Laughing Out Loud Page 3

  Note that the best comedians and writers of comedy are excellent listeners and very good observers. Most folk are too busy to see how funny daily life really is, but to the happily trained eye and ear of the comic, everyone and everything is potential material. Chaplin, for instance, could play a great comic drunk because he had carefully studied drunks-including, sadly, his father-in real life, as he noted in his autobiography.

  [6] Comedy implies a special relationship with and to its audience.

  Put simply, comedy, especially anarchistic comedy and stand-up comedy, acknowledges the presence of the audience and makes direct contact with it. Chaplin stared directly into the camera, at us; Aristophanes' characters often insulted individuals in the crowd; and Woody Allen begins Annie Hall (1977) acknowledging not only us, as he speaks of his failed romance, but also the whole tradition of stand-up Jewish urban New York comedy from which he emerged. Ditto for Mike Myers and his constant asides to the audience (read: the camera) in Wayne's World (1992).

  We are therefore almost always aware of the "game" of comedy being played out with our knowledge, or, as often happens, without our knowledge, as we too become the butt of jokes, of gags and of comic violations of various sorts. Comedy encourages the active involvement of the audience. Tragedy avoids such contact and self-awareness as it strives to involve our emotions. In fact, in a tragedy or serious drama, "the inactivity of the audience is a vital prerequisite of the tragic experience" (Taplin, 26).

  [7] Comedy thrives on details, for details reveal the contradictions and celebrate the incongruities that bring on laughter.

  Shelley Berman used to do a routine about how swiftly romance can be shot down. What happens when you find Miss Perfect, he used to say, and she smiles at you and right between her shiny white front teeth is a big piece of spaghetti caught and dangling before you, which she, of course, cannot see.

  Details and humor.

  Woody Allen used to say his parents believed in God and carpeting. Here we really have a joke structure in a single line. "Parents" and "God" flow along as a related Logic A, while we are thrown for an unexpected comic loop with Logic B, "carpeting," that precise detail that appears to have nothing to do with God. And yet the laughter is in combining the cosmic and the daily, the sacred and the profane.

  As if to highlight this point, Preston Sturges fires off one of his best lines in Hail the Conquering Hero (1944): "Everything is perfect except for a few details." In fact, this line describes most comedy. And it is that series of "few details" that draws the laughs.

  [81 In the world of the truly comic, nothing is sacred and nothing human is rejected.

  Aristophanes was not afraid to mock the gods, as we shall see, on the ancient Greek stage, and the gang at Saturday Night Live takes on every imaginable topic from President Clinton's latest sex scandal to satire of anti-abortionists and the National Rifle Association. Much of the comedy we see on television and in films plays it relatively safe, hoping not to offend many viewers. But as writers we need to recognize that such a limitation of comedy has to do with the censorship of sponsors and timidity of producers, not with the nature of the medium. This relates to the second part of our observation as well: nothing human is rejected in the total vision of comedy. Therefore, the scatological and sexual have their rightful role in comedy even if they have been limited in various cultures in particular ways. Think, for instance, how in the United States and other countries there are strong gender biases in comedy. American comedies often allow breasts to be shown but almost never do we see penises. Film scholar Peter Lehman has written with admirable irony about how, for instance, since Hollywood is still primarily controlled by men, jokes about penises abound in American comedy, but viewing the actual "member" is limited to hardcore pornography (58).

  As writers, our call is to go beyond such censorship to explore a fuller range of comedy as it may be useful, effective and appropriate to our vision! As we shall discuss, here is where many of the foreign comedies can help us grow as writers. Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel is wickedly ironic, for example, in his questioning of religious (especially Catholic) hypocrisy in almost all of his films, including The Milky Way (1969), in which a very drunk Jesus tries to tell traveling salesman jokes at his Last Supper. And Yugoslav filmmaker Dusan Makavejev, in a carnivalesque film such as Sweet Movie (1974), includes such narrative elements as a Miss World Clitoris Contest and an orgy in a vat of sugar crosscut with documentary footage of the digging up of graves of hundreds of Polish officers murdered by the Germans in World War II.

  Once more the message of comedy is clear: don't be afraid to explore, to let go, and to go beyond convention and the "respectable." Note that this is not the same as saying you must beat the audience over the head with unorthodox comedy. No. As we shall explore, any episode of The Simpsons or Seinfeld manages to insult any number of social and religious groups and get away with it because of its speed, clever dialogue, and cartoonish world of exaggeration that put its viewers at ease.

  [91 It is not that comedy has a "happy ending" so much as a festive climax that celebrates a community of two or more individuals.

  In a comic ending, two or more individuals are together, thus making a statement: whatever happens, we are not alone. Of course in so many Hollywood films, endings have come to be called "happy" because all major conflicts appear to be resolved with a fairytale-like sense that "they lived happily ever after."

  As we shall see, Aristophanes' comedies and most of Shakespeare's end in dance, song, and group feasting, suggestive of either a wedding (and thus a vote for social coherence) or a socially desirable change, such as the ending of war, as in so many of Aristophanes' works.

  Comedy reassures. The ending suggests new beginnings, which, once again, is a vote for social coherence and continuity. This is true as well of more sophisticated comedies that play with the very notion of closure by denying us neat resolutions. Stanley Tucci's Big Night, for instance, gives us one of the most effective endings in an American comedy in recent years, as the two brothers who have just come to blows about their failed restaurant, blaming each other, end by quietly sharing an omelet.

  Of course, our odyssey through comedy will reveal a full range of endings, from the clearly impossibly "happy" and thus fanciful, to the quietly assertive, as mentioned above with Big Night. It is up to you to choose to what degree you wish to leave the audience either still in a world of make-believe or with a contemporary and realistic "take" on romance, as at the end of Tootsie, where Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange wander down a New York street negotiating whether she can borrow the halter top Dustin wore when he was a woman.

  [ 101 Comedy is one of the most important ways a culture talks to itself about itself.

  One of the best ways to discover what's going on in any country is to watch the pop comedies of that nation, either on film or in their hit television series. This often brings scorn from local film critics and prize-winning filmmakers, of course. Simply weigh the number of Oscars dished out to "serious" films as opposed to comedies to see what I mean. But the fact is, in every country I know, comedy remains, in all its various forms, a most valued barometer of what is really worrying, exciting or bothering folk. Realize, naturally, that we are saying once more that comedians and comic writers are privileged members of society, for the nonthreatening nature of comedy allows them to say whatever they wish and get away with it.

  The flip side of this observation, of course, is that comedy is very strongly culture-bound, and thus there is a lot of humor that is "lost" in translation and in export/import. Even the Marx Brothers fared badly in many countries because Groucho's hundred-mile-an-hour lines are so fast, there is no way to get it all on and off the screen in subtitles fast enough, and who is going to try to do a voice dub in Lithuanian or Bulgarian at that speed?

  Silent comedy, on the other hand, could travel into the hearts and laughter of the world without subtitles. Chaplin has reached many more millions than Groucho for that very
reason.

  Let's close with a focus on women and minorities in comedy. As in other areas of society, there is racism and sexism in humor and comedy as well. Think how many "dirty jokes," for example, defame and exploit women or ethnic minorities. (How did Americans get started on Polish jokes?) This point made, we will, throughout this text, point to sterling examples of female comedians, writers, and film and television creators who have helped us reverse stereotypes and satirize cliches. And the large number of foreign films discussed herein is testimony to the rich vein of humor we all need to pay attention to outside our national borders. For more on women and comedy, I highly recommend Kathleen Rowe's study The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. Remember that if comedy since Aristophanes' day has primarily been a male-controlled thing, women have one way or another managed to get their laughs too. And in the United States, even as early as 1885 there was Kate Sanborn's anthology of female humor, The Wit of Women (Jenkins, 256).

  Introduction Summary

  Invitations to help you create a comic frame of mind before writing:

  i. Embrace and cultivate unexploded mimes ... in your writing and, indeed, in your life.

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

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

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

  5. Know the comic traditions you wish to work in and cultivate the habits and liberating spirit of carnival necessary to create the comic.

  There was always laughter in the house. Jokes and quips, sight gags and pratfalls were the daily bread of our lives.

  Jean Houston, A Mythic Life

  Write the comedy you want to write for the pleasure of it. And, ultimately, don't worry about checklists, guidelines, rules, or formulas. Having said that, however, I do hope these pages can be there for you when you wish to double back and review or think over elements in your own work.

  In that spirit, let's break down some of the elements of comedy that writers should know about, realizing this is not an exhaustive coverage of the territory and also that a number of other elements are discussed in the following chapters.

  Let us begin with laughter.

  Libraries are filled with books on laughter, and most are not very funny. No, we will not lose ourselves in theories of laughter-social and psychological-but let's acknowledge that we can't speak of comedy without thinking of or longing for that sudden eruption inside our throats (and minds)-audible or not-known as laughter. Certainly we know how good it is to be in an audience sharing laughter, and it is clearly tied to the pleasures of a group or community experience. But ultimately laughter is individual and often occurs not only when something is "funny" but, as we have already suggested, at an "inappropriate" time. Jean Houston, a philosopher and the daughter of a Hollywood comedian, is a strong believer in how laughter taps us into the mythic dimensions of life. She notes: "Laughter under social conditions allows the soul to be congregationalized, and instead of meeting in mutual enmity and distrust, we allow our unconscious responses to become socialized, trusting and openly infectious" (19). In such a perspective, as one comic scholar suggests, we can speak of laughter, building on Freud, as a form of "comic catharsis," since "comedy is capable of representing things that in the real world have the capacity to be painful" (Sutton, 4).

  Finally, we can see a simple division between laughter of the ridiculous and laughter of the ludicrous. The ridiculous suggests a form of ridicule, and thus of laughing at someone or something, while the ludicrous is more simply a laughter that is purely for its own sake.

  Finally, how much and what kind of laughter are you after in your script? John Wayne makes me laugh out loud a lot every time I watch John Ford's The Quiet Man, about a retired boxer returning to Ireland and courting Maureen O'Hara in a feisty village setting. But Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, on the other hand, pushes comedy so close to drama that my laughter is a subdued "knowing" chuckle rather than a series of belly laughs. It's up to you. But a lot of how you answer the "laughter issue" depends on our next element.

  Comic Climate

  Successful comedies manage to convey a sense of a particular climate. I am referring, of course, back to the various possible kinds of comedy, but I do not wish to limit the concept by saying "genre" or "sub-genre" of comedy. For climate has more to do with the atmosphere, tone, or flavor your comedy creates. Thus, you are asking yourself, is there a general "climate" in your comedy that is predominantly (but not exclusively) satiric, as in Hal Ashby's memorable Being There (1979); parodic, as in Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein; or purely farcical, as in Dumb and Dumber. Then again, your script might be meant to be largely feistily romantic, as in Tin Cup (1997); gloriously carnivalesque, as in Mediterraneo (1991); or funny with very dark edges, as in those films that bridge several genres, such as Fargo. None of these are set "types" that should limit your comedy. Rather, what I am suggesting by comic climate is for you to have a clear idea of what tone and overall core trajectory you wish your comedy to embrace.

  In chapter 3 we will trace a division between anarchistic and romantic comedy. But we can be more specific here than in my initial remarks above by mentioning scholar Morton Gurewitch's breakdown of comedy into four components: satire, humor, farce and irony (85). These divisions can help you consider which comic climate you are establishing as you think about how the following handle "folly": "Traditional SATIRE excoriates folly finding it ridiculous but also corrigible. HUMOR seeks not to expunge folly, but to condone and even to bless it, for humor views folly as endearing, humanizing, indispensable. FARCE also accepts folly as indispensable, but only because folly promises delightful annihilations of restraint. Finally IRONY sees folly as an emblem of eternal irrationality to be coolly anatomized and toyed with" (Gurewitch, 85). Simply ask yourself which of these four climates best describes the kind of comedy you are after. Having a clearer understanding of your own vision should make it easier to open up further comic depths within yourself.

  Areas of Comedy

  Next, consider the three major areas of comedy in film and television: comedian-driven, story-oriented, and character-centered, noting that the boundaries are fluid and overlapping and not established in suggestive rather than rigid terms.

  Comedian-Driven Comedy

  So much of American film and television comedy is comedian-driven. That is, the comedy centers on and is written for and about a known comic. The writers thus must know the comedian and her or his strengths and weaknesses, capabilities and limitations. Film scholar Wes D. Gehring in Personality Comedians as Genre suggests that we should view such comedies as constituting their own "genre" (182). Furthermore, the comedian-clown, Gehring holds, makes us laugh for one of two reasons, or perhaps for both simultaneously: the comedian is what we may wish to become or is what we are afraid we may become (182). In this sense, "The comic is what we do not want to be but are afraid we have become," notes Gehring (182).

  As if to underscore the popularity of comedian-driven comedy, Entertainment Weekly in 1997 ran a survey and came up with the fifty funniest people alive (note the limitations of such an exercise: all listed are Americans). The top ten are:

  1. Robin Williams

  2. Jerry Seinfeld

  3. Roseanne

  4. Jim Carrey

  5. Albert Brooks

  6. Eddie Murphy

  7. Garry Shandling

  8. Rosie O'Donnell

  9. Richard Pryor

  1o. Homer Simpson

  ("The 5o Funniest People Alive," 23-25)

  What immediate observations can we make? Yes, there are eight fellows and two gals. OK, nine humans and one 'toon (the only other 'toon in the top fifty weighs in at number 50, Beavis and Butthead). Two are African American, and all but Jim Carrey and Homer Simpson began as stand-up comedians, thus suggesting that even when these comics are structured int
o a sitcom formula, their talents lie more in the realm of the "anarchistic" (as we shall discuss in chapter 3) than in the territory of a carefully worked-out plot. (And Homer Simpson cracks one-liners like a stand-up comedian.) As Gehring notes, "The storyline of clown comedy provides a humor hall tree upon which the comedian can `hang' his comic shtickspecific routines" (Personality Comedians, 2).

  But consider Robin Williams for our focus on the complexity of a comediandriven work. Described as "a Shakespearean fool on speed" ("The 5o Funniest," 23), Williams is part fool and clown, part stand-up comedian and part comic actor, who can, as in Dead Poets' Society (1989) and The World according to Garp (1982), break through into pure pathos and drama.

  Now let us examine the next ten "funniest people alive," noting that the survey does not include great comics of the past. Number ii is Bob Newhart; 12, Monty Python; 13, George Carlin; 14, Bill Cosby; 15, Jack Lemmon & Walter Matthau; 16, Carol Burnett; 17, Woody Allen; 18, David Letterman; 19, Rowan Atkinson; and 20, Mel Brooks. This section of the list brings in an older generation of television (Newhart, Cosby, Burnett) and film (Brooks, Lemmon and Matthau, Allen). But this group also broadens the horizon a bit to include England-Monty Python and Rowan Atkinson-and a night-time television host, David Letterman. The rest of the list: Billy Crystal, Mary Tyler Moore, Bill Murray, Spinal Tap, Tracey Ullman, Steve Martin, Whoopi Goldberg, Howard Stern, Ellen DeGeneres, Tom Hanks, Bette Midler, Dennis Miller, Bill Maher, Kevin Kline, Lily Tomlin, Rodney Dangerfield, Goldie Hawn, Penn and Teller, Janeane Garofalo, Steven Wright, Alan King, Tim Allen, Jackie Mason, Ben Stiller, Conan O'Brien, Dana Carvey, Paul Reiser, Nathan Lane, Joan Rivers, Beavis and Butthead.

  Comedian-driven comedy is based on name recognition. We thus come to any of their work with certain memories and therefore a range of expectations. In this sense, these practitioners of comedy are genres unto themselves.