Category — On Writing

I saw him do a version of this lecture in college. Entertaining, but also a remarkably useful touchstone on storytelling.

My main takeaway from having heard him speak was this maxim: “You have been put on this Earth… to fart around.”

So here it is. The WeWriteFunny blog. Once-in-awhile products re-brand. Coca-cola had their success with New Coke, and why can’t we do the same?

At the next Brevity meeting I will be proposing the following….

WeWroteFunny.com
This really takes the writing pressure off! No need to bring anything funny. We sure did WROTE funny, din’t we, fellas? But we don’t have to do it no more. Thems the past.

WeWillHaveWrittenFunny.com
This helps me feel better about the writing I haven’t even done yet. It will be great, I promise, just as soon as I have done it! There is the potential of future funny, but only if ANOTHER action happens first! Which brings us to…

WeWillWriteFunny.com
This is the step necessary for WeWillHaveWrittenFunny.com to exist. It’s a pretty big hurdle though, because it involves actual writing, and, well, funniness and stuff. I’m freaking out!! I can’t do it!!

WeCouldWriteFunny.com
The conditional is SO nice! It relieves your stress of, you know, performing. It even suggests maybe it’s not that we can’t write funny, but that we don’t WANT to. Like, we *could*, if we FELT like it. But we don’t. Doesn’t mean we won’t suddenly write some HILARIOUS shit out of the blue. Don’t nap, or we COULD take you by surprise with chortling phatness of comedy.

WeAreWritingFunny.com
It’s happening. Right now. As we speak. We just can’t show you yet, cuz we’re not done. Oh shut up. Stop complaining. These will be *free* laughs. You can wait. You want ‘em sooner, ya gotta be a paying customer.

WeHaveWrittenFunny.com
It’s happened before, so it MAY happen again. It’s a proven fact that we have done it. Now we are resting on our very small laurels. Resting until the time comes when comedians are feted like feudal lords! Given wine, women, and song. Well, fuck it, I can do without the songs but just wine, women and even more wine and women! And some kielbassa.

YouWriteFunny.com
A blank page and blinking cursor. You wanna laugh? Then write something. C’mon. Make *yourself* laugh. Tell a joke. C’mon. Whatsamatter? Oh you want US to make YOU laugh! Lazy bastard. See? Comedy ain’t so easy.

WhoWritesFunny.com
An ad for writers to come join our evil brigade so that we may belch forth black, odious comedy sputum over the web land of people’s mindesses. Douche bags (not *you*, though if you thought I meant you, it says something about your self-image), fey goblins, sexual prancing. None of these have to do with comedy, but I enjoyed typing them.

***Bonus one I couldn’t fit into this post cuz I wasn’t a good enough writer, so I’m slapping at the end like meat on the outside of a sandwich:

WeScribedJocundly.anon (too hip. oldies won’t get it)

If you have great new re-branding ideas for WeWriteFunny.com, please find better things to do.

Though this doesn’t specifically apply to comedy writing, it certainly does apply to writing, so I thought I would share it. It’s, as the above title suggests, Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing (which is also available in much longer book form).

Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin

1 Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2 Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, but it’s OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”

3 Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But “said” is far less intrusive than “grumbled”, “gasped”, “cautioned”, “lied”. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated” and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs”.

5 Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6 Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose”. This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”, what do the “Ameri­can and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9 Don’t go into great detail describing places and things, unless you’re ­Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it

Elmore is so smart. And a little witty. Margaret Atwood is smarter, and wittier, in my opinion, and here is her list…

Margaret Atwood

1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

4 If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.

5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

6 Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What ­fascinates A will bore the pants off B.

7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

8 You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

9 Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

10 Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visual­isation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

These lists, and a few more can be found on http://www.guardian.co.uk

A lot of people write funny. We do. Maybe you do. Maybe you simply aspire to. The first lesson is not to end sentences with a preposition, like I tend to.

More to the point, if you want to write funny, you need to write a lot of different types of funny things to figure out which format suits you. Some people can write great stand-up jokes. Other people write awesome sitcoms, but terrible stand up jokes. So what are the different skill sets it takes for different types of comedy-writing? Which type are you? Check out the descriptions and see which ones seem to suit you most.

None of these address the style, or tone of humor, as that varies widely even within these formats. You can bring your individual sense of humor to any of these, as long as the demands of the form suit your personality.

Stand-Up

Step 1: Find a performer who likes your jokes. Step 2: Live off the meagre scraps of that performer’s meager scraps. What sort of writing is entailed? Two guys walk into a bar…

Sketch

You are funny. Your brain is funny. It makes the rest of you laugh because it takes the information your eyes and ears sends it, and re-interprets it into a bizarre world nothing like the one in which you actually live. This skewed way of seeing the world from an oblique point-of-view qualifies you to consider writing sketch comedy. One-liners are important, but so are immediately easy-to-get premises and characters. Can you take a single idea, make it funny, escalate it twice, then turn it and surprise people? Do you have tons of new ideas for funny sketches constantly? Do you have a short? Do–

Sitcom

Template is very important. You have 21 minutes, a cold open, act breaks to hit at certain page/minute marks, a final joke and often a button or tag at the end. Making funny in this sense is like learning the box-step in dancing. You have to be okay with the rigidity of the structural needs, and despite them become unaware of them and just ‘dance’ without thinking about the steps.

Series

Less jokey than a sitcom. more plot and character driven, and generally arced across episodes. The old rule in sitcom was to ‘eave everything where you found it’, meaning that each episode starts with the exact same premise as the first show. Nothing changes or evolves from episode to episode. In a series, the story progresses. Characters get married, die, move in, move out, move on.  It’s a strange, rare form to have a half-hour arced comedy series (like Entourage).  If you like big-picture structure and plot-heavy writing, you may prefer series to sitcom. If you prefer funny situations and one-liners, you may be better suited to sitcom. Or, look at it this way, do you generally clean up after yourself and put everything back where you found it?

Web Series

No rules yet. Elements of sketch: short, with a quick premise. Elements of sitcom: a few simple characters in funny situations. Elements of series: the story can progress from episode to episode (especially useful when episodes are only a few minutes long!) If you like to try new things like Para-Surf-Gliding when no one knows yet if it will kill you, then this is the artform for you. Hey, Columbus wasn’t sure where the hell he’d end up when he set out on his journey. Luke didn’t know how to get to Dagoba either, without R2-D2. Since there isn’t a real R2-D2, though, no one knows where the web tv ship is going, there is no way of knowing when we’ve gotten there…. except your youtube hit count, of course! I know, that’s so 2008.

Smartsy

Poetry, Short Fiction, Novels and all the other ‘smartsy’ writing. You already know who you are because writing any of the above wouldn’t scratch the itch of the intellectual ego. Why did your parents pay to send you to an Ivy League college, after all? Or perhaps you are of the starving artist-in-residence ilk. Equally admirable. Either way, if you are reading this blog post to begin with you are tempted to actually hear someone laugh or clap in enjoyment at your writing instead of writing purely to please Freud’s Vater figure. give in to temptation. I promise, it feels good. You’ll get back to the novel… eventually.

Feature Films

The most likely compromise intellectuals or egoists will come to on their ‘writing persona’ once they’ve given up being a novelist but cannot bear the thought of sinking to sketch comedy. I mean there *are* actual respectable awards and accolades for this sort of writing and you could possibly even get famous, and get a chance to direct! If you are a writer of any talent, I wish you the best in the feature realm. It is the novel-world of Hollywood. Where TV writers try for base hits and walks, the feature writer is always swinging for the fences. If this suits your personality, then go for it.

Tutoring

This is not a type of writing. Why is this here? I thought this was about figuring out what sort of writer I was? AHA!!! Now I KNOW you aren’t a real comedy writer! 103% of all comedy writers are also tutors. That’s right. The same person who dreamt up a fake commercial about hiding cats on people’s nutsacks is charged with being a role model for impressionable young minds. Hey, I didn’t make society this fucked up. I just work here.

Comedic Blogging

Generally you won’t get paid for this. You will still be expected to post frequently by management, who spend all day twirling each others’ moustaches and puffing unlit cigars. I hate those bastards. Maybe they could pay us if they didn’t waste money on cigars they never even smoked. Comedy blogging is generally a labor of love. usually an EMO who is a closet happy will have a private bog so he/she can let all their quirky feelings out without being exposed to the jibes of classmates. This generally works. Occasionally someone finds out, then it spreads through Facebook and the merry EMO hangs himself or overdoses herself. This thinning of the herd keeps the overall number of comedy bloggers on the web steady at about 7. If you are the type of writer who needs a comedic outlet and enjoys hiding like a cowrd behind the anonymity of a keyboard, this is for you. If you begin a comedy blog, please notify us so one of us can dispose of ourselves.

La Summation

That’s it for now. If you haven’t figured out what sort of writer you are by now, you probably aren’t one. get a good factory job testing the seams on the legholes of men’s underwear, or measuring the openings of pipes for companies who want that. If you have figured out which sort of writer you are, then congratulations. I hope you’re funny.

Typical Financial Graphy Thingums

Most of the time we write funny, but every once in awhile one of us brings in something that lays an egg. Okay, sometimes I bring in something that lays an egg.

Here is a wonderful example of an idea I pitched for a sketch about a year ago.

Me: So, I have this idea for a sketch.

Josh: Cool, what is it?

Me: Well, I was just thinking about the stock market, and how it crashed, so I want to have a financial news report about socks, so I can have the reporter say “The sock market has crashed.”

Josh: What?

Me (actually getting enthused): Yeah! Like we could show a graph going downwards and he’d say like, “Wool socks and work socks are plummeting, but argyle…” then we show a line going up… (Barry makes upward arm motion “is bucking the trend as always and heading UP!”

Josh says nothing.

Me: The sock market has crashed.

I wait for the laughter and accolades.

Josh (shaking his head): Barry… you know better than this.

Yes, I do know better, AND yes, I do love funny socks.

Needless to say, we haven’t it shot it. Yet. I’m still holding out hope. Although, in 2010 it may have to be “Sock Market Recovers!”

Pretty great, huh?

Mind The Gap For Laughs

In the spirit of this being a blog written by comedy writers, I thought I’d spend today’s post sharing some of my thoughts on what makes things funny; in specific, the mechanics of a joke.

Now, I don’t mean a knock-knock type joke, per se, but anything that makes you laugh. I am especially talking about laughs you get from sketch comedy, like Saturday Night live, or BrevityTV.com, for example (which is hilariously funny, of course. Maybe even more so than anything else in the universe).

Most humor turns on a gap. That gap can be a difference between audience expectations and reality, like if a character walks in on another man having sex with his wife and instead of getting mad he says “Thank God, now I can watch TV tonight”. It could be a communication gap, such as a script of ours called “Sandwich Shop”, where a frustrated customer cannot get a shop clerk to understand his order.

The Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch also employs the communication gap, but mainly the gap in it is the difference between convincing someone a parrot is dead versus alive. Clearly this is a gap of character viewpoint.

Other common gaps include fish-out-of-water (when Borat visits America we get a cultural gap), personality gap (in “Lost In The Desert” we see what happens when you strand an optimist and pessimist together in the desert), gender role gap (in “Fantasies”, we don;t expect the female to be more sexual than the male).

In fact, there are an infinite number of gaps that can be used. It’s limited only by your imagination. Part of the key is beginning to recognise them in your writing. It also helps if you learn which types of gaps you like to write most often. Some people simply find communication gaps hilarious, so tend to use that a lot in their writing.

So, if you want to write funny, like we do, mind the gap.