Laughing Out Loud: Writing the Comedy-Centered Screenplay

Laughing Out Loud

Also by Andrew Horton

Three More Screenplays by Preston Sturges (editor)

Play It Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes

(coeditor with Stuart McDougal)

Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (editor)

The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation

The Last Modernist: The Films of Angelopoulos (editor)

Bones in the Sea: Time Apart on a Greek Island

Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay

Russian Critics on a Cinema of Glasnost

(coeditor with Michael Brashinsky)

Inside Soviet Film Satire: Laughter with a Lash (editor)

The Zero Hour: Glasnost and Soviet Cinema in Transition

(coeditor with Michael Brashinsky)

Comedy/Cinema/Theory (editor)

The Films of George Roy Hill

Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation

(coeditor with Joan Magretta)

Laughing Out

LOUD

Writing the Comedy-Centered Screenplay

ANDREW HORTON

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2000 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Horton, Andrew.

Laughing out loud: writing the comedy-centered screenplay / Andrew Horton.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-22015-7 (pbk.:alk. paper)

1. Motion picture authorship. 2. Comedy films. I. Title.

PN1996.H668 2000 99-17669

808.2'3—dc2i CIP

Manufactured in the United States of America

15 14 13

12 11 10 9 8 7

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). @

For Caroline,

my very funny anã loving daughter

To the memory of those who made us laugh. The motley mountebanks, the clowns, the buffoons, in all times and in all nations, whose efforts have lightened our burden a little…

Preston Sturges, Sullivans Travels

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 Elements of Comedy That Writers Should Know

CHAPTER 2 Exercises to Nurture the Comic Muse

CHAPTER 3 From Stage and Page to Screen: Anarchistic and Romantic Comedy

CHAPTER 4 Physical Humor: From Commedio dell’Arte and Molière to Vaudeville and Silent Screen Comedy

CHAPTER 5 Sound Comedy: American Screwball Romantic Comedy, Then and Now

CHAPTER 6 Comedy and Television: Stand-up, Sitcom and Everything in Between

CHAPTER 7 Comedies from around the World

CHAPTER 8 Comedy and the Documentary Impulse

CHAPTER 9 Feature Film Comedies

CHAPTER 10 Television Comedy: Seinfeld and The Simpsons

CHAPTER 11 The Fifteen-Week Feature Comedy Screenplay

CHAPTER 12 The Seven-Week Half-Hour Television Comedy Pilot Script

Beyond Happy Endings: Toward a Comic Conclusion

APPENDIX 1 A Recommended Viewing List of American and Foreign Feature Comedies

APPENDIX 2 Networking, Marketing and Making Your Own Comedy

APPENDIX 3 Food, Recipes and Comic Screenwriting

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To all the great comic writers and filmmakers who have made me laugh so much over the years, from Keaton and Chaplin to Sturges and Lubitsch; Renoir, Buñuel and Wilder; Ernie Kovacs, Lucille Ball, Steve Allen and Sid Caesar; on down to the present. Yes, including but by no means only: Abbott and Costello, Adella Adella the Story Teller of New Orleans, Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, Fatty Arbuckle, Aristophanes, Jean Arthur, Rowan Atkinson, Dan Aykroyd, Beavis and Butthead, Samuel Beckett, John Belushi, Robert Benchley, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Shelley Berman, Boccaccio, Humphrey Bogart, Jorge Luis Borges, James L. Brooks, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, Art Buchwald, Godfrey Cambridge, John Candy, Frank Capra, George Carlin, Bill Cosby, Billy Crystal, Rodney Dangerfield, Geena Davis, Gerard Depardieu, Johnny Depp, Charles Dickens, Phyllis Diller, Doonesbury, Jimmy Durante, Gerald Durrell, Blake Edwards, Chris Farley, William Faulkner (really!), Federico Fellini, Henry Fielding, W. C. Fields, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Giancarlo Giannini, Mel Gibson, Jackie Gleason, Cary Grant, Hugh Grant, Merv Griffin, Gogol, Alec Guinness, Arsenio Hall, Tom Hanks, Goldie Hawn, Ben Hecht, Jim Henson and his joyful Muppets, Katharine Hepburn, Pee-Wee Herman, Bob Hope, Helen Hunt, Ben Jonson, Franz Kafka, George S. Kaufman, Danny Kaye, Diane Keaton, Michael Keaton, Milan Kundera, Burt Lancaster, Ring Lardner, Gary Larson, Laurel and Hardy, Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter (I’m having a friend for lunch), Jerry Lewis, Max Linder, Harold Lloyd, Dusan Makavejev, Juri Mamin, Steve Martin, the Marx Brothers, Bette Midler, Molière, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Jack Paar, Michael Palin, S. J. Perelman, Pio, Richard Pryor, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Julia Roberts, Will Rogers, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, Rosalind Russell, Mort Sahl, Gabriele Salvatore, Susan Sarandon, Charles Schultz, Jerry Seinfeld, Mack Sennett, William Shakespeare, Phil Silvers, Red Skelton, Barbara Stanwyck, Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift, Alain Tanner, Jacques Tati, the Three Stooges, James Thurber, Lily Tomlin, John Kennedy Toole, François Truffaut, Mark Twain, Thanassios Vengos, Wallace and Gromit, John Wayne, Mae West, E. B. White, Robin Williams, Flip Wilson, Jonathan Winters, and P. G. Wodehouse. To my students in comedy seminars and classes I’ve taught over the years, especially to those teachers in my 1992 summer seminar for high school teachers sponsored by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities on Comedy and Culture, and the summer 1997 comedy-writing seminar on the Greek Islands. And to the many readers of Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay who have written, faxed, e-mailed, and called: you really have created a worldwide carnival of screenwriters.

To Ed Dimendberg, Laura Pasquale, and Rachel Berchten at University of California Press, who have, with good humor, supported, defended and nurtured my projects with the Press.

To my wife, Odette, and children Sam and Caroline, who have developed a real sense of humor over the years, as well as my older son, Philip, who as an actor is learning to make ’em laugh … and cry.

To all comic writers who have helped me in ways they may not realize, including Herschel Weingrod. And especially to Aristophanes and Lakis Lazopoulos.

I cannot forget the people of the island of Kea, Greece, where the first half of the book was written during a sabbatical from Loyola University of New Orleans. I would particularly like to remember an elderly garbage collector on the island who sings as he loads trash onto the garbage donkeys (most of the streets are too narrow to allow cars, let alone a garbage truck, through). When I asked him why he sings as he works, he simply smiled and said, It’s in my nature, and went back to singing and slinging. The second half of the book was written in Wellington, New Zealand, while I was on an exchange semester of teaching film and screenwriting at Victoria University, January through June of 1998.1 am most grateful for the generosity and supportive friendship of colleagues at Vic, including Russell Campbell, Phillip Mann, John Downey, and Bill Manhire, as well as the laughter and insights that arose from my talented group in Screenwriting 322.

Finally, to St. Philip Neri (1515-1595), the patron saint of joy, whose most remembered command was Rejoice!

Introduction

I wish to make the most comfortable member of the cinema audience feel that he is not living in the best of all possible worlds.

Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh

PRACTICE RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS

bumper sticker

Almost like prophets and shamans, comic writers and comic actors become privileged members of the community.

Dana F. Sutton, The Catharsis of Comedy

Unexploded Mimes

Fade in:

Chaplin walking his funny walk down the road, his back to the audience, cane swinging. Rosanne in her blue-collar living room, berating John Goodman for, well, everything. Groucho as a most unconventional university president, spewing a line of insults at the faculty and student body. Katharine Hepburn as a clueless socialite, climbing a ladder leaning against a dinosaur skeleton to talk to Cary Grant, the absent-minded professor.

The Three Stooges eye-gouging and bonking each other while squealing with comic-violent glee. Mickey Mouse doing anything he wants to do with that dopey wide-eyed grin and those huge ears. The whole gang on M*A*S*H, the television series, clowning around after a successful operation.

Marilyn Monroe trying to arouse a supposedly frigid Tony Curtis on a yacht at night. Robin Williams as Mork or Garp or Popeye, or even the voice of Aladdin’s genie, or as a GI disk jockey in Vietnam. Whoopi Goldberg in a nuns habit, leading a gospel choir.

Seinfeld and Kramer having trouble with the apartments new low-flow showerheads, and George proving once again he’s a loser with women. Buster Keaton’s deadpan face, in the midst of the disaster of your choice: hurricanes, hundreds of cops chasing him, trains demolishing his newly built home. Woody Allen dressed as a gigantic sperm, swimming upstream. Jim Carrey with his distorted face stretching in all kinds of computer-animated directions, or as the hapless hero of a real life television show, who finally walks out of his televised paradise with a Good morning, and in case I don’t see you later, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!

Fade out.

These are just a few American film and television comic moments. But what if we include comic strips, comic books, dirty jokes, the works of Boccaccio, Aristophanes, Molière, Shakespeare, Laurence Sterne, Rabelais, Mark Twain, Gogol, Samuel Beckett and Milan Kundera, to add but a few. And why not mention beloved comic screen images from around the world, created by (for example) Buñuel, Fellini, Truffaut, Alec Guinness and Monty Python, together with individual films such as Shine, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Swept Away, Cinema Paradiso, The White Balloon, Life Is Beautiful, The Gods Must Be Crazy, My Life as a Dog, Never on Sunday, Eat Drink Man Woman, Closely Watched Trains and Time of the Gypsies.

The images and sounds of comedy are endless.

And as one century ends and another begins, one fact seems guaranteed: Comedy will survive and thrive the world over on film, television, and stage, in print, on the street, and in our lives. Thus a toast to comedy through the centuries. This book is meant as a celebration and discovery of creating comedy.

Simple translation: comedy delights—even heals, doctors claim—and it definitely sells.

Comedy is a diverse muse, as the quotes above suggest. Some of you, like Luis Buñuel, may have an ironic talent and wish to leave the audience unsettled. (Another Buñuel line: ‘Tm an atheist, thank God!) Others may wish to surprise viewers with random generosity as the bumper stick commands. In either or both cases—and in everything in between—realize as you read on that writers and performers of comedy are, as the classical scholar Dana F. Sutton suggests, privileged members of the community." I firmly believe that.

How to read these pages? The logic of the book moves from the traditions of comedy to a close look at specific examples and then on to the practical act of writing and selling comedy. But for the restless and curious, you could skip to chapter 2 and check out some ideas about nurturing your comic writing, or to appendix 3 to try the Recipe for Comic Jambalaya, realizing that food and comedy have teamed up throughout history. And then explore other chapters. Or you could begin with part 2 and move on. But whichever order you take in my musings, you would shortchange the book and yourself if you start with chapters n and 12.

Enough said. Let s plunge in:

Laughing Out Loud: Writing the Comedy-Centered Screenplay is meant to be a practical and theoretical exploration of writing comedy. Moreover, I wish to offer an overview of the many dimensions, possibilities and approaches to a variety of forms of the comic. In particular I mean this primarily as a study of ways in which the comic intersects with screenwriting for feature film, with attention also to episodic television as well as the whole range of documentary film and video. Practical writing suggestions and exercises cover the comic in concept, character, plot, dialogue, structure and plain old physical scene and stage comic business. As in my previous book, Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay, this book an alyzes some films in depth and uses examples from throughout the history of comedy, not only in film but from the stage and literature as well, and from countries with fine comic traditions far beyond the shores of Hollywood. I also offer a strong nod to successful independent comic films.

Finally, a note on what is not covered. Comedy depends so much on performance. Timing, for instance, is half the fun of watching a great comic actor and actress. And the history of comedy has been shaped just as much by the comedians themselves as personalities and artists as by playwrights, authors and screenwriters. But performance per se is not our territory in these pages. Also, only fleeting attention is given to the great pleasures of the musical comedy or the comic musical tradition.

A personal memory to get us started.

Over a year after the tragic Bosnian war ended, my family and I were on vacation approaching the Yugoslav border as we drove through Slavonia, that part of Croatia under United Nations protection after the war. My then-twelve-year-old son, Sam, was first to notice the UN signs on the side of the pothole-marked highway. In several languages there were warnings to BEWARE OF UNEXPLODED MINES. Sam was confused for just a playful instant. What is an unexploded MIME? asked Sam. My wife, Odette, our seven-year-old daughter, Caroline, and I all started laughing out loud.

And what would an exploded mime result in? Laughter and joy being spread everywhere? The destruction of things as they were? The interjection of a carnival spirit into stiff and inflexible routines? Certainly we all agreed that an unexploded mime represented an eager potential for mischief and fun, a healthy and imaginative invitation to live fully.

That is the call of this book too, I realize, with a slight change of the sign:

Embrace and cultivate unexploded mimes … in your writing and, indeed, in your life. Yes, keep at least several unexploded mimes in your comic soul as you write, for these will be the essence of the carnival of freedom and imagination needed to write comedy well.

More specifically, I offer three invitations to help put you in the mood or state of mind to write comedy:

1. Live the comic, in perspective and observations of the world around you.

2. Allow yourself total freedom in the carnivalesque play of the imagination.

3. Enjoy the pleasures of becoming a clown or holy fool or a simple child again whenever you wish.

One further note: I hope these pages are useful for the experienced writers of the comic as well as the aspiring, and also for those writers of drama who wish to incorporate humor and comic elements in their scripts without necessarily producing a comedy-centered work. Case in point: Northern Exposure won television awards each year as episodic drama. But I would argue that while serious topics were introduced in that memorable show and many moments had dramatic impact, at its core the show was, in concept and execution, comic in its celebration of a community of diverse characters who exist in a spirit of tolerant acceptance of each other, whether Indian, WASP, Jewish or other.

This hope for my offerings here is also founded on my experience, for I have met award-winning comic screenwriters who have been excited to learn something of, say, the tradition of Aristophanic humor. And, on the flip side, I often run into young writers who know the comic tradition in literature and drama inside out but who need to learn more about how to set off those unexploded mimes inside themselves through the kind of perspectives and practical habits stand-up comedians or comic actors or vaudeville vets cultivate and perfect. Therefore the twin command of this text: know the comic traditions you wish to work in, and cultivate the habits and liberating spirit of carnival necessary to create the comic.

It’s one thing to have a character in your comedy eat his Nike Air shoe because you were influenced by Chaplin eating his boot in The Gold Rush, but this book may help you go even further, to realize that Chaplins scene builds on a lazzi (set comic piece) from the commedia dell’arte, recorded in Rome in 1622, called lazzi of hunger, in which a clown proves how hungry he is after a shipwreck by eating his shoe. You don’t need such historical info to be funny. But part of the plan here is to help provide a frame of reference beyond the immediate world of last season’s hit sitcom or last year’s Oscar nomination that might inform and help inspire you in your own writing.

Part 1 and part 2 are, in this spirit, written not as another history or literary study of comedy you will be tested on. Rather, I have kept the writer of comedy in mind always and have attempted to highlight what I feel is most useful today for you as a writer, no matter what stage you have reached in your career.

The Comic Perspective

Carnival is the people’s second life, organized on the basis of laughter. It is a festive life. Festivity is a peculiar quality of all comic rituals and spectacles.

Mikhail Bakhtin

Realize from the start that any simple definition of comedy is doomed to failure. Even to say that comedy pleases is dangerous, for comedy can also deeply annoy or threaten people, particularly if they have no sense of humor. Comedians relax millions daily through the laughter they evoke, and yet comic writers have, over the centuries, often wound up in prison, in exile, or worse. What definition, after all, can embrace a territory that includes Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing; the farting around the campfire in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974); the years of dark humor evoked by M*A*S*H, one of American television’s longest-running shows; Elvis in Forrest Gump learning his stage wiggles from Forrest Gump’s crippled walk; and Dante’s Christian epic Divine Comedy? Instead, we take our cue from the scholar of comedy Albert Cook, who sensibly suggests that we not waste time with too much classification; rather, The point is to probe comedy’s depths, not chop it into portions (81). Put another way, we begin our mission of writing comedy with an awareness that we are following in a long and varied tradition spanning thousands of years. Harvard scholar Harry Levin has written wisely in Playboys & Killjoys that comedy represents a live tradition, richly variegated and culturally interrelated, that extends from the Old Comedy of Athens to the sit com of television (4). Mikhail Bakhtins quote above about the importance of carnival will also serve us well as we explore a wider vision of comedy than is normally offered.

Let us warm up and take in the larger picture with ten observations that, hopefully, are useful before we embark on a closer look at the elements and examples of comedy and more practical suggestions for writing comedy.

[1] Comedy is a way of looking

at the universe, more than merely a genre

of literature, drama, film or television.

That is, comedy is a perspective. Another way of stating the same point is to say that nothing is inherently funny or sad, humorous or tragic. It all depends on how you choose to look at it. The story of lovers who face family obstacles in getting together is the formula for romantic comedy, as we shall discuss. But it is also the plot of Shakespeare’s tragic Romeo and Juliet and many of the sad headlines in our daily newspapers. Jean Renoir, the French filmmaker, used to say that reality depends on who you are with, the time of day, and the quality of the coffee. Similarly, what is funny to one person may be tragic to the next.

Long before comedy developed as a genre onstage with Aristophanes, Aesop was telling not just fables but fable-jokes, such as the following:

A patient, on being questioned by his doctor about his condition, answered that he had had an unpleasantly heavy sweat. That’s good, said the doctor. The next time he was asked how he was, the patient complained of a shivering-fit that had nearly shaken him to pieces. That’s good too, was the doctor’s comment. At a third visit, the doctor inquired once more about the mans symptoms and was told that he had had diarrhea. Good again, the doctor said and took himself off. When one of the patient’s relatives came to see him and asked how he was getting on, Well, if you want to know, he replied, I’ve had so many good symptoms, I’m just about dead.

MORAL: It often happens that our neighbors not knowing where the shoe pinches us, congratulate us on the very things which we ourselves find hardest to bear.

(Fables of Aesop, 195)

Aesop’s moral says it all. And what of such a perspective? The fun of Aesop’s joke, of course, is the gap between the patient’s and the doctor’s perceptions of the same data. Today, there is even mounting scientific evidence that we are born happy or sad. Period. In studying twins over a forty-year period, scientists have shown that happiness (and we can substitute comic perspective) is determined genetically (Adler, 78). This does not mean that those without such genes can’t laugh or have happy moments. But the study does suggest that, like fat, happiness tends to accumulate more or less arbitrarily on some people more than on others (ibid.).

Yet the news doesn’t stop there: research shows that those with comic perspectives—read: those who laugh a lot—live longer. Accordingly, Laughing, researchers said, is hearty medicine that boosts the immune system and triggers a flood of pleasure-inducing neuro-chemicals in the brain (Ricks, 13).

Considering comedy as a perspective rather than a genre helps us grasp the bigger picture. I am simply suggesting that the comic view is an attitude, an ability to look for that which is funny, incongruous, triumphant, upbeat, positive and, we might add, ironic, sarcastic or even darkly humorous. Thus we start with this overview, from which we can move toward specific areas of the comic, such as jokes, gags, story structure, character and themes.

[2] Comedy is a form of play

that embraces fantasy and festivity.

If comedy is a perspective, it is a wide one that, for instance, contains laughter but may be much more than this. Ludwig Wittgenstein is helpful in pointing out that comedy is a form of games (195). This theory of comedy suggests that key to any definition is the awareness on the part of the players (audience or performers and writers) of a nonthreatening zone that has agreed-upon boundaries, so that all involved feel safe, comfortable, receptive. Call this a comic atmosphere that a comic work establishes and that we recognize through cues, clues, expectations.

The larger territory, therefore, is that of games; comedy is one division thereof. Thus the kinship between a Jim Carrey film, a pro football game, an I Love Lucy episode, girls on the playground jumping rope and Mardi Gras in New Orleans or Carnival in Rio. As theoretician Johan Huizinga has so aptly described in his study Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, this comic playfulness has a lot to say about what it means to be human. After all, people laugh, tell jokes, and act out gags, while fish, buffalo, spiders, and even cats do not. More specifically, comedy involves an expression of the twin dimensions of fantasy (or personal imagination) and festivity (which suggests public celebration). Thus comedy involves a crossroads between the individual and the community.

We have as a root for the word comedy the Greek komos, suggesting a rather drunken chorus of fellows singing or crying out satirical insults to others, often dressed as various animals during the festival of Dionysus, the god of wine, tragedy, and comedy. Inventive fantasy is needed to come up with creative insults, and the whole event is festive in its celebration of wine, community, and shared dances and meals.

In other words, comedy has much in common, in origin and in practice, with the spirit of carnival. Key to both is not just festivity and public and personal renewal and reaffirmation of the community, but the sense of total freedom from the normal rules of society and culture—a freedom that was originally sanctioned in European culture by the Catholic and Orthodox churches as part of the year’s structure. The Russian linguist and literary theoretician Mikhail Bakhtin has well expressed how carnival laughter creates a world within its own boundaries that is universal, democratic, and free (66). Thus his term carnivalesque. .

Beyond the actual practice of carnival in the streets, therefore, Bakhtins term is useful for writers who wish to internalize the carnivalesque in their own writing. The spirit of game-playing and carnival allows for the freedom to turn the world as we know it upside down and inside out without fear of punishment, pain, or consequence.

[3] Comedy and tragedy

are near cousins whose paths often cross.

Merry and tragical? Tedious and brief?

That is, hot ice, and wondrous strange snow.

How shall we find the concord of this discord?

Theseus in William Shakespeare’s

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Comedy is pain.

George Roy Hill

James Thurber, in his preface to Groucho Marx’s autobiography, Groucho and Me, notes that while Groucho was fond of saying, Even trouble has its funny side, he felt that Groucho also understood the troublesome side of fun (10). Consider also Sling Blade (1996): every audience I’ve watched it with has laughed throughout the film at the many moments of surprisingly dark comedy. And yet there is no way to speak of this film as a comedy in any traditional sense. What does this suggest about laughter and the very serious? The same goes for that heartbreaking, laugh-evoking true story from Australia, Shine (1996), about a brilliant young pianist’s mental breakdown and subsequent partial recovery and final romantic and personal triumph. Tears and laughter mix in this Oscar-winning film.

At the end of Plato’s Symposium, Socrates and Aristophanes are the only ones at this famous drinking-party discussion who are still awake and sober enough to be speaking. They are considering how similar comedy and tragedy are in origin, and indeed in social function, when Aristophanes finally