Reader Question: How to approach writing jokes in a comedy script?
Be funny, but not at the expense of character.
Be funny, but not at the expense of character.
GITS reader Paul Sanford sent me this in an email:
That may be a good topic — joke/gag writing in comedy screenplays. It’s clear in the Splash commentary that Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandell (as former sitcom writers) pay close attention to the joke per page ratio in their scripts in a way that those of us who aren’t stand-up comedians or sitcom veterans may not when writing comedy. Since you’ve done both stand-up and screenwriting, it might be interesting to hear your take on writing jokes that help a comedy script, as opposed to jokes that are overly clever or inorganic to the script (assuming you haven’t already covered this of course).
Rather than attempt a generic response, let me go at the subject beginning with these two questions:
- What type of comedy are we talking about?
- What type of comedy are you best at writing?
There are all sorts of comedy. Slapstick. Witty repartee. Situational humor. Character driven. Farce. Action. Children’s. Adult. Dark humor. Smart. Stupid. Stupid smart. Silly. Silly smart. And so on.
There are all sorts of writers, too, each with their own unique sense of humor.
So before a writer takes on any comedy writing project, they should answer these two questions — hopefully that would put you on your way to understanding the tone of the piece. Because tone in relation to comedy is absolutely critical.
A fart joke may not work in a deft, sophisticated comedy of manners. Nor would stopping a slapstick comedy to allow a character to go on for a 1-page lightly humorous monologue likely fit.
Likewise do you write humor that arises from your characters? Or are you more of a joke / punch line kind of comedy person?
Understanding the tone and what your comedic instincts are will go a long way in determining how you approach the writing of any project.
You mention Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, arguably the greatest comedy-writing duo in the last three decades of screenwriting. Their credits are mighty impressive including:
Night Shift (1982)
Splash (1984)
Spies Like Us (1985)
Gung Ho (1986)
Parenthood (1989)
City Slickers (1991)
A League of Their Own (1992)
Mr. Saturday Night (1992)
City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold (1994)
Forget Paris (1995)
Multiplicity (1996)
Edtv (1999)
Fever Pitch (2005)
Not to mention dozens of uncredited rewrites and script doctor gigs. What is really remarkable about their writing is their breadth. One-liners. Monologues. Broad visual gags. Touching character humor. Jokes. Character-inspired comedy. Ganz and Mandell can seemingly do it all. Here are two of my favorite examples.
In Parenthood, perhaps their best script, toward the end of the movie, Gil (Steve Martin) has this encounter with Grandma (Helen Shaw). Gil is the story’s main Protagonist and his life experience during the movie has been up, down, and sideways with things going on. Meanwhile Grandma has barely qualified as a secondary character, almost unnoticeable with the comings and goings of the story’s many characters. And then this exchange (along with Gil’s wife Karen played by Mary Steenburgen) as they prepare to go to their kids’ school play:
Grandma appears.
GRANDMA
You know when I was nineteen,
Grandpa took me on a roller
coaster.
GIL
Oh?
He looks at Karen [his wife] like what is she talking about?
GRANDMA
Up, down, up, down, what a ride.
GIL
(patronizing)
What a great story…
Now his look to Karen says “Grandma’s senile.”
GRANDMA
I kept wanting to go again. It
was just interesting to me that
a ride could make me so excited and
so thrilled all together. Some
didn’t like it. They went on the
merry-go-round. It just goes around
nothing. I like the roller coaster.
You get more out of it. I’ll be
waiting out in the car.
She leaves. Gil and Karen ponder.
KAREN
She’s a very smart lady.
GIL
(mocking)
Oh, yeah. A minute ago I was so
confused about life. Then Grandma
came in with her roller coaster
story and everything’s great again.
I think I’ll have it wood-burned
into a plaque.
Karen fires a spool of thread at him. It hits hm. She’s
angry. Gil is taken aback. She gets up.
KAREN
I happen to like the roller coaster, okay?
She takes a step away.
KAREN
As far as I’m concerned, your
grandmother is brilliant.
She EXITS. Gil is left to ponder.
GIL
(looking out the window)
If she’s so brilliant, why is she
sitting in our neighbor’s car?
This is a big thematic moment in the movie. It not only summarizes nicely the experience of being part of a family, especially as a parent, it also sets up Gil’s Final Struggle — at the school play where his children turn it into utter chaos. At first, Gil starts to freak out, then the camera starts to veer up and down — like a roller coaster — and Gil just accepts the chaos of the moment, enjoying life, smiling and laughing. So the theme — roller coaster — is a big thematic point.
And who do Ganz and Mandel choose to deliver this important bit of wisdom? Grandma. A complete surprise. And coming from her lips, it works wonderfully — and is also whimsically humorous. Then being the master comedy writers they are, they give the scene a great punch line: “If she’s so brilliant, why is she sitting in our neighbor’s car?”
So here you have humor arising from the characters intertwined with some interesting drama — the tension between Gil and Karen — ending with a great one-liner. One of many, many fantastic moments in the movie.
Then there’s this famous moment in A League of Their Own, when the women’s team’s manager Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) gets on one of his players Evelyn Gardner (Bitty Schram):
JIMMY
Evelyn, could you come here for a second?
Which team do you play for?
EVELYN
Well, I’m a Peach.
JIMMY
Well, I was just wonderin’ why you would
throw home when we got a two-run lead.
You let the tying run get on second base
and we lost the lead because of you. Start
using your head. That’s the lump that’s
three feet above your ass.
Evelyn starts to cry.
JIMMY
Are you crying? Are you crying? ARE YOU
CRYING? There’s no crying! THERE’S NO
CRYING IN BASEBALL!
DORIS
Why don’ t you give her a break, Jimmy…
JIMMY
Oh, you zip it, Doris! Rogers Hornsby was my
manager, and he called me a talking pile of
pigshit. And that was when my parents drove
all the way down from Michigan to see me play
the game. And did I cry?
EVELYN
No, no, no.
JIMMY
Yeah! NO. And do you know why?
EVELYN
No…
JIMMY
Because there’s no crying in baseball.
THERE’S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL!
No crying!
Again, comedy that comes directly from a character — in this case, Jimmy recalling an incident from his past, one that obviously has stuck with him. Now I wasn’t in the room with Ganz and Mandel when they concocted this scene, but I’ll bet one of them said, “What if one of the girls cried,” and the other one said, “The manager could get on her ass and she’d start to cry, “ and the other one said, “And the manager would be flummoxed — ‘There’s no crying in baseball.’” And they knew that they could milk that line over and over — it would be funny, character driven, and just flat-out work.
So I’ve tipped my hand: In general, I think the best comedy arises from the characters. That said I remember seeing a draft of the script for the movie The Scout. It eventually starred Albert Brooks, but the draft I saw was when it was being written for Rodney Dangerfield and his ‘people’. And in that script there were about 12–15 sides of dialogue — for Rodney’s character — which were like this:
RODNEY
[put joke here]
Depending upon the writers and the tone of the story, that approach could work.
Here’s my advice in a nutshell:
- Know the type of comedy you’re writing
- Know what type of comedy you write best
- The best comedy emerges from the characters
- Every page should have something funny in it
- Always be on the look-out for great one-liners, but no line is good enough if it doesn’t fit the character
And once again, if you need guidance in this area, watch some great comedy movies, read some great comedy scripts, and break them down, scene-by-scene to see what the writers did.
Anybody with other tips about writing comedies?