Today we’re covering a movie that would NEVER get made today. But, not to worry, I think it’s only a matter of time before the pendulum swings back to sanity with this cancel culture stuff. Comedy is at its best when it’s pushing the envelope. And today’s script shows us just how hilarious pushing the envelope can be. If you’ve never seen Tropic Thunder, it’s about a group of actors shooting a war movie who, unknowingly, find themselves in an actual war.
1) Easy comedy concepts are staring you in the face! – Further proof that one of the easiest ways to come up with a funny movie idea is to take a serious movie and turn it into a comedy. “What if we made Platoon a comedy?” could’ve easily been the starting point for this concept.
2) Character intros that tell you exactly who your characters are – Introduce your characters in a way that tells us exactly who they are. Comedies are about LAUGHS so you don’t have 20 minutes to meticulously set a character up. You gotta do it quickly so you can get to the funnies. To this day, no comedy has set up its characters better and faster than Tropic Thunder. The idea to introduce each character via trailers of the biggest movie they starred in (Tugg Speedman in his goofy blockbuster franchise, Scorcher. Kirk Lazarus in his Oscar bait gay priest movie, Satan’s Alley. And Jeff Portnoy’s awful ‘plays all the characters in the movie’ Fatties franchise) immediately told us who these characters were.
3) Every situation is an opportunity for a character to reinforce his funniest trait – The joke with Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.) is that he’s always trying to win an Oscar with every line he delivers. So when Tropic Thunder’s director gets blown up by a land mine, the five actors look around at each other, unsure if what just happened was real or fake. Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) declares, “This is nothing, guys. It’s all part of the game. It’s what he was talking about with all that ‘Playing God’ stuff.” Kirk Lazarus looks off at nothing and, in the most serious voice you can possibly imagine, replies, “He ain’t playing God…. He’s being judged by him.” Lazarus dutifully delivers Oscar-baiting lines even when their director just got blown to bits.
4) Death is hilarious – In every other genre, death is serious. But comedy is the one time people are willing to laugh at death. So take advantage of that. When the director is blown up by the mine, Tugg Speedman is convinced it’s fake. He assures the guys, “I’ve been in a lot of special effects movies. I think I know what a prosthetic head looks like.” Tugg picks up the director’s head and starts playing with it, going to every extreme to prove it’s fake, even tasting the blood to prove it’s corn syrup. Death is funny guys. Lean into it!
5) Never let a busy plot get in the way of your comedy script – I have seen busy plots destroy comedies. Busy plots lead to lots of exposition. Exposition is hard to make funny. Tropic Thunder doesn’t do a great job of this. There are quite a few scenes where the characters have to stop and remind themselves where they’re going and what their current goal is. There’s a boring scene, for example, where they realize they mis-followed the map and are now lost and they have to figure out where to go next. Too many of these scenes can disrupt the rhythm of your comedy, which is when readers start losing interest. Try to keep your plot as light as possible in a comedy. And if you are adding big plot points, make sure they’re funny!
6) Ultra-serious guy is funny! – A standby character that’s almost always funny is the SUPER EXTREMELY SERIOUS GUY. This character always works because of the irony. What’s the polar opposite of funny? Serious. So when you dial that up to 11 in a comedy, it rarely misfires. In Tropic Thunder, that character is Nick Nolte’s Four Leaf Tayback, the real life veteran who wrote the book the movie is based on. Nolte steals many of the scenes he’s in with his deadly serious delivery. When explosions expert Cody (Danny McBride) informs Four Leaf he’s his biggest fan and tries to chum it up by asking, “That’s a pretty cool sidearm you got there. What is it?” Four Leaf replies… “I don’t know what it’s called. (Long pause) I just know the sound it makes (long pause) when it takes a man’s life.”
7) Learning proper structure puts you in rare air in the comedy genre! – I’ll let co-writer Justin Thereoux explain why: “Me and Ben had written a bunch of scenes. Basically, we beat out the characters, and had sixty pages of loose stuff that we were trying to organize. But Ben was working and I was working, so we called Etan (Cohen), and he came in, gave us an outline, and wrote a short draft. Then me and Etan worked together in L.A. I came out from New York, and we hung out for an intense five days where we went through the script and recalibrated the tone. Then he went off, and me and Ben took the script and [finished it].” Comedy people actually aren’t very good with structure I’ve found. They’re good at jokes. They’re good at coming up with funny situations. But I can’t tell you how many comedies I read where the structure is a mess. Heck, even yesterday’s script had structure problems. If you’re funny AND you’re good with structure? You’re the total package, baby.
8) To give the audience what they ‘expect’ in a comedy is the equivalent of script suicide – You want to avoid the expected in every genre, of course. But you especially want to avoid it in comedy because the best punchlines are often unexpected. Tugg Speedman is alone in the jungle at night when he’s attacked by a large animal. Blinded and desperate, Speedman grabs his knife and releases his inner rage, battling the animal, stabbing it dozens of times. When he finally kills it and is able to see what it is, what do you think he finds? A bear? A jaguar? A tiger? No. It’s a panda bear. Tugg killed a cute cuddly panda bear.
9) Comedies are upside-down world – In comedy, insignificant things are often extremely important and extremely important things are often insignificant. For example, one of the major running jokes in Tropic Thunder is Tugg Speedman’s agent (played by Matthew McConaughey) becoming obsessed over a minor clause in Speedman’s contract – he gets to have Tivo on location – not being met. McConaughey’s entire storyline is built around him making sure that somebody corrects this mistake. It’s hilarious because, in the grand scheme of what’s happening, it is beyond insignificant.
10) Likability of your main character matters a lot in comedy – In a Collider interview, Ben Stiller (who directed and co-wrote the film) was asked if he was worried about Tugg Speedman being unlikable in the script. This was his answer, “Sure, there were aspects of my character in the beginning that I put on the DVD, the extended cut because at that point, who cares if we’re likable or not? (Laughs.) Um, but that was one of the things, because my character is trying to adopt a baby and there’s a joke where he said, ‘I feel like all the good ones are taken.’ And it was always funny out of context, but in the movie it always felt like people thought, ‘Ugh, I don’t want to watch that guy for the rest of the movie.’ (Laughs.) So, I cut that from the movie.” While it’s tempting to have your hero say whatever jokes pop up in that head of yours, you need to be more calculated. Sometimes an early hateful or off-color joke can solidify a character as “unlikable” in the audience’s mind. So be mindful of that. Also, when you have people read your comedy, one of the first things you should ask them is, “Did you like my main character?” If they didn’t, ask why, and try to correct it.
