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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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Joseph C. Cavella
Writers Guild of America
about the author
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