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How to Write Comedy
in Hollywood
In addition to a precise how-to blueprint, this is the only book that includes the emotional and spiritual insights that you will need to navigate the exclusive turf of the successful Hollywood comedy writer.
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BELIEVABILITY VS. COMEDY
Nothing But The Truth
Next time you see a stand-up comedian performing, notice that he uses his words, his voice, his face and his body to make you believe that the story he is telling is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He will pause, he will act like he never before told about the airline losing his luggage, that he just now remembered it. He will react to every detail he relates as though it really happened exactly as he is telling it.
"A funny thing happened to me on the way to the club tonight" was a line actually used several decades ago by so many comedians that it became a cliché. But it was the joke teller's primitive way of making the audience believe the truth of the story he was about to tell. It was his way to convince the audience that it happened just a few minutes ago, that it was true.
One of the early successful hosts of The Tonight Show, a comedian named Jack Parr, used to preface humorous stories with a statement swearing that the events he was about to relate were absolutely true. He became known for a line that he habitually used before each bit; "I kid you not." Comedians are more sophisticated these days, they aren't that obvious, but if you watch closely you'll see them use more subtle versions of the old "I kid you not."
Why? Because story telling, humorous story telling, has to be believable to be funny. If you're okay with that, please excuse me for including the following example for others who aren't.
And...uh...if you're Betty White, or a dog advocate, don't read this.
Believability
A guy is at his girlfriend's apartment on the sixth floor in the living room waiting for her to finish dressing in the other room. Her beloved poodle, which is also in the living room, jumps out the window.
Is that funny? Of course not. Why not? Because it lacks credibility. It's not believable. Why did the dog suddenly decide to jump out the window? Why, on the sixth floor, was the window open? Let's try the story again and fill those holes, make it more believable.
A guy is in an apartment on the sixth floor in the living room waiting for a new girlfriend to come out of the bedroom where she is getting ready for their first date. The window is open to cool the apartment. Not a dog-person, the guy calls to the girl that the dog brought him a ball. The girl calls back that Boopsie wants to chase the ball. The guy tosses the ball.
The hyper-active dog lunges after it and immediately brings it back to the guy. This time the guy heaves the ball with all his might. The dog streaks after the ball. The ball hits the coffee table and bounces out the open window. The dog leaps out after it.
That's a much better story isn't it? It's kind of funny, well, tragic-funny, because it's more believable.
Destroying Believability
I'm frequently dismayed to see a sitcom in which the story calls for a working-class character to dress up to go to a costume party. In an effort to get a visual maxi-yuk, they have the character enter the scene dressed in a costume decorated with eighteen-thousand-dollars worth of silk, sequins and feathers. It gets a laugh, but it destroys a lot of believability making it harder to get laughs down the line.
I understand that the design of the costume is the creation of some overzealous craft people, but isn't there someone there who can tell them that it is so unbelievable that this poor schmuck would have access to all that expensive stuff?
Indigenous
I remember getting a frantic phone call from Jay Sandrich who was, at the time, producing Get Smart. He told me that they were in a story meeting and they couldn't think of what Maxwell Smart could use in a gym scene to clobber the KAOS guy. A dumbbell wouldn't be funny, too brutal, it had to be something else. I said I'd think about it and call him back. (I didn't agonize over it, it wasn't one of my scripts.)
Anyway, the point is that even in that farcical show and even though the show may not have looked like it, the story people poured a lot of effort into finding something indigenous to the setting to make the scene believable.
Indigenous Plus
A shining example of making use of the items indigenous to the scene is the cornfield sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest. Cary Grant is instructed to get off a bus on a deserted dirt road bordered by miles of cornfields. Grant begins to realize he has been set up. He hears a plane approaching. It swoops down and to avoid being run down he hits the dirt.
Hitchcock did not choose a sleek corporate plane that would have been more apropos for the international bad guys, instead he chose a crop duster which was more native to the setting, more indigenous.
And when Grant is fired upon he runs for cover into the cornfield. Hitchcock dosen't then reach for the pyrotechnics of a flame thrower or rocket launcher, instead he uses what he has, what is indigenous to a cornfield. He has the crop duster spray Grant with choking insecticide. Not as flashy, but indigenous, believable.
And lots more fun.
Hitchcock gets a gold star.
Creating Believability
So, I'm going to assume that I have convinced you that it is molto importante to fashion your story so that it is believable, so that it will be believed. The only question remaining is how do you create believability.
I'll show you how that's done.
First Believability Equation
Believability is directly proportional to likeability.
If the reader or audience likes what he is reading or watching, he is more likely to believe it. If he likes the characters, if he likes how the story is turning, if he likes the actor playing the part, if he likes the setting, if he likes the music, if he likes the costumes, he is more likely to believe it. The more he is enjoying himself, the more he is having fun, the less you have to work to make the screenplay believable.
Second Believability Equation
Emotion trumps logic. Always.
A scene driven by a character's emotion is always more believable than a scene motivated by a character's logic. The audience, might question logic, they might mistrust intellect, but they will not question emotion. A character who acts out of emotion will be believed. His resulting action will be believed. Whereas, a character who acts out of logic could be mistaken, he could be lying.
A common example of this tenet may be seen when a TV news-person interviews a victim at the scene of an accident. The victim is on his back pinned under an Arrowhead truck with blood squirting out of his ear and the on-the-scene reporter sticks a mike in his face and asks, "How do you feel?" That's what the reporter is taught to say to get a truthful answer, not what the person thinks, but what he feels.
In many movies, particularly near the end, when the mansion goes up in flames and the hero is about to experience his enlightening crisis, his epiphany, he recites all the logical reasons why he should not bother to risk his life to save the ex-wife who recently tried to run him over with the Volvo.
Then, as the audience clutches the arms of the seats and laments, "No, no, you're a good guy, no matter how rotten your wife is, she's a human being, you care about her," the hero rejects the logical action and chooses the illogical, the emotional one. He finds his true heroic nature and to the great relief of the audience breaks free of the firemen holding him back and dashes into the roaring inferno.
Emotion trumps logic.
Always.
Emotion is believable; logic is suspect. Don't forget that.
Third Believability Equation
You can damage the believability of the story by tossing in gratuitous violence, violence that is not necessary to the story. You've heard that before, haven't you?
And you can weaken credibility by larding in gratuitous sex. You've heard that too.
What I'd like to do is add a third often ignored way of sapping believability-gratuitous humor.
Humorous dialogue, or action, is inversely proportional to believability.
If you have the hero and his girlfriend Velcroed to a rising Tomahawk missile, you can't have him make jokes about always wanting to see Baghdad. Well, you can, if you want to lower believability or to relieve the tension or if you are writing a broad farce.
Otherwise, if you want to keep the audience with you, if you want them to believe the jeopardy, go easy on the jokes.
O course if you have Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis doing your lines, forget everything I just told you. These guys make anything work.
If you have a great actor who can pull it off, you are much more likely to get away with funny lines in a story without sacrificing believability.
Fourth Believability Equation
When we write a story, we create a framework of believability, a set of rules that we tell the audience will govern the characters and their environment. Once we present these rules we can never violate them without eroding believability big time.
We cannot write that an evil alien can be killed only by locking him in the cloud chamber of a particle accelerator and then later show him killed by falling off a flatcar. We cannot describe a world where all the creatures are sightless and then show one of them lining up a Winchester Seventy.
A convenient word used to describe this discipline is verisimilitude.
The American Heritage Dictionary definition says:
Verisimilitude 1. The quality of appearing to be true or real. 2. Something that has the appearance of being true or real.
Or: A world created with it's own, unique, inviolable attributes.
Actually, I just made up that last definition, but from a writer's standpoint, that's about what the word means.
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CREATIVE ENERGY
If you could stay at your computer for eighteen hours a day you could knock out a theatrical screenplay every two weeks. The truth is, you could do it physically, but you couldn't do it mentally, emotionally. You would burn your little synapses out.
Since creative writing eats up mega-tons of brain power, theatrical screenplays often take months or years to complete. The average output for a screenwriter, on a good day, is five pages.
Increasing Your Writing Output
Writing a screenplay is different from writing a TV segment. A while back, during a very good year, when all of us did our writing on an ingenious, cordless device known as a Royal Manual Typewriter, I was simultaneously writing scripts for Get Smart, Man From U.N.C.L.E., Please Don't Eat The Daisies and The Farmers Daughter, At the end of the first three weeks of delivering drafts late, my lightening-quick mind figured out that I had to write faster.
I designed and hammered together an elaborate slanted plywood writing desk that sought to overcome the deficiencies of a foolishly level office desk. Hinged to either side of a center copy-holder hung two angled wings that tripled my page-display space. If you're interested in bizarre, wooden furniture, write to me and I'll send you the plans.
I also timed my page output and found that, working from an approved outline I could turn out a page in twenty-minutes. I bought a twelve-inch studio clock, took it apart, removed the hands, turned over the cardboard face and marked the blank side at the twenty, forty and sixty minute positions, then reassembled the clock replacing the new face and the minute hand only. I eagerly anticipated a human script-machine faster than a speeding bullet.
As stupid as all that sounds, it worked. After installing the improvements to my workspace, I began turning out pages at the optimum speed, three pages per hour.
But, a month later I got real tired. Mentally. Emotionally. I felt like I had the flu. I had difficulty concentrating. My jokes sucked and my stories put me to sleep. Even surrounded by my laminated comforts, my page output nose-dived. I realized (I'm a fast learner) that my physical environment was not the limitation on my output. The real problem was a melt-down of my creative energy.
With this new revelation, I switched my search for speed from plywood to gray matter. I carefully reviewed past events, emotional episodes looking for clues to what mental impediments might be slowing me down.
Don't Talk The Life Out Of It
When I first started writing, I used to tell my stories to my wife and ask her opinion. After listening, she would say something nice, like, "It's very good." And for some unfathomable reason it set off a murmur in my head that said, "She hates it." I could never figure out where the hell that came from, but it always set me back on my heels, slowed me down, my page count drifted toward a scary zero.What was I doing wrong? What was my wife doing wrong?,
After years of introspection, here's what I finally figured out. My wife wasn't doing anything wrong, but I was. I was trying to drag someone else into an activity, an occupation that must be pursued alone. I was trying to turn a solo performance into a duet.
Creative energy conservation rule: Never discuss your writing in progress with anyone not directly involved in getting your script made into a film. Don't talk to your wife about it, don't talk to your kids about it, or your mother, forget your father, your friends. Don't confer with anyone you don't have to.
Over the years I was surprised to learn that most professional writers follow this same practice. And there's a good reason that we do.
If you tell your story to someone, anyone, the story loses energy, it loses forward motion. Even if the response of the listener is complimentary, even if it's full of ardent praise, it alters in some subtle way how you originally felt about the story.
You might argue that someone else's input might provide you with suggestions that could improve your story. And that may sometimes be true, but your first need as a writer is not for dubious advice, but for the energy to finish writing the thing.
I don't want to sound like my love, Shirley MacClaine, but there is a certain aura, a mysterious, spiritual, deeply subconscious force fueling the creative process. Releasing the story to another individual threatens to undo the magic, disturb the Karma. It opens a puncture through which creative energy escapes.
Be A Writer Not A Talker
Here is another reality that writers too often relegate to the denial-bin. Although you may find it hard to admit, there is only one true reason that you tell the story to someone else. You are seeking confirmation, validation, strokes. You want to experience another person enjoying your story and admiring your creativity. You want adulation and you want it now.
The Rubaiyat counsels, "Take the cash and let the credit go." It is a common conceit, it is a normal, human desire.
But, in case you haven't become aware of it yet, you have become a talker not a writer. You enjoyed regaling your spouse or your children or your parents or your friends. You've traded future accolades for immediate gratification.
Don't laugh.
This may sound like Joyce Brothers popcorn psychology, but it is not. It's a real danger to the writer. It's a real risk to your creative energy. You've talked it out, you've had your fun, now why go through the trouble and uncertainty of writing the story?
Resist temptation. Gird your loins. Show your strength of character. Put in your time at the keyboard. Alone. And keep your sights on the day when your script lights up the screen and family and friends cheer as the words "Written by" are followed by your name flashing onto the glass beads.
Writing Is A Solitary Activity
Coming next in this book is one of the most difficult concepts to properly express. I hope I get it right. I hope I make it clear enough to be of value to you. Here goes.
First, the shocker: The people closest to you, your family, your friends, may not be members of your potential audience. They may not share the production instincts and marketing skills of the producer, the purchaser of your work. They may not share the sensibilities of the audience that the producer targets.
It is hard to consider that your screenplay may connect with a group that may not include those who love you. But you must accept the reality that your family and friends who gush over your screenplay might well be indifferent to it had it been written by someone else.
Share your success with those you love. Write your screenplay alone.
You Are Different
If you are a loving, caring person, you will find what follows even harder to accept.
As a writer, you are different from your wife, your children, your parents, your friends.
You are writing, they are not.
The very disposition that impels you to write may lie in closer concert with strangers. It is hard to reconcile this thought that seems to estrange you from the people you live your life with. The only consolation I can offer is this:
Although most of your opinions, most of your feelings keep you closely bound to your family and friends, you differ from them in a private place so deep inside you that it rarely surfaces in your daily life. And it is from this unseen well that you draw the energy and insights that illuminate your writing. A place that those who love you may not go.
Well Meaning Criticism
There is another case for not revealing work-in-progress to your loved ones. Discussing your writing with those closest to you is bound to lead you astray. If your spouse, mother, son or daughter say your screenplay is perfect, the comment may simply be a courteous, loving encouragement and though it may be momentarily pleasing, it could easily be misleading. It could convince you that your unsaleable screenplay is a gem with no further work needed to go to market.
And, on the other hand, if they say your screenplay needs a little something, you may be persuaded to rewrite a salable script and in doing so damage its value. In either case, it's not worth the risk.
Criticism And Affection
Also, consider this reality.
A family member has a personal investment in you that shapes his opinion of your work. And a friend's assessment of your screenplay may be determined by whether last night you ran over his solar-powered driveway lights or this morning picked him up at the Ontario airport at six in the morning. Or you may get an opinion based on a prevailing wind. Your reviewer in his personal life may be experiencing mind-altering emotions of love, hate, resentment, jealousy, anger, impatience, etc. making miniscule the chance of his comments being untainted or helpful.
Strangers Less Biased
On the other hand, the person who buys your script, the producer, judges your story on a single criteria, whether or not it provides him with the material he needs to make his next film. He has trained himself not to respond to your person. If he thinks he can make a buck with your script, he will work with you even though he detests your nose ring.
The old Sam Goldwin edict instructing his assistant goes like this. "That double-crossing, two-faced actor is barred from this studio forever. I never want to see his face on this lot again-unless we need him for a picture."
You're A Professional
You are a writer, it's your occupation, it's your profession. If you were a dentist would you invite your wife and children to your office to admire a set of porcelain veneers? If you were an accountant would you invite your friends to your cubicle to ogle your balance sheet?
You're a professional. Do your work and shut up.
Working With A Partner
Of course, if you are indeed working with a partner, a writing partner, to be sure, you will be talking the story out with another individual ad nauseam. (I think I just tipped my repugnance for working with a partner.)
The truth is, comedy screenplays are most often written by teams of two writers. The reason is that humor is so subjective that two sensibilities applied to the jokes increases chances of entertaining a larger percent of the audience. If one partner thinks a joke is funny and the other doesn't, you might predict a fifty percent audience hit. If both partners think it's funny, the odds shoot way up to somewhere between fifty and a hundred percent.
Another seeming contradiction to the admonition to work alone arises with the success a few years ago of the writing partners Ben Affleck and Matt Damon who said they hammered together the screenplay of Good Will Hunting while driving together cross country. The operative word is partners. Two people working together to write a screenplay is not the same as a writer asking a friend to critique his work.
Lesson: If you are writing with a partner, a full, equal participant in the creative process, you have a viable (although sometimes delicate) working model. If you are writing alone, without a partner, that's it, Babe, don't reach for an ego pill by dragging faintly grinning, bewildered family and friends into it.
Writing Partner Etiquette
Working relationships may vary from one partnership to the other, but in professional collaborations certain general behavioral norms prevail.
When one of the partners voices his idea of how a line or a scene should go, the other partner, if he finds it the worse thing he has ever heard, must restrain himself and not to reject it out-of-hand with a negative remark or barb.
In the story conferences the most common method of rejection we use requires the rejecter to listen patiently, nod his head appreciatively while considering amendments or replacement and finally to say, "Or…" and then present his own improvement or substitute line or ploy. Even though everyone knows that "Or…" means that the suggestion is rejected, the rejection is softened and the tender subterfuge keeps the creative process in forward motion.
Here's the point. If either partner, or participant in a story meeting says, "That's rotten" or "That stinks" the atmosphere turns darkly negative. In a very short time, to avoid personal awkwardness, recrimination and rebuke, all those present will withdraw their participation and retreat to the comfort of silence. No one will risk offering his honest, thoughtful, creative input in an environment that threatens rude, summary dismissal.
I titled this section Partner Etiquette because the relationship between partners must be characterized by uncommon courtesy, not the every-day variety, but a hypersensitive awareness of the subjective and personal investment of individuals collaborating in a creative enterprise.
In the heat of the whirling and tumbling of words and ideas, it is a short hop from "That stinks" to "You stink."
Reading Another Writer's Script
I no longer read other people's scripts. One of the advantages of getting old is that you can refuse to do things and people can't get mad at you. You don't even have to make up an excuse, your excuse is a built-in.
But if you don't have the advantage of being eighty, and you are trapped into reading a friend's writing, look back over this chapter to find out what he is asking of you. He is not asking you to say if the story is okay or not, he is asking you to compliment his work. And if you have an ounce of humanity in you, you will tell him his screenplay is ten times better than any movie you have seen in your entire life. Yes, Virginia, you may have to lie.
Why don't you tell him the truth? For the same reason that no one in Hollywood will tell you the truth. Because if you say his stuff stinks and by some fluke he sells it and it becomes a big hit, he will never forgive you and he will have positive proof of something he has suspected for a long time, that you're a first class nincompoop.
The other reason you don't tell him the truth is because all things Hollywood, even the mightiest corporate juggernauts are founded on whimsy, on a fleeting comment, on a scribbled page, on a sketch of a mouse. And these wispy flights of fancy no matter how vapid they seem, no matter how absurd they seem must never be discouraged.
Everyone profits from keeping the ball in the air.
When asked to comment on another writer's work, members of the film community have a responsibility to invent a way of not saying the work is unadulterated drek. And I have heard some doozies.
The producer who wants to buy your script, like the used car salesman looking at your clunker, isn't going to tell you or your agent how great it is. Instead, he's going to say it's okay and he'll make a deal. On the other hand, be aware, my friend, when, in Hollywood, a producer tells you that your screenplay is magnificent, he is about the business of preserving your friendship and keeping the ball in the air. And you can be certain that the next five words you hear will be, "but it's not for us."
The Script As A Sales Document
Earlier we said that your screenplay must first impress a producer. The first one you have to sell is not the audience, but the guy who green-lights your screenplay. While you are putting your story on paper you must keep in mind that, although you are ultimately writing for the audience, your screenplay will never see an audience if it does not first energize a producer or a studio executive or perhaps a movie star.
You must not forget the people who stand between you and the ticket-buyer. Your script has to seduce The Studio with corporate dreams of private vacation islands, it has to tickle the producer until he falls off his chair, the star has to see visions of Oscars dancing in his head, it has to make your agent covet ten percent of thirty more years of your income.
You will increase your chances of seeing your screenplay made and your superiors achieve their ambitions if you pay as much attention to the words used to describe the action as you do to the words used to render the dialogue. The audience will never see the action written on the page, but the guys upstairs will. It will register with those who evaluate your script and may just nudge it over the top.
It's worth the effort.
I have read many scripts and I can always spot a professional job; the action is written with great care, it is a pleasure to read, it is written beautifully.
Detailed Action
As you rewrite, keep expanding and refining the details of the action.
Your first draft may contain a line of action that reads, "They fled down the fire escape." But by the final draft it might say, "Armand and Gina struggled to push the huge, oak desk against the door to hold off the Seepers, then ran to the window overlooking the fire escape, but is was barred and padlocked. Armand grabbed Gina's hand and yanked her into the bathroom. He tugged at the bathroom window but it wouldn't budge. He wrapped a towel around his fist, smashed the glass and cleared the shards from the frame. He climbed out but the fire escape was just out of reach. Etc., etc."
Even if the director uses none of it, seeing that you did your job, that you thought the scene through and painted a picture of exactly how you envision it, he is going to remember your name.
Getting yourself going
Okay, now, let's pump up your creative energy. Yeah.
Something I said at the beginning of this book is a good way of revving up the engines. Get yourself a couple dozen three-by-five scratch pads or cards. Keep one by your bed, in your purse, in your car, by your kitchen table. When you get an idea, stop what you are doing and jot it down. Deposit all the idea slips into a folder, or a zip-lock. When the folder starts to bulge, it will radiate heat that will fire your creative neurons.
It's a hell of a lot easier to face your Dell if you have a sack full of ready ideas. Or, as a horrified Dean Martin said when another performer told him that, unlike Martin, he never drank before he went on stage, "You mean you go out there alone?"
The message: Don't face your seventeen-inch TFT alone. Have a truckload of ideas with you.
The Float Chamber
A short time before he died I was at Timothy Leary's house and noticed that he had a float chamber, a sort of bathtub with a shell cover used to induce sensory deprivation. It reminded me that if I ever got to compiling this book on writing, I would include a technique I used years ago to recharge my creative batteries.
When I ran out of gas and sat staring at a blank page I used to go into a quiet, darkened room and lie down-sensory deprivation-and just lie there. I found that when I'm lying prone with my eyes closed I don't have to work to keep my mind focused on the story I'm working on. In fact, I have a hard time not focusing on it. Maybe you could call it more worrying than focusing, because I lie there thinking, "I'm never going to get this story off the ground. Maybe it's too political. Maybe I should humanize the hero more. Maybe I should have him going through a painful divorce. Naw, that's been done to death. Wait a minute. Why is this a guy? Why can't he be a girl? Maybe a babe. Maybe a black babe? Maybe Arab. With a burka? Wow, that's bizarre. But we'd never see the actresses face..."
Anyway, it works for me, but I can't guarantee it will work for you.
But it might.
Try it.
Start Somewhere Else
Here's another idea that might do it for you. If you can't seem to get the screenplay going, you can't seem to get the opening scene right, think of a scene coming later in the story that you really like, perhaps the scene that triggered the whole idea, and start writing that scene. Start writing the play from somewhere in the middle, somewhere other than the beginning.
Why not. Who says you have to start writing at the beginning. Write the scene that fascinates you and apply the energy it creates to work both ways toward the beginning and toward the end. You may find the story shooting off in a totally new direction. But that's okay too, you may come out with a better story than the one you thought you were writing.
If your favorite scene doesn't fly, goes into the ground, well, maybe it wasn't such a hot story after all. Stash it away in the vault, your Notes and Drafts file, and get cracking on a fresh one.
First Draft
Sure, write good prose, but not necessarily in the first draft.
The first draft differs from all other drafts in that it is the only one that starts with the blank page. And once you get it going, don't stop the flow, don't get hung up on crafting the perfect metaphor. The time to buff the prose is after you have the first draft finished, the whole story set down.
All writers and writing teachers agree with this approach. Try to get the first draft down in one gulp. Whether you're working with an outline or in freefall, whether or not you know where the story is going or not, even if you don't have the crumb of a last act, whip the thing along till it crosses that finish line-fade out.
The first draft is where you fill pages, not where you make refinements. Rewrites are where you correct your fumbles and stumbles and shine up the prose.
Write in haste, rewrite at leisure. (My apologies to the writer of the original-whoever he was.)
The Way You See It
And etch this on your frontal lobe: Whatever novel, whatever newspaper feature or magazine story you read, be aware that it was not written the first time the way you now read it. Let me repeat that: Be aware that it was not written the first time the way you now read it.
There are no exceptions.
When you read a novel, a story, a feature that seems just perfect to you, it is hard to imagine that it once existed in other, different versions; lesser versions, defective versions that now would shock you by their very existence. What you now see and conceive as the only possible correct permutation of your favorite artist's work is simply the latest version of perhaps wildly differing drafts.
The same phenomena is even more clearly demonstrated in the live performance of recorded songs. The audience knows every note and nuance of the recording and is devastated if the performer deviates from it. To the fan, the performer has sung it incorrectly, but to the performer, the CD available for purchase is simply one of the several cuts that was finally chosen to press.
To maintain your energy, your equilibrium, it is important to understand fully your covenant with the true nature of the creative process. In your labors as a writer, you are not a fan, not a consumer, not an observer, you are at the other end of the process, the disorderly end. You see your final draft as only the last of the many corrected versions of the first. You can never see your final draft without knowing the drafts that came before it. You must accept the following truths:
Your audience sees your work fixed and inevitable and perfect.
You can never see the final version of your work as its admirers see it.
You can never see yourself as your admirers see you.
These are not rules, they are simply the knowledge that visits any individual who is impertinent enough to produce a creative work.
Pure Entertainment
Don't edit out material that you think might offend someone. That's someone else's job and there is no shortage of folks happy to assume that responsibility. Moreover, it is almost impossible to write comedy without tweaking someone's nose.
One of my early bewilderments in the writing trade occurred while I was in a story meeting with the producer of a TV series. The producer was going through my script, The Leaning Tower of Ridgemont, which I had written as a kind of testament to Sam Rodia, the solitary builder of the remarkable Los Angeles Watts Towers.
As he moved through the story, the producer came to the part where the heroine has taken her frustration to city hall. As she is shunted from office to office by icy clerks, I had her lament, "There must be a human being in this building somewhere." Not Shakespeare, but I liked it. The producer read the line and with a blue pencil promptly drew a line through it. And I remember his words, "That's another story."
What I found out that day and confirmed in the years that followed is that there is a large contingent of producers, studio and network executives, writers and actors who believe that the comedy writer's job is to create pure comedy, pure entertainment, comedy that doesn't offend or stimulate a thought or suggest an opinion. I have since heard that dictum many times and it still gets my blood boiling. I can't seem to shake the idea that writing, even comedy writing, should be about something. If it's not about something, it's garbage, it's crap.
I love Sean Penn's take on the subject. "If you want pure entertainment, get yourself two hookers and an eight-ball."
Don't Edit Yourself
Don't try to arbitrate correctness, political or otherwise. Never stop to consider whether what you have written is in good taste.
I'm not sure I agree entirely with Picasso, but he was on the right track when he said, "Good taste is the enemy of creativity." Don't try to second guess the moral, ethical or political sensibilities of the critics, the studio bosses, the audience, or your mother.
The best humor is edgy. It skirts the limits. I have occasionally crossed the line, and have been called on it. But that just lets me know that I have gone far enough, that I am up there at the edge, at the boundaries. You're never going to be good at comedy if you don't reach for the line. And you're never going to reach the line if you're afraid you might cross it.
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Joseph C. Cavella
Writers Guild of America
about the author
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