Category — Inside the Writer Brain

Bandura Lessons $5

Lenny made all the beautiful music he could on his Bandura to impress the goatherder’s daughter. Lenny played like Sorongstrang the legendary Bandura player of old. The magic call of its plinky notes brought many beautiful snakes into the house. Still, she did not say she loved Lenny.

When he saw this, he made a face under his beard, but no one could notice it. He threw the heavy Bandura out of his first-floor window. “I wasted five bucks on those Bandura lessons.”

The girl left to milk her goats. Lenny grumbled for a spell about the five dollars.

Cute, But Not Aubergine

When the teacher let the kids dress up for class, Julie said she would “Come in dressed as an aubergine.”

Julie is doing poorly in school.

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?

We all love songs, even when we can’t understand some of the lyrics. Sometimes we go years thinking we know the lyrics of a song, only to find out we’ve been singing the wrong thing on karaoke night.

Here are a few of the things I have sang, out loud, in front of people for decades before finding out I was wrong.

Jimmy Hendrix – “Purple Haze”

What Barry Heard – ” Scuse me, while I kiss this guy!”

What Jimi Said – “Scuse me, while I kiss the sky!”

Pretty close, but I wonder why none of my male friends ever told me.

Here’s the inimitable Mr. Hendrix at Woodstock singing the song properly (I still think it sounds like “kiss this guy”).

Big Country – “In A Big Country”

What Barry Heard – “In a pickle tree, dreams stay with you.”

What Big Country Sang – “In a big country, dreams stay with you.”

I spent a few years looking for pickle trees. I even asked a botanist lady once on a field trip to the Ontario Science Centre where I could find pickle trees.

Here they are, Big Country singing the inventively named “In A Big Country”.

Manfred Mann’s Earth Band – Blinded By The Light

What Barry Heard – “Blinded by the light. Wrapped up like a douche, another runner in the night.”

What Manfred’s Band Crooned – “Blinded by the light, revved up like a deuce, antoher runner in the night.”

Apparently I’m not the only person who had issues with this one!

And here’s the real version… with funny subtitles.

So… what song lyrics have you misheard?