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04/19/2006: "All About Evil." That's One. We Should've Used That One


Hang on, everyone. I'm about to take an unpopular position. I'm going to advocate analyzing comedy. This is, in general, thought to be a very bad idea. Even dangerous. Once you start trying to figure out why something is funny, the reasoning goes, you lose the sense of whether it is or not. The enterprise is, at best, fruitless, and at worst, a path to the numbing loss of comedy sensation.

Well, it's true that once you start taking apart a joke to learn how it works, you do lose track of your natural unselfconscious sense of what's funny. The sensation of it is unmistakable. And, to me, very familiar. Before I was a comedy writer I was a student of Linguistics. We had to talk about language all the time, asking ourselves questions about which utterances were a part of our own natural idiolect and which ones weren't. Even a few minutes of this kind of thinking tended to lead to blunted judgments about what one could or could not say. I have heard this referred to as "Scanting Out," the name coming from the result of trying to figure out when one would naturally use the word "scant." Would you naturally produce the utterance: "His entrance was greeted with scant applause"? "I had scant time to prepare"? How about "there was scant butter in the storehouse"? Or "She gathered her scant dress around her"? Or "He was a man of scant talent"? Or "Any loss of water will reduce the supply to scant"? Hmm… lose your sense of it yet?

And still, we do not stop analyzing language. It's valuable and worth the effort. I think joke analysis can also be worth more than a scant effort. (See… the instinct is back again. It bounces back!)

I would love, someday, to create a Field Guide to Jokes. A real inventory of types of funny with lists of examples. Much of the skill that makes a good joke writer is clearly subconscious, but that doesn't mean it can't be sharpened. And for those of you who are new to joke writing, I think this kind of guide might help you a lot, giving you a mental check-list of possible funny approaches to a moment.

So let's start.

One of the entries in the Field Guide would have to do with taking cliches and altering them, usually by simply reversing the intent. For example, when Buffy was battling an especially ugly monster she once said: "A face even a mother could hate." And I vividly remember Joss pitching that in another script someone should say, "And the fun never starts." In another, I riffed off the old Wonder Bread slogan "Builds strong bodies eight ways" to describe a weapon that "Kills strong bodies three ways." This one was less successful since no one but me remembered the old Wonder Bread slogan. They can't all be winners. The headline of this entry, a punnish play off a title, is one that I simply cannot believe we never used.

It's a fun type of joke. Breezy, a little dry, kind of smart. You might want to play around with it. If you've got a character who needs a wry observation on what's going on around them, this might be the joke type for you.

Lunch: Took the leftover chicken, tomato and eggplant from yesterday's Mediterranean Salad, and heated it up with a bit of spaghetti sauce. Ate it with pita bread. Nothing wrong with that.