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03/09/2006: Something So Hard To Write, It Could Injure You


I had the most delightful lunch today with friend-of-the-blog Maggie from the bootstrap-productions blog . How exciting to be just starting the journey! And, from my point of view, there's this interesting thing that happens, like when you're showing the new foreign-exchange student around the high school, where you start seeing everything with new eyes. Hollywood looks like HOLLYWOOD again.

But then, I've had that feeling for a while now, because of this blog. It's totally envigorating to look at the process of writing from the beginning again. You start thinking consciously about things that have become entirely subconscious.

Like jokes. Jokes have different functions. Some are hammers. Just old-fashioned put-downs used against other characters. And almost all of them are flashlights trained on the character that says them. You learn something about a character every time you laugh at something they say.

And a few jokes... A few jokes are explosives. They hit every one in the room. They change the way all the OTHER characters look at something. They turn the story. This is the most difficult kind of joke I can imagine.


Remember on Sex and the City where the women were talking about a baby boy with an unpleasant demeanor? One of them (Samantha) finally said: "Maybe he's just an asshole." I have heard so many people remember and comment on that line. It was written by the wonderful Alexa Junge, by the way. In that line, she didn't just shock us with using that kind of language to discuss a baby. Instead, she hit on something we'd all observed but that no one had said out loud before: babies are not equal. Other people are allowed to have bad qualities, why not babies? And, as I remember the moment, you can SEE that insight hit all of the other characters.

Usually jokes are not bendable to this purpose. When Radar announced that Col. Blake's plane was shot down, the line affected all the characters. That moment was so big and so tragic that it obviously would have been impossible to do that with a joke. But when it IS possible to bring emotional impact and humor together, it's magic.

On Friends, there was a moment when fighting between the friends became intense and Phoebe shouted "Stop! Look what we're doing to Chandler!" And we then saw that Chandler was capering frantically, like a little boy trying to get his parents to stop fighting. Funny and heartbreaking. The moment hit the audience and it hit the characters and it still managed to play as a joke. Fantastic.

I bet we could find moments like this from All in the Family, Cheers, Taxi and Frasier. And I bet it wouldn't even take us that long to remember them. Those are the moments you remember.

If you're writing a comedy spec, and you want to try for the highest degree of difficulty... wow. Good for you.

Lunch: Eggs and mimosas and sherbet and good company.