Laughing Out Loud Read online

  A physical humor-based scene: In Sherlock Jr., Buster Keaton milks one setup for all it's worth in a scene that might more accurately be described as a sequence of short scenes. He plays a small-town movie theater projectionist who falls asleep and, in "dream" form, moves out of his own body and onto the screen, climbing into the film being projected. The set-up is simple: how does someoneeven in dream form-walk into a screen and become part of a movie? The answer is also simple: with great difficulty, and with a lot of humor. The first time, he is bounced out of the film as if it were a live theatrical piece; the actors simply shove him out. Then he actually enters the frame, only to become a victim of film editing. When he appears to be standing on a rock in the sea, he dives into the waterbut while he is in the middle of his dive, the film cuts to a new scene, so he ends up diving into a snow bank. And when he starts to lean against a tree in one frame, the scene cuts to a treeless garden and he falls once more. With more than ten such gag cuts, Keaton pushes the set-up as far as he can before his "Sherlock" figure is finally assimilated into the movie on screen. Note that if you have a clever set-up for physical comedy, the audience can take a lot of variations, for both the pleasure and the mental stimulation of it. As numerous critics have pointed out, there is almost an existential dimension to Keaton's physical humor (see Horton, Buster Keaton's "Sherlock Jr."). Such repetition would be lame and boring if it were only the throwing of custard pies, for instance. Keaton's physical gags tickle our imagination because ultimately we "get" that he is playing with film language in a way we have never seen it done before.

  An extended monologue scene: Matt Damon and Ben Affleck picked up the 1997 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay with their first script, Good Will Hunting. The film mixes psychological drama, refreshingly nutty screwball romantic comedy and anarchistic comic and dramatic elements.

  Humor is used throughout the film, both to reveal character and to highlight the emotional dimensions of the narrative. The script sparkles with well-written dialogue, but some of the biggest laughs come from extended monologues, one in which Will (Matt Damon) verbally humiliates a Harvard student in a bar who is flirting with a student (Minnie Driver) he is interested in, and another, late in the film, when Will turns his verbal laser beam on a nameless and faceless NSA recruiter.

  Audiences in theaters where I've seen the film break into applause, after first laughing throughout Will's passionate and sarcastic attack on all that the NSA stands for. The applause, of course, is for Will's outlandish skill and for the complete silence maintained by the straight man, the NSA rep. Note that we do not even get a final reaction shot but rather cut to the next scene, simply imagining how confused and angry the executive must be.

  Once again: if a whole series of monologues were launched in the film, we would tire swiftly and head out for more popcorn. But the careful planting of only two major speeches helps punctuate the film emotionally and comically. Would a long monologue be effective in your script? Once more, examine your story and characters to see what effect you are striving for.

  Two more areas of comic scene construction should be mentioned at this point: the counterpoint of foreground and background and the counterpoint between sound and image.

  Think about the humor that can arise from the clash between what is happening in the background and the foreground activity. In Babe (1995), the Australian farmer (James Cromwell) who seems so stern and grim cuts loose in one scene and joyfully dances his heart out, thinking he is alone, only to discover, in the background, all of his farmyard animals peering through the window in bewildered awe. And in The Full Monty, as the gang of unemployed steel workers stand in the unemployment line in the foreground, our "dancers" begin to do a little disco shuffle as they stand in line. The humor comes not because they are dancing again but because of the incongruity of where they are dancing.

  When you think about the play between sound track and image, think not just about music but about sound. Humphrey Bogart gets our laughs early in African Queen when his stomach growls endlessly during Robert Morley's impossibly formal tea in an isolated African mission. No amount of dialogue could accomplish what the simple sound of a growling stomach conveys about how impossibly wrong the gin-swigging, free-living riverboat captain Bogart is for such sedate society.

  The same is true of music. We have pointed out how the serious funeral hymn that opens Kolya stands in clear opposition to the "behind the scenes" activities of Louka, who is both flirting with the singer and trying to make a cup of coffee while a funeral is in progress.

  Sequence Construction and Comic Rhythm

  I suggest that during this week you outline how many sequences your treatment indicates given the story you are telling. By "sequence" we mean those scenes that clearly work together to create a certain mood or a narrative part of your script. The Coen brothers' Raising Arizona, for instance, uses Nicolas Cage's opening voiceover narration as a unifying element for the whole opening sequence of short scenes. Similarly, in George Roy Hill's The World According to Garp, the section in which Garp (Robin Williams) imagines one of the stories he is writing becomes a separate sequence, united in tone and effect.

  The benefit of such an exercise is that you will begin to see your comedy as a series of movements that have a purpose and rhythm of their own, beyond any sense of a "three-act structure." Sullivan's Travels, for instance, in loosely following Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, has at least four major sequences, defined by the four journeys Sullivan takes from Hollywood, and smaller related sequences within those major divisions, each with its own distinct visual style and pace. The first journey, for instance, is a slapstick silent comedy sequence, while the later cafe scene with Veronica Lake begins a romantic comedy sequence.

  To be able to identify sequences in your script means that you will better understand your comedy as not just one comic tale, but as a pleasingly complex crossroads of various segments, each with its own possible degree and form of humor and laughter.

  Thinking of your scenes as belonging to sequences also helps you understand your need for those quiet moments along the way in a noisy comedy, or vice versa. Jules Dassin's glorious Never on Sunday (1960) is a very boisterous comedy, as he plays an idealistic American who attempts to reform an Athenian prostitute (Melina Mercouri) with no lasting success. But in the center of all of the carnivalesque activities, the film slows down for a quiet sequence: Mercouri, alone in her apartment, sings a quiet song that becomes the theme song of the film. Even within the almost complete anarchy of a Marx Brothers film, all comes to a quiet halt when Harpo plays his harp, lyrically and well. Simply ask yourself if you too have hit a rhythm and variety of moods and tones that allow for the humorous sections to be even more humorous and the quieter moments to have their value.

  ASSIGNMENT:

  i. Write pages 11-20.

  2. Surprise yourself big time this week, in your writing and in your daily life!

  Week 6: Focus on Comic Dialogue

  Unless you are writing a silent physical comedy, you will be in the business of writing dialogue that you hope will make us laugh out loud. Where to begin? Nothing is healthier than the kind of exercise suggested in chapter 2, in which you spend some time each day or each week simply listening to others talk in a park, a restaurant, a mall, on the street. People are often very funny without knowing it. Training our ears to listen-to really listen-and our eyes to pick out telling details is at least half the carnival of writing lively dialogue. How do you capture that quality of really nutty speech on paper?

  Start with character and context. If you know your character, you should know how she or he will react and speak in any given situation. That said, the same principles we've outlined elsewhere hold true here as well. Look for comic exaggeration, the combining of opposites, and upping the stakes of a comic "crisis." Remember that we meet many conversations already in progress, that sentences rarely get finished because characters often interrupt each other, and that especially in comedy cha
racters speak at cross-purposes, with large misunderstandings that the audience is in on and thus laughs with and at. Finally, consider accent, dialect and vocabulary. Remember The Little Rascals (Our Gang) from the 193os? They got laughs for one whole episode based on the fact that none of the kids knew what the word "divorce" meant but none of them wanted to admit it. Thus everybody from Spanky to Buckwheat claimed they had a divorce in their family too.

  Let's examine a few set-ups:

  1. Original romantic comic dialogue: Do whatever you have to do to destroy stereotypical romantic dialogue. We have already looked at the crackling dialogue in James L. Brooks's As Good As It Gets. Add this short exchange from Preston Sturges's script for The Good Fairy (1935, directed by William Wyler). Margaret Sullavan is a clueless innocent "orphan" turned loose in decadent Budapest. Dr. Sporum is a clueless doctor who has fallen for her. In this case the humor comes from a romantic couple in which neither is smooth with language, not to mention courtship.

  LU: I'm an orphan.

  DR. SPORUM: There should be more orphans.

  LU: I never heard anybody say that before.

  If Dr. Sporum were being ironic, that would be one matter, but the fact that he is actually attempting a compliment adds to the humor, capped by Lu's simple rejoinder.

  2. Dialogue centered on some basic misunderstanding: Half the laughs in Forrest Gump arise because Gump says whatever comes into his mind, without a clue as to what others are thinking. When asked why he is jogging across America, he answers that he likes to run. A similar fish-out-of-water tale of a total innocent in a world full of shattered innocence would be George Roy Hill's Slaughterhouse Five, based on Kurt Vonnegut's darkly satirical novel. Billy Pilgrim, like Gump, takes everything at face value; we laugh at the dialogue scenes, knowing what Pilgrim doesn't. And 8o percent of the laughs in Tootsie or Mrs. Doubtfire come from the comic misunderstandings generated by gender-switching, echoing the fun Shakespeare used to have with hidden and mistaken identities. Add Some Like It Hot to the list too.

  3. Dialogue in comic conflict or contrast to surroundings: What is happening while your characters are talking? In comedy, even more than in drama, we usually want our characters to be up to something, or to generate laughter by the conflict between speech and act. In Preston Sturges's The Palm Beach Story (1942), Claudette Colbert is discovered hiding (in her dressing gown) in the shower of a fancy apartment she is trying to sell. The man who discovers her is a very rich old man who makes "weenies." The dialogue between the selfproclaimed Weenie King and Colbert becomes both ludicrous and suggestive in a very nutty way, and finally borders on touching, as the old man gives her money since he is too old to do anything else. We laugh all the more because they both look particularly ridiculous standing together in a bathroom. More surrealistically, Woody Allen talks to his "enlarged" mother hovering over Manhattan, as if just to embarrass him personally, in Allen's section of New York Stories (1989). Finally, touching on wickedly surrealistic comedy, Luis Bunuel has his discreet bourgeoisie chatting away in a restaurant while the body of the owner lies on the table behind them in Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

  4. One-sided "dialogue" with one partner silent: Look how funny the two crooks in Fargo are because one does not speak.

  5. Dialogue at cross-purposes: The famous closing moment in Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, in which Jack Lemmon tries to explain that he is not a woman, does not faze Joe E. Brown. Why? They are at cross-purposes: Lemmon wants to come clean and end the charade, but Joe E. Brown is intent on marriage and will be stopped by nothing or no one-not even by reality! "I'm a man," says Lemmon. "Nobody's perfect," quips Brown, in one of the most delicious endings of an American comedy.

  ASSIGNMENT:

  I. Yes, roughly ten more pages.

  2. Look at appendix i and rent a foreign comedy you haven't seen for the pleasure and instruction of it. Invite your comic partner over to see it too.

  Week 7: Focus on Comic Subplots and Minor Characters

  Review your own script and see if you have enough minor characters, and whether you have the right ones. This goes for subplots as well. Are you being too predictable? Do you need to include other figures not to simply fill up ninety minutes of screen time but to comically explore a dimension of your tale you have left underdeveloped?

  Comedy celebrates diversity. Embrace a bevy of characters in addition to the main protagonist(s), and embrace smaller stories beyond the driving narrative. Look at so many of the comedies covered in previous chapters. Each of Aristophanes' chorus of brightly feathered birds in Birds is his own character, while a wealth of scoundrels (priests, fortune-tellers and gods such as Hercules) attempt to crash Cloudcuckooland. Or take any Marx Brothers or Fellini or Frank Capra comedy: we delight not only in following Groucho, Marcello Mastroianni or Jimmy Stewart but the wacky array of secondary characters and interwoven subplots.

  As in any story, the so-called minor characters and subplots reflect some dimension of our main protagonist or some aspect in contrast to the protagonist. In ensemble comedy such as M*A*S*H, we begin with a comic landscape that is crowded from start to finish. Which characters in Spike Lee's Get on the Bus are major or minor? Each adds to the mosaic of African American males on a journey to a march and on a voyage of self-discovery.

  Look at some more of the films we've reviewed. The White Balloon takes us through the streets of Teheran so that our young protagonist comes across every kind of person you can imagine. Each is important to how our seven-year-old heroine will deal with life, from snake charmer to tailor, from a soldier on leave to a teenager selling balloons. And each character within the carnival of teens in Amy Heckerling's Clueless suggests the wide world of Beverly Hills and greater Los Angeles-Cher's comic environment.

  Note that "minor" characters and "sub" plots are only loosely useful terms. Two examples: The Coen brothers' Fargo would still be a powerful film without developing Norm, Marge's quiet homebody artist husband. But the "minor" details of his character and story, including the final scene of the film, tell us so much about Marge and allow the film to be clearly taken as a comedy, given the happy ending of a loving twosome about to become a family of three. Similarly, Kolya would be touching and hilarious with just Louka and Kolya attempting to get on together in their Czech and Russian and with their opposite needs. But the comedy becomes much warmer and funnier with the addition of Louka's girlfriends, mother and graveyard-operating friend Boz, with his home full of children, animals and noise.

  ASSIGNMENT:

  I. Sail joyfully through pages 31- 40.

  2. In your comic journal, name a few comic "minor" characters who have added to the spice in your life.

  Week 8: Are You Surprising and Entertaining Yourself As You Write?

  I do get calls, letters and e-mails from stressed-out writers working on comedies. And I must admit I am always a bit baffled. Stressed-out authors working on comedy? Shouldn't this be a contradiction in terms? Isn't the whole point to enjoy the experience? Isn't your comic partner close by, on the phone or across the table with a coffee cup or glass of Merlot to lighten you up, challenge you playfully and give you hell if you begin to take yourself too seriously?

  But my question remains: are you surprising and entertaining yourself with your own comedy? If not, turn off the computer and go fishing, shopping, jogging, on a trip, on a walk, to sleep, to a friend's, or pick up the phone and call someone you haven't seen in five years. That will surprise you and them. Meanwhile, let's be honest and admit one more time: writing good comedy can be tricky. What can go wrong? Anything and everything, but here are three danger points:

  i. You are following your treatment too mechanically, so that you are being true to the outline but missing the spirit of the comedy you originally enjoyed. Your treatment should be a magic carpet to what you write rather than a straightjacket closing you off from changes and fresh insights. Particularly in comedy, if one element "takes off " on you, follow it through and see where that
character, that idea, that twist is headed! Do you need to see a comedy that runs out of gas early on and then painfully follows a plot outline that should have been opened up or thrown out? Rent Tom Schulman's Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag (1997) and try to stick with it long enough to see what goes wrong in timing, story, characterization-did I leave out anything?

  2. You are not allowing yourself to be crazy enough in dreaming up a world turned upside down, characters who are carnivalesque, situations that pit opposites playfully against one another. The Full Monty could have settled for a mildly amusing social comedy about the unemployed. Instead, Simon Beaufoy gave himself the total freedom to create a gaggle of oddly shaped misfits who were willing to humiliate themselves all the way and in the process regain their own self-esteem. Nothing is "too crazy." Write it and share it, then decide if it needs pulling in, toning down, redefining. But redefining is very different from confining. Go for total carnival and see what happens! Put on a Monty Python film just to remind yourself how nutty comedy-anarchistic comedy especially-can be.

  3. You are actually beginning to change the kind of comedy you are writing. Cervantes began Don Quixote as a comic parody, and it wound up as one of the most touching novels Europe has produced. What happened? Cervantes discovered he had a bigger tale to tell than he originally thought. If your vision of the project is changing, take time off and think it through. Perhaps it needs to change! Take the Oscar-winning Italian comedy Mediterraneo (i99i, Gabriele Salvatores), for instance. This tale of six inept Italian soldiers stranded on a Greek island during World War II could have faded out with their rescue at the end of the war, and it would be seen as a warm and often hilarious ensemble anarchistic comedy with romantic touches. But the postscript scene that caps the film has one of the soldiers returning to the island in the present, in his late sixties or early seventies. He meets up with two more of the original group, and the three old men sit quietly peeling eggplants for a moussaka, full of memories of the past and with a shared friendship continuing in the present. The tone of the ending? Nostalgic and muted. And it is an ending with a bit of social criticism attached, since the returning veteran says he left Italy because the dream of building a better society after the war didn't work out. That jump-to-the-present ending changes the whole impact of the film, making it a more serious work even though our memories include much laughter throughout. If your sense of your comedy is changing, does that reflect several levels of comedy that could, as in Mediterraneo, be combined skillfully and effectively to deliver laughter and a few tears too? This is a good week to take stock.