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  Screenwriters should study the film for the small details that slyly become significant. In the opening, for instance, we see Razieh heading home with her mother, but she breaks away for a moment to watch some old dervish snake charmers who have gathered an all-male crowd. We sense, therefore, that her de sire for the dancing goldfish is simply the outer expression of a deeper burning to check out the exotic street life beyond her family's four walls.

  It is to the filmmaker's credit that he and the script avoid making Razieh an overly cute Shirley Temple. In fact, we often feel like throttling her. She herself has a look beyond her years that suggests the middle-aged woman she might well become.

  Highlights include an early scene in which a snake charmer reduces her to tears as he places her goldfish money in a box with his snake as a group of men watch on, as well as an extended sequence in which the money falls down a drain and we meet a cross-section of the population as she and finally her brother try to retrieve the money. It is in this way that a refugee boy selling white balloons enters the plot.

  The ending is both an embrace-she obtains her goldfish and heads home with her brother-and a loner: the final shot is of the boy with the white balloon sitting alone. Subtly, the filmmaker ends not with an Iranian family celebrating the New Year together but with a homeless refugee, alone with nowhere to go, no one with whom to share the festivities.

  Teens and Comedy: Amy Heckerling's Clueless, a Valley-Talking Anarchistic Romance

  Amy Heckerling penned and directed Clueless (1995), one of the brightest, funniest teenage comedies in years, inspired, believe it or not, by Jane Austen's Emma. I've included Clueless as a shining example of how to write for and about teens without looking down on them and without reducing them to shallow stereotypes. Heckerling has a special talent for both spoofing teen culture and celebrating the joys of teenhood in America (specifically California, more specifically Beverly Hills) at the same time.

  Heckerling has paid her dues, especially with her groundbreaking Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), which proved an early showcase for Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Judge Reinhold, among others. She is completely tuned in to the way Southern California teens talk, walk and act. We feel in both films that she is writing from the inside out.

  The plot: Clueless is the reverse of Sturges's Sullivan's Travels, a romantic anarchistic comedy. Heckerling's comedy is an anarchistic romance. Her target audience is teens everywhere, but it speaks well for her talent that Heckerling's film brings laughter to audiences of all ages. During the first half the main character, Cher (Alicia Silverstone), has the "crazy" idea of being everyone else's matchmaker as an exercise in control and power. First she practices on her high school English teacher, with the selfish motive of wanting a higher midterm grade. And then she and her African American sidekick, Dione (Stacey Dash), pounce on the new girl in school, Tye (Brittany Murphy), for a make-over and a matchmaking session. This second half is absolutely a carnival of Aristophanic comedy, as Cher "rules" in her kingdom.

  Heckerling's mastery of anarchistic comedy stems from the following elements:

  1. A razor-sharp ear for teen talk and slang. Heckerling has made "As if!" and "Hello!" (accent heavily on the last syllable, please) everyday phrases for millions of viewers. Everyone has their favorite lines and exchanges, but no one can remember them all; thus the pleasure of repeated viewings this film brings. Here are just a few. When Cher reads a few lines of poetry she has copied for a false love letter from her English professor to her unsuspecting, troll-like guidance advisor, Dione asks where it is from.

  CHER: That's a famous quote.

  DIONE: From where?

  CHER: Cliff Notes!

  When Cher's father finds a stack of parking tickets the licenseless Cher has run up, he exclaims, "I didn't even know you can get tickets without having a license." Or Cher on how she checks herself while dressing: "I don't rely on mirrors, so I always take Polaroids." Her disappointment in her big date with Christian, whom she does not yet understand is gay, is expressed with, "I guess it just wasn't meant to be. He does dress better than I do. What could I bring to the relationship?"

  But clever lines alone do not a comedy make, as we know.

  2. The creation of Cher as a comic protagonist who is half trickster and half innocent, and completely a clown. Yes, Jane Austen deserves credit for the original prototype. But Heckerling has leaped forward to turn Cher Horowitz into a sixteen-year-old gal whom we laugh both at (ridiculous) and with (ludicrous). Heckerling's use of first-person voiceover also does a lot for helping to establish Cher as a sympathetic "ditz with credit cards," or, in Tye's cruel words, "A virgin who doesn't know how to drive." Heckerling strikes a perfect balance between voiceover narration and simply letting her story roll.

  3. Music-video-style pacing, editing and comedy. Heckerling helps keep this teen comedy light and bright in the first half, hitting us with music and images as well as sparkling dialogue. She thus incorporates teen culture into the style of her script.

  The second half of the film becomes a screwball romance as all her carefully laid plans for Tye blow up, beginning when the intended boyfriend nearly rapes her in a parking lot dominated by a huge neon clown. All the formulas of screwball romance are touched on in this half, as Cher discovers she was wrong on all her "character" calls, but most of all, she was wrong about herself. And Josh, her "ex-stepbrother" (yes, as Cher's crazed lawyer father says, "You divorce wives, not children") emerges as the love interest.

  Several critics paid Clueless the ultimate tribute when the film premiered in 1996: they noted that Emma was Clueless set in the nineteenth century but not as well done!

  Blurring the Boundaries: Crime and Comedy in the Coen Brothers' Fargo

  Quentin Tarantino caught the attention of a small dedicated audience with Reservoir Dogs (1992), and then the whole world with his irreverent Pulp Fiction (1994), blending laughter and murder in jarringly postmodern juxtapositions. American crime films have always had some very funny and ironic lines in them, especially since so many of them either came directly from or imitated great hardboiled writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. These films can teach us much about laughter with an edge. We all remember Tarantino's snappy dialogue as John Travolta talks to Samuel L. Jackson about Big Macs in Paris as they're on the way to carry out an "assignment." The lines are funny enough in and of themselves, with Jackson playing the straight man to Travolta's wise guy. But what is distinctly "Tarantinesque" is the dark absurdity of the conversation, given that we know they are about to murder someone.

  But for years before Tarantino began shooting his dark-humored films, the Coen brothers had been making us laugh in uncomfortable moments. Throughout their careers they have blurred the boundaries between cinematic genres as well as between independent and Hollywood productions. They have managed to keep an admirable independence in such quirky and original films as Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987), Miller's Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991) and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). With Fargo (1996) they not only walked off with Oscars for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress (the amazing Frances McDormand), but they managed to mix crime and humor in a refreshing blend that had all audiences walking out with smiles on their faces and imitating Minnesota Scandinavian English, "Yah!"

  What did they accomplish and how did they do it?

  Start with the strong sense of place, atmosphere and season: the dead of a Minnesota winter. Ethan Coen, in his introduction to the published screenplay for Fargo, makes it clear that he and his brother, Joel (co-author and the director of their films), grew up in that bleak Minnesota landscape celebrated in the film. He builds on their experiences listening to tales by their Russian Jewish grandmother, which sounded true and exotic but which, on reflection, tested "credulity" (viii). In the spirit of their grandmother, they observe, "The stories that are not credible will occasionally, however, turn out to be true, and stories that ARE credible will conversely turn out to
be false" (xix, x).

  Nothing in the set-up of the film suggests the comic. As the film begins with a whited-out screen and an epic-sounding orchestra score, we might think we are in for Dr. Zhivago, Part Two. The tone is thus serious and mythic, as Ethan Coen suggests, and the iconic shot of a huge Paul Bunyan throughout the film alludes to other "myths" from the area. But as this dark tale of Jerry Lungegan, a simpleminded car salesman (an innocent little guy gone wrong) who hires two thugs (trickster eirons) to kidnap his wife in a hairbrained scheme to try to get out of debt, unfolds, laughter starts to become a distinguishing feature of this mixedgenre production. The Coens do blur the boundaries between what we normally think of as comic material and what should be offensive and gruesome as Jerry's whole scheme goes from bad to worse and then even worse still. Yet this story alone is not the heart of the film. The Coens skillfully present a double tale, each playing off the other. We wait a good thirty minutes to be introduced to Officer Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), the investigating police officer. At that point the whole focus and tone of the film shift to Marge, her artist husband Norm and their baby-to-be. In short, the crime plot is not what is at the center of the violence and the humor of this film; rather, family is. Jerry's world is one of failed marriage, failed fatherhood, a failed family in every sense: thus the spiral of violence, the crimes and murders, and the sad final arrest of Jerry in his underwear in a cheap motel. The flip side is our growing understanding of how good a marriage Marge and Norm have and what a truly happy family they will be after their child's birth. How do we know this? From the Coen brothers' careful attention to loving details, such as Norm's housekeeping and Marge's thoughtfulness in picking up worms for his fishing trips in the middle of her murder investigation (talk about role reversals!). And, the closing scene is a strong embrace ending, literally and figuratively. Marge and Norm are in bed, celebrating the news that Norm's painting of a duck has been accepted for a three-cent stamp. Once more, in a loving reversal of traditional roles, it is Marge, the real breadwinner of this duo, who comforts an insecure Norm. Listen to the humor and love and plain old good writing in that final exchange:

  NORM: They announced it.

  Marge looks at him.

  MARGE: They announced it?

  NORM: Yah.

  Marge looks at him waiting for more, but Norm's eyes stay fixed on the television.

  MARGE: ... SO?

  NORM: Three-cent stamp.

  MARGE: Your mallard?

  NORM: Yah.

  MARGE: Norm, that's terrific!

  Norm tries to suppress a smile of pleasure.

  NORM: It's just the three-cent.

  MARGE: It's terrific!

  NORM: Hautman's blue-winged teal got the twenty-nine cent. People don't much use the three-cent.

  MARGE: Oh, for Pete's-a course they do! Every time they raise the darned postage, people need the little stamps!

  NORM: Yah.

  MARGE: When they're stuck with a bunch a the old ones!

  NORM: Yah, I guess.

  MARGE: That's terrific.

  Her eyes go back to the TV

  I'm so proud a you, Norm.

  They watch TV.

  ... Heck, we're doin' pretty good, Norm.

  Norm murmurs.

  NORM: I love you, Margie.

  MARGE: I love you, Norm.

  Both of them are watching the TV as Norm reaches out to rest a hand on top of her stomach.

  NORM: ... Two more months.

  Marge absently rests her own hand on top of his.

  MARGE: Two more months.

  Hold; fade out.

  Pulp Fiction makes us laugh throughout its unfolding, but the final moment of Travolta and Jackson swaying out of the diner, having defused the robbery set up in the opening scene of the film, is a false "happy ending," for we already know that Travolta will be murdered while trying to pull his pants up. Fargo, on the other hand, begins bleakly, but subtly and surely the crime film becomes a family comedy.

  Highlights: Too many to elaborate in a brief summary. But I would target five important comic levels in Fargo.

  1. The double-story structure we have already mentioned succeeds in turning a crime film upside down and inside out. Just reverse the final scenes and think what a different film it would be if it ended with Jerry's pathetic arrest.

  2. Character development: Jerry is stupid, but we don't hate him. The Coens shade his character so we have some sympathy for this sad fellow. And part of that sadness is that we never really understand what he is all about or what has gone wrong in his marriage. Similarly, Marge is brilliantly detailed. After all, we've never had a pregnant Minnesota police inspector on the screen before.

  3. Visual humor: Take the scene late in the film when Grimsrud, the silent criminal (laconically played by Peter Stormare), is shoving Jerry's wife's leg into a wood-shredding machine. The scene is so bizarre and original that we can't help laughing, and yet the Coens have blurred the boundaries, for we know whose leg it is. As in all of their films, such a visualization of humor works well to capture a rather surrealistic level within the real world of the narrative.

  4. Fine comic dialogue based on dialect: As mentioned in the beginning of this discussion, the Coens could write this dialogue because they grew up hearing it. Just imagine how false it would sound if someone who had never been to Minnesota had tried to write such lines: stereotyping or simpleminded caricaturing would probably result. The Coens, however, wound up with a Minnesota twang and laconic, loopy speech patterns that the whole nation enjoyed hearing and that even those I've interviewed who hail from those Scandinavian parts were not offended by.

  5. And they created memorable minor characters! Who can forget the scenes with the two minor criminals, Showalter (perfectly realized by Steve Buscemi) and Grimsrud, especially the scene in which they are driving and Showalter can't stop talking, while Grimsrud says not a word. Once more, the Coens tread the thin line between caricature and character successfully, for there is a realism behind the exaggeration of the scene.

  You know, sometimes when I think you're the shallowest man I've ever met, you somehow manage to drain a little more out of the pool.

  Elaine to Jerry in Seinfeld

  I'll tell you about the time I got locked in the bank vault with Mr. Mooney. It was another one of my harebrained schemes ... Wait a minute. That was a Lucy show!

  Homer in The Simpsons

  Our task in this chapter is to understand more clearly how two of the alltime most popular episodic television comedies "work." Then in chapter 12, it will be your turn to have a go at it.

  Few shows make it past the five-year mark. Thus our two focal offerings in this chapter, Seinfeld and The Simpsons, should already command both our attention and our respect. As we go to print, The Simpsons is past the ten-year mark while Seinfeld continues to play strongly in reruns around the world. That alone says a lot about the quality of the writing and the staying power of good comedy. Our close-up on these shows will take us not only into the make-up of each series but also into a detailed look at representative scripts from the shows.

  Do these two seemingly very different comedies share anything besides the ability to make millions laugh for twenty-six minutes at a time? The answer is "yes" on at least two fronts. Both are media- and audience-conscious, and each is fearless in experimenting with subject matter, format and the twisting and turning of narrative possibilities, including the use of dream, fantasy, flashbacks and flashforwards. Seinfeld the character is, after all, a successful comedian, and a number of episodes play with that reality, giving him total license to be a stand-up comedian within this sitcom. Similarly, every Simpsons episode begins with the imaginative credit sequence, showing each Simpson rushing home to watch ... television. Each time, the Simpsons see "Created by Matt Groening" appear on the screen. The wink to both the medium and the audience, a prime characteristic of stage comedy since Aristophanes, is therefore definitely at play in both shows.

&nbs
p; Seinfeld: Much Ado about Something

  Jerry Seinfeld announced his resignation from the Seinfeld show after nine very successful seasons (1989-1998), doing what few actors, let alone comedians, have done: quit while they are ahead. "It's all about timing," said Jerry at the time, and in a real sense, he was absolutely correct (Handy, 77). For to watch any Seinfeld episode is to see a perfectly timed performance that blends stand-up with ensemble anarchistic sitcom. "Stand-up" because Jerry plays himself, a successful stand-up comedian; "ensemble" because it is a four-character series, with George, Kramer and Elaine sharing the spotlight from moment to moment; and "anarchistic" since each episode is propelled by several crazy ideas that usually, unlike Aristophanes' fantasies, go wrong, or at best astray. Note too that while there is a lot of dating and a lot of flirting and some sex, there really is nothing "romantic" about these late-twentieth-century New York singles.

  One more classification: Seinfeld is also a comedy of manners. That is, like British comedies of the seventeenth century by William Wycherley and William Congreve, each Seinfeld episode brings up issues and customs of social interaction, examines them from a variety of angles and leads to some form of conclusion about them. We will follow a number of "manners" examined in the episode "The Kiss Hello," with the main plot being how and why and whom we kiss "hello" as a social greeting. In a comedy of manners, much of the laughter is generated by the characters' varying reactions to social manners and customs. Further, we follow the reactions to the conflict between individual desires and group pressures. Given that Seinfeld captures a culture in constant change, the possibilities for laughter are myriad.

  Media critic Mike Flaherty has detailed seven principles that formed something of a backbone for the series from its beginning. Note how many of these dovetail with the observations on comedy offered in my introduction:

  1. "The characters playfully do not grow," says Seinfeld writer Larry Charles (24). This factor is a clear thumbing of the nose not only at traditional family-oriented comedies and romantic comedy in general, but also at simplistic, feel-good "self-help" movements.