Three stooges stuffing a turkey

COMEDY FOR NEUROTICS: A Practical Guide to Writing Funnier Screenplays

and Stage Plays and Sketches

By Scott Winfield Sublett Note to the reader: When I decided to take on teaching this class, I assumed there would exist a good textbook for it. I was wrong, so I have had to write one myself, and this is it. In its current form, this text is intended as a course reader for “TA 13: The Great Comedies.” Its aim is to familiarize you with the nature and techniques of comedy writing so you can better analyze comedies and understand why they’re funny. My ultimate goal is to continue to develop this text until it becomes a viable “how to” book for those who intend to write comedies for stage and screen. (It will be a companion volume for my screenwriting text, Screenwriting for Neurotics, published in 2014 by University of Iowa Press.) This material is copyrighted and you may not share with it others legally. Please help me protect the value and copyright of my original material by not sharing with anyone outside the class. Thank you. Let’s start laughing.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Are You Funny?/ Comedy vs. “A Comedy”/A Little About Me/Prepare to Be Funny/Definitions of Comedy/Better Living Through Comedy/A Warning Chapter One: Principles of Comedy The Comic Moment: That’s Wrong!/Deviation From Norms and Standards:Criticism and Forgiveness/Deviation#1:Cultural Norms/The Stereotype and Deviation From the Norm/Airplane! Playing With Norms and Racial Stereotypes/Is Comedy Inherently Unkind or Politically Incorrect?/Deviation #2:From Human Norms/Deviation#3: From Norms of Physical Possibility/Physical Impossibility and the Acton Hero/A Digression About Comic Tension and Comic Relief/Back to Action and the Comedy of Physical Impossibility/Deviation#4: From Artistic Norms/The Forth Wall/Asides and Direct Address of the Camera/Examples of Characters Acknowledging They’re in Fictions/Genres That Depend on Deviation from Artistic Norms/DEVIATION #5:FROM LINGUISTIC NORMS/Non-sequiturs, Mangles Word Choice and “Goldwynisms”/Non- sequiturs and Nonsense/Misunderstanding/Mispronunciation/Puns and Wordplay/The Voices of Performers/Impersonating a Voice and Mimicry/The Linguistic Deviation Expresses Character/Changing Norms and Crossing Borders: A Digression”/Topicality/WHY DOES THE COMIC CHARACTERS DEVIATE FROM NORMS?/Henri Bergson and Automatic Behavior/INAPPROPRIATE Behavior: Comedy, Context and the Fish Out of Water/Selecting a Setting for the Fish Out of Water: Places of Solemnity, Propriety and Theatricality/Proper, Fancy, Rule- bound/Environment/Human Types/ Chapter Two: Comic Characters and Their Behaviors Identifying, Understanding and Creating Comic Characters/Characterization and Comedy: Shharp and Defines/The Single-Mindedness of the Comic Character/ Surprise! The Comic Character’s Mind is Elsewhere/The Moment the Audience Realizes, “So That’s What He’s Thinking!”/Setting Up Comedy With Character/Putting It Together: Mastery and Delight/Obliviousness/Dishonest and Misrepresentation: Lying, Disguise, False Identity, Trickery, Hypocrisy and Pretension/Acting “As If”: Intentional and Unintentional/Pug/The Mask: Hiding the Unacceptable/Misperception and the Pleasure of Perception/Types pf Dishonesty/The Moment of Comedy: The Mask Slips and the Mystery Is Solved/Comic Flaws/The Dark Side of Comic Character/How Bad Can a Comic Character Be? When is It OK to Laugh?/Why Do I Laugh Instead of Slapping You/Likable Characters, and Characters That Make Us Laugh/Show Your Character’s Pain/Tragedy Plus Time and the Question of Black Comedy/Creating Comic Character: Hybridization of Type/Overreaction and Underreaction/Deadpan/Pauses/Back to Overreaction and Underreaction/ Chapter Three: Comic Types The wit and the butt/Wit, Sarcasm and Snark/The Witty Charater: Wit is Surprising, Daring, True, Agile, Clever and Definitely Knows “How Things Should

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Be”/Snark/Sarcasm/A List of Comic Types/Comic Types in History/Commedia dell’arte/Mture Artists Steal…Inspiration/ Chapter Four: The Comic Character Worksheet Analyzing and identifying Comic Character/Comic Character Worksheet (with commentary)/Comic Character Worksheet Chapter Five: The Moment of Comedy: Behavior and Dialogue Putting It Together: Comedy Happens in the Head/Not Too Much Information—But Enough/It’s Funny Because It’s True/One the Nose and Not on the Nose/The Comic Moment May Be Complex/The Butt Reveals Himself Inadvertently/The Wit Reveals Himself Intentionally/Obscure References/Comic Relief: Tension Precedes Release/ Chapter Six: Comic Dialogue Comic Lines: Short, Crack Like a Whip, The Last Word Assembles the Meaning/Great Lines/Some Like It Hot/Reveals His Crazy Thinking/Ends With the Word that Trigers the Laugh/Specific/Building Tension Before the Punch Lines/”K” Sounds (and snappy words)/Voice-over narration: Incongruity Between Image and Sound/Catchphrase/ Chapter Seven: Comedy Techniques Identify the Funny/Collapse of Dignity/Mistaken Identity/Signaling Comedy/Turn on a Dime/ Chapter Eight: Styles and Genres Satire/Parody/Patiche/Burlesque/Farce/Bedroom Farce/Slapstick/Camp/Intentional Camp/Shock Comedy/Genre: Romantic and Screwball Comedy/The Romantic Comedy: The Five Situations Chapter Nine: Pulling it All Together and Planning a Comedy

INTRODUCTION There’s a story about a Hollywood mogul giving notes to writer. The mogul said, “Make it funnier.” The writer replied (presumably deadpan), “Do you want it 15 per cent funnier or 30 per cent funnier?” Which shows that the mogul picked the right writer because first, the writer is funny, and second because the writer knows that comedy is a way speaking otherwise unacceptable truths, the truth in this case being, “That’s not a very helpful note and it shows that you know nothing whatsoever about the process of writing a comedy.” Good comic lines do convey truths, or at least rely upon them for their meanings. And it is our recognition of the truth behind the comic behavior that provokes the laugh. The truth in what the writer said to the mogul is that comedy can’t be dependably manufactured in precise, calibrated, measurable quantities because it relies on the inspiration of the moment. It is an art. However, writers of comedy can benefit from a greater understanding of the principles and techniques of comedy, and can write funnier screenplays, stage plays, skits and sketches if, in the planning stage, they give some thought to finding and developing comic characters, and if they give some thought to the situations in which those characters will find themselves. Put a comic character in the right situation and, if you know that character, he will be funny. Some writers say that their characters “come to life” and behave outside their control, which of course isn’t the case, they’re fictional constructs, but if you have a thoroughly imagined comic character, comic lines and behaviors will pop into your head. Furthermore, later in the process, you can hone the lines so they’re funnier—land the joke. No book can make you funny, but you can learn to be funnier within the context of “dramatic writing,” which is to say, the construction of narratives of varying lengths to be seen on various screens and stages. A Broadway musical comedy and a silly webisode you shoot in your back yard are both dramatic writing, and embody the same principles. And skills. This book is essentially a practical approach to building those skills—and for creating opportunities for inspiration. This isn’t a book on standup comedy per se, but I think a lot of it would be of interest to standups. The great standup comedians create comic personas, which is to say characters. Standups say funny things, but those things are funny because they reveal the character, sensibility, and thought processes of the comedian. They come out of his persona, and even if the standup bases that persona on himself, it’s shaped, edited and heightened into a character that, in the end, is somewhat fictional. A mask, if you will. The standup can benefit from this book’s discussion of character, and also from the discussion of overall principles of comedy, not to mention the book’s advice on sharpening comedy. Gosh, come to think of it, this book is great for everybody on your holiday gift list. Put it down, run out, and buy ten more copies right now. Not kidding. Do it. Are You Funny? Do You See Life as a Comedy?

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But, as I said, all the advice in the world won’t do you any good if you’re a humorless bore. Are you funny? Someone (either Horace Walpole or Jean de La Bruyère, there some controversy over it) once said, “Life is a tragedy to he who feels and a comedy to he who thinks.” If you have a great sense of humor, it’s possible that you live not so much in your heart as in your head, which is to say you’re a rationalist, which of course would mean you see that life isn’t rational. It doesn’t make sense. It’s full of absurdities and contradictions, but instead of crying about you laugh, because you take delight in your ability to identify the contradictions and absurdities of the world—and of the people—the characters—in it. If you’re funny, you already know it. You probably demonstrated the ability and desire to make people laugh at an early age. The psychology of how you got that way, whether you needed attention, or wanted a safe way in which to vent hostility, or wanted to be liked or to prove you were cleverest little girl in the room—none of that matters here. What matters is that you developed a sense of humor. If you have no sense of humor you will be better off not trying to write comedy. If you do have a sense of humor, then you might want to try writing a comedy. Writing humorously is fun, puts one in marvelously good humor, and affords many hours of pleasure. Comedy Versus “A Comedy” Being funny doesn’t make you better than other people and it doesn’t make you worse— but it does make you more able to write a comedy. Note, I said write “a comedy,” not “comedy.” This book isn’t about stand-up or humorous essays, though I like to think that big chunks of it would indeed benefit people who want to do those things (the material on creating a comic character would be enormously helpful to stand up comedians, for example so buy more copies of the book and give them to standup comedians, and don’t buy used copies, that money doesn’t come back to me as royalties). But I’m mostly here to help you write “a comedy.” A comedy is a piece of dramatic writing, for the stage or any of the many screens that we watch: the movies screen, the TV screen, the computer screen or the smart phone screen. If you’re writing funny graphic novels specifically designed to be seen on a smartphone, this is your book. Nowadays, with YouTube, anyone can create sketch comedy and potentially be seen by millions and millions of viewers. If you want to write “a comedy,” be it a sketch, a play or a feature-length screenplay, or if you write those already and want to get better, you will get a lot out of this book, and even more out of multiple copies scattered around the house. A Little About Little Old Me I wrote my first comedy in junior high school. It was a musical, basically a parody of musicals I had seen and a satirical take on the goings on at school. It was fun to write and fun to put on, but I didn’t write any more comedies for a long time. I spent years as a newspaper film critic and feature writer, then got my MFA in screenwriting at UCLA and went back to writing comedies (among other things). It is striking how little really good instruction on writing comedy exists. Therefore, as a screenwriting professor at San Jose

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University, I was forced to create a “course reader” because the text I wanted simply didn’t exist. This is that course reader. Prepare to be Funny The central truth of this book is that writing a comedy requires thought and preparation. Earlier in my career—and maybe this will sound familiar to you—I was under the misconception that comedy was something you added or sprinkled on top of a dramatic narrative, like a spice or a sauce. I’d write scenes that included, in brackets, the words, “Insert joke here.” I thusly showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the comedy. What I didn’t understand was that comedy wasn’t something that one added to the script later. Comedy is something that arises spontaneously out of the script when you have created comic characters and comic situations. Just by being themselves, comic characters, when propelled into action within the right situation or context, will make us laugh. So the trick is to come up with comic characters and to put them in comic situations. The most important thing is character. Create a character with the right kinds of flaws and he will be funny. By being himself the comic character is funny. His behavior will be funny. His lines will be funny. (This book, while it inevitably touches on issues of plot construction, is not a guide to screenwriting and playwriting. If you want to know more about that, your first stop should be my book Screenwriting for Neurotics, which has been responsible for many contest wins and many produced films, and embodies a precise, systematic approach to planning and executing a screenplay. My publisher gives discounts when you buy them by the case, so do.) Edison supposedly once said, “Invention is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.” That is certainly true, in my opinion, of the art of dramatic writing. Inspiration is important, but so is the learning of techniques of composition, planning, and thoughtfully, deliberately, carefully thinking through your characters and situations so that you can be as funny as possible. All this may sound inartistic to some of you, but if you weren’t hungry for guidance in this endeavor you wouldn’t have picked up this book, which is based on the assumption that, like dramatic writing, comedy can be taught. The main purpose of this book is to help you understand the principles of comedy—why things are funny—but also to create a system for the application of that understanding to the creation of comic characters and comic situations. This book is meant to teach you how to make a comedy that is as funny as possible, and to that end I have tried to create a systematic approach. It assumes you already understand the rudiments of dramatic construction and means to take you further, to add another layer, though “layer” is misleading because it’s all integrated and organic. As for inspiration, like poetry, comedy writing is heavily dependent upon it, but don’t worry about inspiration. Worrying doesn’t help. Relax and assume you’re funny. Comedy is more dependent upon inspiration than drama, admittedly (the same can be said of

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poetry, another literary genre where inspiration is key), but the methods in this book are meant to create a context in which you are likely to experience useful inspiration. Ultimately, this is a practical guide, and all the theory about comedy is simply there to help you recognize why your inspirations are inspired. At the very least, if you have written a comedy that is not funny, or not funny enough, the principles in this book enable you to realize why it isn’t funny, which is the first step to fixing it. Don’t expect to understand all these concepts right away. Just keep reading, and sooner or later it will all come together. Maybe we’ll even have some laughs along the way. I’m not promising. [Insert joke here.] But, as I said, if you’ve never written a comedy before, you’re in for a wonderful journey. Writing comedy is lots of fun. When I’m writing scenes I make myself laugh all the time. It isn’t the easiest task in the world, but it isn’t the hardest, either, especially if you you’ve taken the time to think through your plot and characters in advance (which is why you’re reading this book). Furthermore, writing comedies is a noble profession. As I said at the beginning of this introduction, and I said it because it’s the most important thing I’ll say: jokes are a way of telling truth—a delightful way—that brings insight to the audience while also providing them with great pleasure. Comedy deepens our understanding of human nature, the world, and the life we all share in it. It’s astounding it doesn’t get the attention and respect it deserves. One more thing: comedy is not a formula. Understanding the techniques in this book will not enable you to make funny if you’re not. A moment of comic explosion is usually two or more of these principles coinciding in a surprising way—as surprising to you as to the audience, usually. However this book will teach you to construct characters and situations much more like to result in said explosions, and to recognize them when they work, and thus enable you to play variations on them and make them work elsewhere in the narrative. Repetition with variation is a key technique, and it’s easier to do when you know why something was funny in the first place. Another note: my references and examples will be all over the map, from low comedy to classic theatre, from Moliere and Oscar Wilde to YouTube videos, to classic screwball comedies from the Golden Age of American Film, to TV sitcoms of all stripes and eras. I strive to provide a lot of examples in hopes that at least one rings a bell. Obviously, we haven’t seen all the same movies, plays and cat food commercials, so no need to feel bad if a particular example is outside your ken. Definitions of Comedy There are a lot of definitions of the comedy out there. Perhaps most often, it’s said that a happy ending is the defining characteristic that makes a dramatic narrative a comedy. Fair enough.

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Lord Byron said that all comedies end in marriage. Lots do, especially “romcoms” (romantic comedies). But for me, comedy serves a practical purpose: that of provoking laughter. I rate comedies on how often they make me laugh. I define a comedy as a dramatic narrative that aims to provoke laughter—and I’m not embarrassed to say it. Better Living Through Comedy To “write funnier movies” is no joke. Mind/Body Health by Hafen has a chapter on the mental and physical health benefits of laughter and they’re amazing. Comedy relieves pain, stress, fear, anger and depression. It enhances self-esteem and broad-mindedness. It prevents industrial accidents. No—really! So to write funnier movies is indeed to serve humanity. This is something Woody Allen understands. One of his finest comedies, “Hannah and her Sisters” (1986) has the depressed hero (played by Mr. Allen) on the verge of suicide, but wandering into revival house and watching “Duck Soup”—and deciding that life is worth living after all. Then there’s “Starlight memories,” his parody of Fellini, which ends with the filmmaker hero (again played by Mr. Allen) encountering aliens and asking what he can do to make the world a better place: “You wanna do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes.” A Warning I have done my best to organize the subject of comedy and break it into bite-sized pieces, but that’s always going to be a little bit forced and artificial because character and plot (which is to say the comic situation) overlap and even, arguably, are the same thing. A dramatic character lives because he does things and says thing, and those things drive the plot forward—they are part of the plot. If what he says and does is part of the plot, where do you draw the line between character and plot? What that means is, chapters that concern themselves with one thing will inevitably touch on other things, because we are dealing witn an organic whole: a piece of dramatic writing that contains plot, character, theme, style and—one hopes—comedy.

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CHAPTER ONE: PRINCIPLES OF COMEDY

THE COMIC MOMENT: THAT’S WRONG! Dr. Seuss, who sold a lot of children’s books, once explained that comedy, essentially, is a child’s reaction to being told something that’s “not right.” You’re tucking them in and you say, “I know you’ve hidden an elephant under those bed sheets.” And the child giggles because she knows that it is impossible to hide an elephant in a twin bed, or even a queen-size. It’s the same for grown-ups: how far is that from the famous Groucho Marx line, from Animal Crackers, “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I dunno.” As a child, your most important task is to understand how the world works: how things are supposed to be. When things aren’t as they’re supposed to be we have a sudden, flashing thought: “That’s wrong!” And there’s a certain delight in that mastery of our ability to identify successfully that which is wrong. The wrong thing might be morally wrong, physically impossible, or just impolite, but something is not as it should be and I have identified it. It’s a little triumph. It makes me feel good. You’re busted! I’ve busted you, or I’ve busted the world, but in any case I know that an elephant can’t hide in my bed. A spider could, and if you want the child to cry, substitute “spider” for elephant, but don’t blame me when crawls in your bed at 3 A.M. Our delight in figuring out the working of the world and characters in it never goes away, no matter how old we get, but as we grow up we more finely hone our sense of what is right and wrong. For a sophisticated adult, hearing someone order “a nice mare-lotte” might be hilarious, whereas it would fly right over a little kid’s head. But essentially, it’s the same thing the child experiences: something is wrong and I’ve spotted it, figured it out, which makes me smart—and better than the person or thing I’ve identified as wrong. No wonder I laugh. I won. Most often, the “wrong thing” comedy shows us is human bad behavior, misbehavior, or inappropriate behavior. The opposite of that doing things the right way. When we do things the right way, we adhere to “norms” or “standards”: the rules and expectations that govern life. But real people often deviate from norms, and comic characters deviate as often as possible depending on how many laughs the guy who wrote them wants to get. They behave in ways that are “not right.” Their behavior is inappropriate, naughty or incongruous. Their behavior may in some way be unacceptable or inappropriate. They are not acting they “should” given the circumstances. As you will see, the comic characters inappropriate behavior in some way does not fit in, and is a function of their interaction with the world—their context.

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“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be,” wrote William Hazlitt, in Lectures on the English Comic Writers, "Lecture I: On Wit and Humour" (1819). Isn’t he, arguably, saying that the human being is the only animal that can recognize the inappropriate—and laugh at it. DEVIATION FROM NORMS AND STANDARDS: CRITICISM AND FORGIVENESS We deviate from these norms usually, but not always, in harmless ways, and usually (but not always) as a result of common, normal human weaknesses that we all share to a greater or lesser degree. We’re all selfish, greedy, dishonest or stupid at least some of the time, but we also see that to be selfish, greedy, dishonest or stupid is against the rules— the norms. It is usually said that laughter is about enforcing these norms—an expression of disapproval. Maybe. Another way to look at it is that laughter is an expression of our forgiveness of the deviation from the norm. We’re not demanding that the character be jailed or horsewhipped—we’re laughing, which means we don’t approve, but we probably don’t hate him. We don’t think he’s less than human. We recognize our common humanity. When Shakespeare’s Puck says, “What fools these mortals be,” there’s a contemptuous edge to it that makes it not such a funny line. Laughter says, “What fools we mortals be.” But I digress. What laughter “means” is really a subject for psychologists and philosophers. For now, our goal is create laughter in the context of a dramatic narrative— that is to say, we want to write a comedy—and to do that it helps to understand norms and how people deviate from them. Let’s identify the kinds of norms from which we deviate, keeping in mind that borders are porous, and these categories bleed into each other, coincide, and synergize. DEVIATION #1: FROM CULTURAL NORMS Within any given culture, there are norms. Cultural norms are the norms of behavior that a particular culture imposes on its members. A Baptist church in Harlem has one set of norms, a saloon in Dodge City another. To burp at the dinner table is abnormal in one culture, mandatory in another. Manners, etiquette and customs are good examples of cultural norms. What is normal in a village in Africa might not be normal at a Rotary Club in Kansas City, Kansas. What’s more, cultural norms change over time. What’s not OK in 1850 may not raise an eyebrow 200 years later. That is why comedy has a shelf life: the norms change and therefore the comedy disappears. This is also why the timelessness of the greatest comedies, such as those of Moliere, is so amazing.

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An example of deviation from cultural norms would be the character Archie Bunker on the classic sitcom “All in the Family.” Archie was a racist, and his outspoken belief in racial stereotypes was a deviation from social norms even back in the 1970, when the show was a big hit. People of all races laughed and laughed at Archie, but they also liked him and forgave him, because in that era his ignorance was understandable. A few decades later that ignorance is less understandable, so his character seems less likeable and forgivable. Today he wouldn’t get the laughs he got then. Times change, references change, comedy fades. That’s why your old Uncle Carl’s jokes aren’t as funny as yours. Another character who deviates from cultural norms is Rodney Dangerfield in the film Caddy Shack. He’s vulgar, bluntly outspoken, and wildly deviant from the norms of the strict subculture of a snooty golf club. In Victor/Victoria, when Toddy puts a cockroach in his dinner to get out of paying, that’s a deviation in multiple ways. First, stealing is not OK in most cultures, nor is putting insects in food. Flatulence is a deviation from a cultural norm, for example the farting scenes in The Nutty Professor and in Blazing Saddles. (How dare you fart before my wife?” “I didn’t know it was her turn!”) In Trainwreck, even in our post-Germaine Greer, post-Madonna western culture, Amy Schumer’s over-the-top promiscuity is a deviation from cultural norms (though perhaps not the cultural norms of Bonobo monkeys, among whom her character would be popular and admired for her social skills). Later, when we talk about the concept of “fish out of water,” you will see that when characters that embody one set of cultural norms are plopped into a completely different culture, their deviations become funny, for example the Sasha Baron Cohen character in Borat. The comedy stems from his ridiculous, over-the-top deviation, but also from the reactions to it by members of the host culture. In deviation from cultural norms, the deviant behavior might be where the laugh is, or the reaction to it might be where the laugh is: the “shocked observer” character. Or the observer trying not to react, but we know they’re reacting. The Stereotype and Deviation from the Norm In the past, and to some degree today, one way in which comedy enforced cultural norms was by employing unflattering stereotypes. Women, Latinos, blacks, Asians, LGBT people and so on were thought all to behave in certain stereotypical ways—and those ways were at odds with the way a ruling class white, heterosexual male behaved, and he was right and they were wrong. His behavior was the norm by which the behavior of the “out” group was judged; the stereotypical behavior was the subject of mockery. In early cinema, stereotypical depictions of African American men were often employed to supposed comic effect, with lazy, shuffling servant characters who were always quite afraid of ghosts (though, to add nuance to the analysis, very often they turned out to be

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right within the context of the narrative—the ghost they believed in and the white people didn’t was real). The point is that the member of the out group is not acting “right” because they’re not acting like the white, heterosexual males who are the norm. Many years ago there was a very popular one-act play (by the great George S. Kaufman, by the way), often done at high schools back in the day, entitled If Men Played Cards as Women Do. The boys got together for cards, but acted the way women supposedly did when they played cards— jumped up on the table because they were afraid of mice and so on. (Neil Simon’s play The Odd Couple has card-playing scenes in which fussbudget Felix deviates from the norm in similar ways, and it’s hard to imagine that Neil Simon wasn’t influences by Kaufman’s one-act). Not only did the play mock stereotypical female behavior, but also such behavior, when performed by men was incongruous (later, we’ll discus the concept of “hybridization of type”—one thing at a time). The play would seem offensive if performed now (and it won’t be) because it deals in stereotypes that we no longer accept, but that were widely accepted at the time—if they weren’t, the play would not have been as popular as it was or have gotten the laughs it got. Airplane! Playing with Norms and Racial Stereotypes (a digression) In the bad old days, the stereotypical behavior of the “out” group is a deviation from the norm that is laughable. More recently, though, the stereotype can be the norm. It depends on the point of view of the writer. He’s the one who decides what the norm is. In the very funny disaster movie parody Airplane!, there’s a famous scene in which two black men on the plane speak only “jive.” One of them is sick but he and his friend can’t make themselves understood to the stewardess because of their dialect, which deviates from the “norm” of so-called “standard” English, and deviating in a way that is a racial stereotype (which is underlined by their stereotypical costumes—one wears a purple suit). It looks like the joke is going to be at the expense of the stereotypically depicted black men. But that’s just the set-up—there’s a clever twist. As the stewardess (that’s what they were called back then) struggles to understand the jive-talking black men, a middle-aged white woman politely interrupts: “Oh, stewardess—I speak jive.” Now, this isn’t just any white woman. She’s played by Barbara Billingsley, who was June Cleaver, the housewife mom on Leave It to Beaver, a sitcom that epitomized bland, oppressive, 1950s-style whiteness. The show was unbelievably fake treacle (faker and treaclier than even The Cosby Show) and June Cleaver became herself a stereotype: a stereotypical post-war, white, American, cookie- baking, pearl-and-high-heel-wearing stay-at-home mom. And this whiter than white woman proceeds to explain to the stewardess what the black man has said—to “translate” it from jive into English. The stereotype of the white ‘50s housewife, who would certainly be too provincial in her suburban purdah to pick up a ghetto patois, by speaking it deviates from what is expected of her. The norm of the 50s housewife has evolved into a stereotype of the 50s housewife and now she deviates from that stereotype. Dizzying, and a classic scene of comedy that isn’t over yet.

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The gag plays out further when the stewardess says she’ll go get some medicine, and the white woman proceeds to “translate” it into jive for the benefit of the black men. They’re outraged that she assumed them to be so ignorant as not to understand the stewardess. At this point we expect the white woman to apologize meekly and slink away—but instead she raises her voice and “sasses” the men in the manner of a stereotypical black woman who’s not going to take any of their guff. Throughout the course of the gag she’s gone from being the stereotype (the white woman) to deviating from the stereotype (she speaks jive) to becoming another stereotype when she seems to slip into the persona of a stereotypical black woman. She seems to a black woman in the body of a white woman (later we’ll discuss hybridization of type, which this scene touches upon). One more example: Queen Latifah and Steve Martin co-starred in Bringing Down the House (2003) about a black woman who breaks out of prison and moves in with a very conventional, white, middle-class man. It’s a fish-out-of-water comedy (she doesn’t fit into his neighborhood) but the modern twist is that her stereotypical black behavior is seen as better, more authentic, more normal, than his uptight stereotypical white behavior—so the black stereotype, in that way, becomes the norm against which the behavior of the white people is judged, and the white behavior that used to be the standard or norm, is now itself transformed into a stereotype. A Quick Digression: Is Comedy Inherently Unkind or Politically Incorrect? While some kinds of comedy are unkind and cruel, comedy doesn’t have to be unkind or cruel. It’s a matter of norms. Different people have different norms and will find different things funny. My preference is for comedy that evinces what one psychologist called an “adult” sense of humor, which he described as free of meanness, accepting of human imperfection (“foibles,” they used to be called), and demonstrating an understanding of life’s absurdity. But comedy is often critical and even hostile under the surface. It’s not always politically correct or kind. Of course, political correctness and kindness are norms, and if deviating from norms is the basis of comedy, unkind and politically incorrect people can be funny—but we’re laughing because we know that they’re wrong. DEVIATION #2: FROM HUMAN NORMS As we’ve seen, comedy is not always politically correct by today’s standards and not always kind. Sometimes the norms enforced by comedy are outdated, oppressive or even cruel. Remember that in Elizabethan England, animal baiting was acceptable entertainment: put a chimp atop a horse, set loose the mastiffs, and guffaw hysterically as the terrified chimp screeches and clutches the steed as it bucks and neighs and snorts in horror, and both animals end up with chunks of flesh torn off by the ravening dogs. Now that’s comedy! Queen Elizabeth loved it, and perhaps the next night would take in a performance of Shakespeare and relish it just as much. Go back a bit further, to medieval times: throwing rocks at schizophrenics and watching their amusing cries of anguish and herky-jerky dodging—to Medieval Guy (and some modern junior high kids—talk about savages), that’s rich comic amusement. Times change but humans are still a little bit savage and comedy still isn’t always nice (Mean Girls). That I include an example of

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comedy in this book doesn’t mean I necessarily approve of its deeper meanings, I certainly don’t think it’s nice to make fun of people physical differences. That said, here’s an example of deviation from human norms: if we were at a very fancy pants cocktail party and saw basketball great Michael Jordan chatting with the actor Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones), who is a very little person, most of us would probably at least smile. And if they started dancing together we would guffaw. Both of these men deviate from the “normal” height of an adult man. To be physically different is to deviate. The giant prosthetic penises in ancient Greek comedy and Dolly Parton’s more-than- ample bosom both got laughs. The mere presence of the physical difference isn’t usually enough to get a laugh—one has to put it into action. Andre the Giant is a big, scary man, but he’s a funny big man if we have him visit the home of a little old Japanese lady who is four-foot-nine and whose house has been built to her scale not his. His physical difference becomes inappropriate and he’s “a fish out of water” (much more on that concept later). In the Monty Python sketch “The Ministry of Silly Walks,” gentlemanly government officials stroll about demonstrating wildly ridiculous and impractical ways of walking that grossly deviate from the normal gait of human beings. The exaggerated hip swiveling of Mae West and Marilyn Monroe were erotic but also comical. Both actresses were primarily comediennes. On Saturday Night Live, The Coneheads were a family of people with conical heads. The norm is a head more roundish, and the resemblance to dunce caps was no doubt intentional. In the film Dumb and Dumber, the deviation from human norms is right in the title. To be stupider than others is funny, but also it’s funny to be “too smart,” hence the success of that sitcom about all the smart nerds. Back to Dumb and Dumber, when they triumph over people of normal intelligence there a lovely, surprising irony. It’s “wrong” that they should do so. DEVIATION #3: FROM NORMS OF PHYSICAL POSSIBILITY These are the norms that deal with what is possible in the real world. When characters do things that are physically impossible, that’s “wrong” in a funny way. The world of cartoons is the most vivid example of this. When Wile E. Coyote runs off the edge of a cliff, keeps going, stops in midair, and only plummets to the canyon floor because he looked down and understood his plight, that is deviation from physical norms. When said coyote paints the entrance to a train tunnel on a canyon wall in hopes that the Road Runner will smash into it and thus become dinner, only to see the Road Runner nonchalantly (as nonchalant as one can be and 150 miles per hour, and for Road Runner that is pretty nonchalant) zoom into the faux tunnel as though it were real, that’s deviation from physical possibility. Of course, the expert Warner Brothers cartoonists know to repeat and vary the gag, so when the coyote tries to pursue the Road Runner into

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now-real tunnel—we saw the Road Runner enter it—it’s suddenly not real anymore. Wile E. Coyote smashes into it. That last is an example of how a great comic moment usually contains more than one principle in operation simultaneously: yes, its physical impossibility, but it’s also character. We know that Wile E. Coyote never has luck and that the Road Runner always does, so both are in character, and even the physical universe distends itself to keep them there. All cartoons do similar things. In Up, a man travels in a house held aloft by balloon. Physical Impossibility and the Action Hero Very often, this physical impossibility principle is embodied in an action hero whose moves are so athletic, agile and over the top as to defy physics. Watching Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan elude villains as he crashes, dodges and leaps his way through a chaotic urban setting (street vendors beware!), helped along by vigorous editing, is as excitingly suspenseful as it gets but funny at the same time. So, too, was a Douglas Fairbanks swordfight, especially as parodied by Gene Kelly in The Royal Rascal: the faux silent film embedded in Singin’ in the Rain. Even at the end of Unforgiven, where Clint Eastwood outdraws, like, twenty guys and kills them all, some of the exhilaration and release of tension we feel over the impossibility of his feat tips over into a kind of comedy—I laughed. A Digression about Dramatic Tension and Comic Relief In all those cases, the dramatic tension of the situation creates an emotional excitement conducive to laughter. The action and jeopardy build tension that is then released. The great British farceur Alan Ayckbourn advises that even a drama should have laughs, and that the writer should know where are they are and nurture and make them intended (even if they weren’t intended in the first place). Why should a drama have laughs? Because, according to Ayckbourn, the tension will make the audience laugh at some point, so might as well be control of well so as to avoid laughs where you don’t want them. Back to Action and the Comedy of Physical Impossibility: A Neat Segue Silent movies used this principle extensively: Charlie Chaplin, George Méliès and Buster Keaton in The Cameraman all defied physics. Advances in computer graphics have enabled filmmakers to take that in new directions that encroach on the bailiwick of animation, for example the Jim Carrey vehicle The Mask, in which his face transmogrifies into a series of, well, scary masks. The great Frank Tashlin, who directed Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope vehicles, in his classic western comedy Son of Paleface, provides a chase scene (again, the excitement of action creating fertile tension) in which the hero, chased by Indians, driving a buckboard, loses a wheel. He just reaches over from within the buckboard and grabs the axel, thus (impossibly) holding up the speeding vehicle. Then he urges his companion, rootin’ tootin’ cowgal Jane Russell, to hurry up, as what he’s doing is impossible. He acknowledges the impossibility of the action!

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Remember what I said about more than one thing going on at once in most great comic moments? Yes, he’s defying the rules of physics, but then he’s also deviating from artistic norms—the norm being that, when the impossible thing happens, the character on the screen, being part of a screen world, a reality where impossible things do happen, does not acknowledge the impossibility. Bob Hope acknowledges the impossibility of his action, which neatly segues into our next form of deviation. DEVIATION #4: FROM ARTISTIC NORMS Artistic norms are the conventions of cinema, theatre and storytelling that we mostly only notice in their absence. The rules of filmmaking, the rules of storytelling, the conventions of genre—all the myriad ways of presenting dramatic narrative that have accumulated over the centuries, are things we take for granted—for example the “fourth wall.” The Fourth Wall In plays and movies, a centuries-old convention going back to the Greeks is that the characters within the story are unaware of the audience. They exist in spaces that have four walls and those walls exclude us, the audience. Three walls are solid, but the fourth is like a two-way mirror: the audience can see and hear the characters, but the characters can’t see or hear the audience. They don’t know we’re there. To defy that convention is to “break the fourth wall.” When Bob Hope mentions that his actions are impossible in “Son of Paleface,” in a sly way he’s breaking the fourth wall. Who could he be talking to but us? Obviously, the people inside the narrative aren’t surprised that he can perform his physically impossible action, they aren’t reacting to it, but Son of Paleface knows that we will be surprised. He’s talking to the audience—telling them what he’s doing is impossible, that he knows it’s impossible, and that he want us to know he knows it’s impossible. When Ferris Buehler narrates the adventures that occur on his day off, he’s breaking the fourth wall. Once you’ve broken the fourth wall, al hell can break loose. On the old Burns & Allen TV show, George Burns would watch TV to see what his zany wife Gracie Allen was up to, and he’d share it with the TV audience. Is that breaking the fourth wall? Sure— because was acknowledging to the TV audience that he and Gracie were on TV and he knew it. In Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, the characters in a 1930s adventure movie suddenly become aware of the movie house audience and then the leading man (Jeff Daniels) realizes that he can step off the screen and into the real world (which, being within a movie, is just as unreal as the film-within-a-film), and have a love affair with one of its inhabitants (Mia Farrow). (Once he’s in the real world, his norms collide with its norms and have the “fish out of water,” which we’ll get into later.)