Gleason, Cary Grant, Hugh Grant, Merv Griffin, Gogol, Alec Guinness, Arsenio Hall, Tom Hanks, Goldie Hawn, Ben Hecht, Jim Henson and his joyful Muppets, Katharine Hepburn, Pee-Wee Herman, Bob Hope, Helen Hunt, Ben Jonson, Franz Kafka, George S. Kaufman, Danny Kaye, Diane Keaton, Michael Keaton, Milan Kundera, Burt Lancaster, Ring Lardner, Gary Larson, Laurel and Hardy, Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter ("I'm having a friend for lunch"), Jerry Lewis, Max Linder, Harold Lloyd, Dusan Makavejev, Juri Mamin, Steve Martin, the Marx Brothers, Bette Midler, Moliere, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Jack Paar, Michael Palin, S. J. Perelman, Pio, Richard Pryor, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Julia Roberts, Will Rogers, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, Rosalind Russell, Mort Sahl, Gabriele Salvatore, Susan Sarandon, Charles Schultz, Jerry Seinfeld, Mack Sennett, William Shakespeare, Phil Silvers, Red Skelton, Barbara Stanwyck, Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift, Alain Tanner, Jacques Tati, the Three Stooges, James Thurber, Lily Tomlin, John Kennedy Toole, Francois Truffaut, Mark Twain, Thanassios Vengos, Wallace and Gromit, John Wayne, Mae West, E. B. White, Robin Williams, Flip Wilson, Jonathan Winters, and P. G. Wodehouse. To my students in comedy seminars and classes I've taught over the years, especially to those teachers in my 1992 summer seminar for high school teachers sponsored by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities on Comedy and Culture, and the summer 1997 comedy-writing seminar on the Greek Islands. And to the many readers of Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay who have written, faxed, e-mailed, and called: you really have created a worldwide carnival of screenwriters.

  To Ed Dimendberg, Laura Pasquale, and Rachel Berchten at University of California Press, who have, with good humor, supported, defended and nurtured my projects with the Press.

  To my wife, Odette, and children Sam and Caroline, who have developed a real sense of humor over the years, as well as my older son, Philip, who as an actor is learning to make 'em laugh ... and cry.

  To all comic writers who have helped me in ways they may not realize, including Herschel Weingrod. And especially to Aristophanes and Lakis Lazopoulos.

  I cannot forget the people of the island of Kea, Greece, where the first half of the book was written during a sabbatical from Loyola University of New Orleans. I would particularly like to remember an elderly garbage collector on the island who sings as he loads trash onto the garbage donkeys (most of the streets are too narrow to allow cars, let alone a garbage truck, through). When I asked him why he sings as he works, he simply smiled and said, "It's in my nature," and went back to singing and slinging. The second half of the book was written in Wellington, New Zealand, while I was on an exchange semester of teaching film and screenwriting at Victoria University, January through June of 1998. I am most grateful for the generosity and supportive friendship of colleagues at Vic, including Russell Campbell, Phillip Mann, John Downey, and Bill Manhire, as well as the laughter and insights that arose from my talented group in Screenwriting 322.

  Finally, to St. Philip Neri (1515-1595), the patron saint of joy, whose most remembered command was "Rejoice!"

  I wish to make the most comfortable member of the cinema audience feel that he is not living in the best of all possible worlds.

  Luis Bunuel, My Last Sigh

  PRACTICE RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS

  bumper sticker

  Almost like prophets and shamans, comic writers and comic actors become privileged members of the community.

  Dana F. Sutton, The Catharsis of Comedy

  Unexploded Mimes

  Fade in:

  Chaplin walking his funny walk down the road, his back to the audience, cane swinging. Rosanne in her blue-collar living room, berating John Goodman for, well, everything. Groucho as a most unconventional university president, spewing a line of insults at the faculty and student body. Katharine Hepburn as a clueless socialite, climbing a ladder leaning against a dinosaur skeleton to talk to Cary Grant, the absent-minded professor.

  The Three Stooges eye-gouging and bonking each other while squealing with comic-violent glee. Mickey Mouse doing anything he wants to do with that dopey wide-eyed grin and those huge ears. The whole gang on M*A*S*H, the television series, clowning around after a successf
ul operation.

  Marilyn Monroe trying to arouse a supposedly frigid Tony Curtis on a yacht at night. Robin Williams as Mork or Garp or Popeye, or even the voice of Aladdin's genie, or as a GI disk jockey in Vietnam. Whoopi Goldberg in a nun's habit, leading a gospel choir.

  Seinfeld and Kramer having trouble with the apartment's new low-flow showerheads, and George proving once again he's a loser with women. Buster Keaton's deadpan face, in the midst of the disaster of your choice: hurricanes, hundreds of cops chasing him, trains demolishing his newly built home. Woody Allen dressed as a gigantic sperm, swimming "upstream." Jim Carrey with his distorted face stretching in all kinds of computer-animated directions, or as the hapless hero of a "real life" television show, who finally walks out of his televised paradise with a "Good morning, and in case I don't see you later, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!"

  Fade out.

  These are just a few American film and television comic moments. But what if we include comic strips, comic books, dirty jokes, the works of Boccaccio, Aristophanes, Moliere, Shakespeare, Laurence Sterne, Rabelais, Mark Twain, Gogol, Samuel Beckett and Milan Kundera, to add but a few. And why not mention beloved comic screen images from around the world, created by (for example) Bunuel, Fellini, Truffaut, Alec Guinness and Monty Python, together with individual films such as Shine, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Swept Away, Cinema Paradiso, The White Balloon, Life Is Beautiful, The Gods Must Be Crazy, My Life as a Dog, Never on Sunday, Eat Drink Man Woman, Closely Watched Trains and Time of the Gypsies.

  The images and sounds of comedy are endless.

  And as one century ends and another begins, one fact seems guaranteed: Comedy will survive and thrive the world over on film, television, and stage, in print, on the street, and in our lives. Thus a toast to comedy through the centuries. This book is meant as a celebration and discovery of creating comedy.

  Simple translation: comedy delights-even heals, doctors claim-and it definitely sells.

  Comedy is a diverse muse, as the quotes above suggest. Some of you, like Luis Bunuel, may have an ironic talent and wish to leave the audience unsettled. (Another Bunuel line: "I'm an atheist, thank God!") Others may wish to surprise viewers with "random" generosity as the bumper stick commands. In either or both cases-and in everything in between-realize as you read on that writers and performers of comedy are, as the classical scholar Dana F. Sutton suggests, "privileged members of the community." I firmly believe that.

  How to read these pages? The logic of the book moves from the traditions of comedy to a close look at specific examples and then on to the practical act of writing and selling comedy. But for the restless and curious, you could skip to chapter 2 and check out some ideas about nurturing your comic writing, or to appendix 3 to try the Recipe for Comic Jambalaya, realizing that food and comedy have teamed up throughout history. And then explore other chapters. Or you could begin with part 2 and move on. But whichever order you take in my musings, you would shortchange the book and yourself if you start with chapters n and 12.

  Enough said. Let's plunge in:

  Laughing Out Loud: Writing the Comedy-Centered Screenplay is meant to be a practical and theoretical exploration of writing comedy. Moreover, I wish to offer an overview of the many dimensions, possibilities and approaches to a variety of forms of the comic. In particular I mean this primarily as a study of ways in which the comic intersects with screenwriting for feature film, with attention also to episodic television as well as the whole range of documentary film and video. Practical writing suggestions and exercises cover the comic in concept, character, plot, dialogue, structure and plain old physical scene and stage "comic business." As in my previous book, Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay, this book an alyzes some films in depth and uses examples from throughout the history of comedy, not only in film but from the stage and literature as well, and from countries with fine comic traditions far beyond the shores of Hollywood. I also offer a strong nod to successful "independent" comic films.

  Finally, a note on what is not covered. Comedy depends so much on performance. Timing, for instance, is half the fun of watching a great comic actor and actress. And the history of comedy has been shaped just as much by the comedians themselves as personalities and artists as by playwrights, authors and screenwriters. But performance per se is not our territory in these pages. Also, only fleeting attention is given to the great pleasures of the musical comedy or the comic musical tradition.

  A personal memory to get us started.

  Over a year after the tragic Bosnian war ended, my family and I were on vacation approaching the Yugoslav border as we drove through Slavonia, that part of Croatia under United Nations protection after the war. My then-twelve-year-old son, Sam, was first to notice the UN signs on the side of the pothole-marked highway. In several languages there were warnings to BEWARE OF UNEXPLODED MINES. Sam was confused for just a playful instant. "What is an unexploded MIME?" asked Sam. My wife, Odette, our seven-year-old daughter, Caroline, and I all started laughing out loud.

  And what would an exploded mime result in? Laughter and joy being spread everywhere? The destruction of things as they were? The interjection of a carnival spirit into stiff and inflexible routines? Certainly we all agreed that an unexploded mime represented an eager potential for mischief and fun, a healthy and imaginative invitation to live fully.

  That is the call of this book too, I realize, with a slight change of the sign:

  Embrace and cultivate unexploded mimes ... in your writing and, indeed, in your life. Yes, keep at least several "unexploded mimes" in your comic soul as you write, for these will be the essence of the carnival of freedom and imagination needed to write comedy well.

  More specifically, I offer three invitations to help put you in the mood or state of mind to write comedy:

  i. Live the comic, in perspective and observations of the world around you.

  2. Allow yourself total freedom in the carnivalesque play of the imagination.

  3. Enjoy the pleasures of becoming a clown or holy fool or a simple child again whenever you wish.

  One further note: I hope these pages are useful for the experienced writers of the comic as well as the aspiring, and also for those writers of drama who wish to incorporate humor and comic elements in their scripts without necessarily pro ducing a "comedy-centered" work. Case in point: Northern Exposure won television awards each year as episodic drama. But I would argue that while serious topics were introduced in that memorable show and many moments had "dramatic" impact, at its core the show was, in concept and execution, comic in its celebration of a community of diverse characters who exist in a spirit of tolerant acceptance of each other, whether Indian, WASP, Jewish or other.

  This hope for my offerings here is also founded on my experience, for I have met award-winning comic screenwriters who have been excited to learn something of, say, the tradition of Aristophanic humor. And, on the flip side, I often run into young writers who know the comic tradition in literature and drama inside out but who need to learn more about how to set off those unexploded mimes inside themselves through the kind of perspectives and practical habits stand-up comedians or comic actors or vaudeville vets cultivate and perfect. Therefore the twin command of this text: know the comic traditions you wish to work in, and cultivate the habits and liberating spirit of carnival necessary to create the comic.

  It's one thing to have a character in your comedy eat his Nike Air shoe because you were influenced by Chaplin eating his boot in The Gold Rush, but this book may help you go even further, to realize that Chaplin's scene builds on a lazzi (set comic piece) from the commedia dell'arte, recorded in Rome in 1622, called "lazzi of hunger," in which a clown proves how hungry he is after a shipwreck by eating his shoe. You don't need such historical info to be funny. But part of the plan here is to help provide a frame of reference beyond the immediate world of last season's hit sitcom or last year's Oscar nomination that might inform and help inspire you
in your own writing.

  Part i and part 2 are, in this spirit, written not as another history or literary study of comedy you will be tested on. Rather, I have kept the writer of comedy in mind always and have attempted to highlight what I feel is most useful today for you as a writer, no matter what stage you have reached in your career.

  The Comic Perspective

  Carnival is the people's second life, organized on the basis of laughter. It is a festive life. Festivity is a peculiar quality of all comic rituals and spectacles.

  Mikhail Bakhtin

  Realize from the start that any simple definition of comedy is doomed to failure. Even to say that "comedy pleases" is dangerous, for comedy can also deeply annoy or threaten people, particularly if they have no sense of humor. Comedians relax millions daily through the laughter they evoke, and yet comic writers have, over the centuries, often wound up in prison, in exile, or worse. What definition, after all, can embrace a territory that includes Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing; the farting around the campfire in Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles (1974); the years of dark humor evoked by M*A*S*H, one of American television's longest-running shows; Elvis in Forrest Gump learning his stage wiggles from Forrest Gump's crippled walk; and Dante's Christian epic Divine Comedy? Instead, we take our cue from the scholar of comedy Albert Cook, who sensibly suggests that we not waste time with too much classification; rather, "The point is to probe comedy's depths, not chop it into portions" (81). Put another way, we begin our mission of writing comedy with an awareness that we are following in a long and varied tradition spanning thousands of years. Harvard scholar Harry Levin has written wisely in Playboys & Killjoys that comedy represents "a live tradition, richly variegated and culturally interrelated, that extends from the Old Comedy of Athens to the sit com of television" (4). Mikhail Bakhtin's quote above about the importance of carnival will also serve us well as we explore a wider vision of comedy than is normally offered.

  Let us warm up and take in the larger picture with ten observations that, hopefully, are useful before we embark on a closer look at the elements and examples of comedy and more practical suggestions for writing comedy.