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03/26/2006: Nuns and Knishes


Hi all. Greetings from New York! Sorry for the lack of posting, but I've been trotting around town seeing Broadway shows and eating cart-knishes and freezing my butt off. Fun!

I saw Doubt last night -- a beautifully written play. My agent tells me that plays work very well as specs, although I've never written one myself. For those of you who want to try this, I'm afraid I have no advice other than the pathetically obvious suggestion of seeing and reading as many as you can.

One of the things that Doubt illustrates really well, is how to work flashes of humor into the darkest subject matter without making characters automatically unlikable, or making the work as a whole trivialize what's going on. When this works best is when the humor comes from a particularly well-observed quirk of character instead of the subject matter. When the nun at the center of Doubt starts her answer to a simple question with "In ancient Sparta...," the audience laughs. That laugh is a laugh of recognition. We've known people like this. For some reason, humans laugh at things they recognize. This is what keeps stand-up comedians in business. Whether you're writing a play or an episode of Two and a Half Men, look for the humor that comes from character quirks. You'll get more milage out of it than out of the characters commenting on the crazy events you've got swirling around them.

In contrast, characters' expressions of surprise at the actual events around them usually feel flat anyway, since a reader can't help but be aware that you, the writer, contrived those events exactly in order to get that reaction. I think this is more the case in reading a script than in seeing a produced version, so, as a spec writer, you have to be extra careful. Go for the character-based jokes instead.

Lunch: A hot knish off a cart, slit open with a meat-stained knife and filled with spicy mustard. Hot. Smooth. Redolent with the smoke of a hundred hotdogs. My my.