And how can we steal their secrets for features?
The only thing that matters right now is that they’re finally building a real lightsaber. Not those fakey glorified glow-sticks but a real live lightsaber that rises up from the handle. I will be the first one to buy this when it comes out, even if it means dipping into my retirement fund. There are some things that are more important than long-term financial security. Five Guys French fries and lightsabers are near the top of the list.
In non-lightsaber related news, I was recently thinking about how rare it is to find a funny movie. Yet there are a ton of funny television shows. That got me wondering why television seems to be such a better format for comedy. I was hoping that, if I examined that paradox today, I might be able to discover a few things about why TV is better for comedy and steal those lessons for the feature world.
Let’s get into it!
The sit-com seems to be the master laugh-generating format. From The Jeffersons to Cheers to Seinfeld to Friends to Modern Family to South Park to Broad City to Curb Your Enthusiasm. These shows figured out a formula to keep you laughing for 30 straight minutes. And they do it week after week after week.
Meanwhile, how many great comedy features did we get last year? The most recent comedy studio release was The War With Grandpa. Anybody see that? I didn’t think so. 2020’s comedy behemoth was Like a Boss, a movie with a trailer so unfunny, it reportedly killed the editor’s ability to laugh. 2019’s big comedy was Goodboys, which is, arguably, the best studio comedy of the last three years. If that doesn’t tell you where we are in the feature comedy world, I don’t know what does.
Part of the problem is that all the things that make movies great don’t transfer well to comedies. With Hollywood movies, the sets are always bigger. The effects are always bigger. The locations are always bigger. The overall production design is stronger. This is what helped them create Titanic, The Avengers, Terminator 2, Fast and Furious, The Dark Knight Rises.
But none of those things matter in comedy. I suppose bigger locations and bigger sets are important for action-comedies like Spy. But there has never been a correlation between bigger budget and bigger laughs. In fact, I’d argue the opposite is true. The more expensive a gag, the dumber it usually is.
There’s a scene in Spy where Susan is on a private plane that gets hijacked and we get a five minute “comedic” sequence where they’re going in and out of zero gravity. There wasn’t a single laugh in the scene. And I’m guessing the sequence took 4-5 days to shoot and was one of the more logistically complicated scenes. I wouldn’t be surprised if the price for that scene came out to 4 million dollars. For zero laughs!
A good laugh usually costs nothing but the the actors you’re paying and the writer who wrote the joke.
One big advantage TV has over movies is that, other than the pilot episode, TV doesn’t have to set up its characters. That is huge. Character set up is public enemy number 1 for feature writers. Before you can laugh at a character, you must understand who they are. You must first understand the contradiction of George Costanza (neurotic, dim-witted, yet oddly entitled) before you can appreciate his interaction with the soup nazi, a man he’s been told never to question, yet when he’s not given any bread with his soup, he can’t help himself. He must bring up the injustice.
But that George is not present in Seinfeld’s first five episodes. It takes a while for us to understand that that’s who George is. Unfortunately, movies don’t give anywhere near that much time to establish a character. You have two, maybe three scenes, to convey to an audience exactly who your character is. And that creates some limitations. Out goes complexity. Out goes subtlety. This forces you to create one-dimensional on-the-nose characters who don’t feel like real people.
That’s a key detail that a lot of people forget about comedy. Yes, almost every comedic character is an exaggeration. However, they still need to be based on people we feel like we know. In other words, they have to be based in reality. We all know someone like George Costanza who can’t help himself. He *must* die on that hill, even when all the data suggests it’s not a hill worth dying on.
So, character is the first hurdle feature comedy writers must leap. Spend as much time as possible coming up with really funny characters then figure out how you’re going to convey that particular brand of humor in a few short scenes at the beginning of your screenplay. I mean who doesn’t know who Annie in Briedesmaids is after her first scene?
That’s the scene where Annie’s having sex with a douchebag character played by Jon Hamm and even though the sex is horrible, she’s desperate to be his girlfriend, sneaking into the bathroom before he wakes up the following morning to do her hair and make-up so that when he does wake up, she can pretend this is how she always looks. That desperation to find someone helps us understand Annie’s jealousy issues at her best friend getting married AND having to share maid-of-honor duties with the bride’s new best friend. Annie’s jealousy is the engine for almost her entire comedic performance and the setup of that character was a big reason why that worked.
The second big difference I noticed between comedy in TV and film is the way they go about their laughs. TV is mainly about creating a series of comedic situations. “Situation” is the “sit” in “sit-com.” “Situation-comedy.” So as a sit-com writer, you’re basically looking to find funny situations. Plot isn’t that important. There obviously needs to be some setup involved and that requires exposition and, possibly, an earlier scene or two. But if something requires too much setup, you don’t want to mess with it in television.
I’ve noticed that a lot of comedic TV situations are based on misunderstandings. One of my favorites occurs in Modern Family when Phil (the well-meaning but clueless dad) befriends a guy at the gym (played by Matthew Broderick) who he has no idea is gay. Phil invites the gym friend to his house to watch a basketball game (they share the same alma mater), having no idea that the friend is interpreting this as a hook-up opportunity. The *situation* plays out with Phil cluelessly rooting his basketball team on while high-fiving and hugging the gym friend, who keeps attempting to escalate the physical contact into something more (signals that Phil always misses).
Meanwhile, feature films, for some reason, shy away from situational comedy. Instead, they replace this with “set-piece” comedy. Set-pieces such as the famous dinner scene in Meet the Parents where Greg attempts to tell Jack that anything that has nipples can be milked. This both sort of makes sense to me and sort of doesn’t.
It would make sense that, because a movie is longer, you have the opportunity for longer scenes. But longer scenes require more setup to make them work. And setup is often unfunny. You try and make it funny, of course. But the underlying purpose of a setup scene ensures that it always feels like setup. And those scenes are always the most boring. One of the things that separates A-list comedy writers from everyone else is the ability to construct their setup scenes so that they’re individually funny scenes themselves and the audience doesn’t realize they’re being set up.
Think about that dinner scene in Meet The Parents – how much setup that required. You needed to establish that Greg had a ‘wussy’ job. This will be important later when you set up that Jack had a ‘manly’ job. You need to setup that Greg was just about to ask his wife to marry him before learning how important it is in their family to get the father’s approval first. You need to have Greg lose his suitcase on the flight. You need to set up her family and the wedding that’s going on that weekend. All of that stuff works its way into the dinner set-piece.
If you don’t do that or don’t know how to do that, you won’t have enough jokes to pay off. A joke punchline needs a joke setup and a set-piece is often the climax of a bunch of joke setups.
However, there’s something deeper going on here. I’m trying to imagine putting the Modern Family situation I mentioned above into a movie. Could you do that? I’m not sure you could. There’s something about a movie having a bigger overall theme and plot that would make a surface-level misunderstanding like that seem insignificant. And yet I don’t want to deprive comedy writers of such a strong comedic device. Obviously, something is wrong with the feature comedy format. We should be getting more than one funny studio movie every three years. Is the fact that it is so set-piece driven, and set-pieces are so much harder to pull off than situational comedy, the problem?
I need more time to study this but something tells me we can blend both situational comedy and set-piece comedy into a hybrid ‘situational set piece’ scenario that offers the best of both worlds. I’m sure some of you will point out movie scenes that do just this so I’m all ears. I’m ready to learn.
For now, though, those are the two lessons I want you to take away from today’s article. You need to put an insane amount of focus on figuring out your comedic characters and then even more focus on introducing them in a way where the audience immediately understands them AND what’s funny about them. Some sit-coms benefit from the fact that they’ve had two seasons to fully discover a comedic character. You don’t have that luxury so you need make up for it by nailing the introductory scenes.
The second lesson is that situational comedy is easier to pull off than set-piece comedy. And situational comedy is used so frequently in television shows that when a situation doesn’t work, you immediately have a shot with another one. Meanwhile, there’s so much time between set-pieces in movies that if even one of them doesn’t land, it could be the difference between a good and a bad comedy. Because who wants to wait 25 minutes for the next big laugh? For this reason, you must nail all the setup for your upcoming set piece so that you have a lot of jokes to pay off. And if a set piece isn’t working, you need to get rid of it and find another one. You don’t have the flexibility, like sit-coms do, to fail. Your set pieces all have to be the best you’re capable of.
I hope this helps!
I’m thinking of reviewing Stone Thunder or whatever that dreadful new Melissa McCarthy Ben Falcone superhero comedy on Netflix is called this Monday. I wouldn’t normally bother but it is a comedy and it’s obviously terrible so maybe we can learn something from it? Vote in the comments below!
Sorry for the late post. It’s a travel day so I didn’t have time to read and review a script. But I did want to share with you a comedy I recently watched that’s quite good. It’s free on Amazon Prime and it’s called Brittany Runs A Marathon.
I was researching the movie for something that had nothing to do with comedy but came away from it with a valuable comedy lesson.
When it comes to comedies, 99.9% of the time, you want your hero to be likable. Comedies are not thrillers. They’re not dramas. Their mission is to make people laugh. It’s hard to do that if we don’t like your hero.
I thought Brittany Runs a Marathon was great. But I didn’t like the main character. She complained a lot. She felt sorry for herself all the time. She was a downer. So why did I still root for her?
Well, Brittany Runs a Marathon reminded me that, even though it should never be your first choice, you can still make us root for your unlikable comedic hero as long as you make them *sympathetic.*
You’ve heard about sympathy and its affect on audiences before. But usually in regard to other genres. In comedy, a lack of likability is tougher to do. Which is why you need to consider whether it’s worth the risk.
The way they made Brittany sympathetic is by leaning into a universal insecurity – Brittany hates the way she looks. She hates that she’s overweight. They drive this home by showing Brittany out drinking one night and some douchebag comes up to her and says he wants to have sex in the bathroom. She doesn’t even know this guy so she’s disgusted.
Later in the evening, Brittany catches herself in one of club’s mirrors and, from her look, we can tell she’s disgusted by what she sees. A few minutes later, she runs into the same guy by the bathroom, and he gives her a, “Are we going in?” look. Brittany follows him in to get just the tiniest amount of validation, anything to push away the image she just saw of herself in the mirror.
From that moment on, we’re sympathetic towards Brittany’s plight. We want to see her succeed.
Again, when it comes to comedy, the best thing to do with your hero is to make them likable. But, if that type of character doesn’t fit the story you’re telling, you can still ensure that the reader will root for them if you make them sympathetic.
Today we review a big spec sale pitched as Knives Out in the White House!
Genre: Thriller/Mystery
Premise: The president is murdered during a private dinner, and Secret Service agent Mia Pine has until morning to discover which guest is the killer before a peace agreement fails and leads to war.
About: Pitched as “Knives Out set in the White House,” this one sold for big money to Paramount last year. Jonathan Stokes broke onto the scene with a hot script in 2011 called “El Gringo,” which would go on to get made. Since then, he’s had a ton of scripts in development and I’m sure he’s been working steadily on assignments. This was a spec script that went for high six-figures against seven-figures. It also got onto last year’s Black List with 9 votes.
Writer: Jonathan W. Stokes
Details: 114 pages
The Black List?
More like The Black Hole List.
The list where quality goes to die.
Where are all the good scripts? It’s gotten to the point where every time I open a Black List script, I expect it to be bad. There have always been bad scripts on the Black List but it used to be that the good ones outnumbered them. I don’t think that’s the case anymore.
We had a debate on here a couple of years ago where we discussed if there were any amateur scripts – IN THE ENTIRE WORLD – that were good enough to be on the Black List. And one writer was actually saying, no, there wasn’t. Which is ridiculous of course. But I think even he would now concede that the bottom half of the Black List is basically a randomized group of scripts that ended up being in the right place at the right time.
Or is it?
I am hoping that with today’s high concept premise and already sold status, we’re getting a different level of writing. Join hands and pray with me for Murder in the White House!
30-something secret service agent Mia Pine is having sex with someone in an office in the White House when she hears a scream. She quickly gets dressed, runs to the Oval Office, and sees the first lady, Gail Wood, hugging her dead husband, who’s been stabbed in the neck with a knife.
That night, the president was having an exclusive dinner with six people. They included Vice President tough guy James Steele. Speaker of the House, Terra Brookes. Russian Ambassador Pyotr Kamenev. World renowned Israeli cellist, Adara Lehava. The president’s wife. And someone I’m forgetting.
After taking pictures of the crime scene, Mia brings everybody into the War Room and explains that they’re going to wait until tomorrow morning to announce the president’s death. But right now, they’re going to figure out which of them is the killer. Because the president was killed with a rare steak knife that there are only six of, and each of the guests had one of those knives during dinner.
The early assumption is that it’s the Russian ambassador, of course. Especially since the Russians moved into Syria less than an hour ago. Everyone assumes the two things are related. But the person who has the most to gain from the president’s death is obviously the VP, an intense war-hungry man. If he kills the president, he becomes the president!
You would think the wife wouldn’t have killed her beau. But Mia happens to know that the husband has cheated on her several times. Could this have been a revenge murder? Especially since this hot Israeli cellist isn’t exactly White House dinner quality. Could she and the president have been having an affair?
Meanwhile, Mia has to hide the fact that the reason she wasn’t around when this happened was because she was bumping uglies with White House Chief of Staff, Holland Atkinson. Should that get out, all her credibility would be shot. So Mia must hope nobody solves her mystery while attempting to figure out who murdered the president. And she’s only got six hours to do it!
So, did Murder in the White House break the streak?
While the script was a step above a lot of the amateur-ish writing of other scripts in this vote-range, it still didn’t crack the ‘worth-the-read’ threshold for me.
I like the idea of an Agatha Christie murder mystery in the White House.
And there’s no doubt the contained setup of this high-stakes situation is fun.
But something was missing.
The script made a critical mistake early on, in my opinion, by starting Mia off having sex with some guy. This created a slew of problems. For one, it’s not the greatest way to introduce a character that you want us to root for. Someone who can’t control their sexual urges to the point where they have to sneak off with their bang buddy in the white house while they’re on duty? Errrr….
This issue continued into Mia’s interactions with Holland (the man she slept with). During Mia’s individual interrogations of everyone, Holland comes in and they start making out and joking around. It undermined her entire character. You’re supposed to be leading one of the ten most important murder investigations in the history of this country and you’re still horny? What’s wrong with you?
But the biggest of all the issues is the fact that we learn Mia WAS SPECIFICALLY BROUGHT HERE TONIGHT BECAUSE THE PRESIDENT THOUGHT HE’D BE MURDERED. And STILL you’re doing the horizontal happy dance with some guy?? You couldn’t keep it in your pants on the one night you’re being asked to guard the president’s life?
No matter how many good moments occurred in the screenplay, that problem was always in the back of my head.
But there are some lessons to learn from this script.
One thing I noticed was that the script was stumbling for a good 20 pages early on as the characters rushed in and out of different rooms. It’s a mad scramble that, while dictated by the crazy circumstances, felt wild and sloppy. I was losing interest quickly.
Then Stokes added an interrogation sequence. For about 10 pages, Mia interviews, one-at-a-time, all the major suspects. I’m not going to say the sequence was amazing. But, for the first time in the script, we had structure. And this reminded me just how powerful structure is as a storytelling mechanism.
By the way, when I say “structure,” I’m not talking about the three acts or the 8 sequence method. I’m talking about anything you can add to your story that gives it boundaries – a setup that the audience understands and can participate in.
For example, if you were writing a movie about a company, you could write a bunch of scenes where we’re bouncing all over the office seeing different people and different situations. But if you did that for too long, it would start to feel unfocused. And when a script becomes unfocused, it’s only a matter of time before the reader loses focus.
However, if you bring 10 of those office members into a boardroom for an important meeting that determines the future of the company, now you have something structured. We’re all inside a space. We all have a clear objective. There’s form to this setup that isn’t there when we’re randomly jumping around to a bunch of people.
And Murder in the White House has a lot more jumping around than it does structure. Which is why my mind was wandering half the time.
So always be conscious of that. Look for opportunities to add structure to your story, especially if you’re writing something big and unwieldy with lots of characters. The Godfather is something that could’ve become big and unwieldy. But it knew how to structure scenarios to keep us focused. Like the wedding. Like the assassination in the restaurant. Like the attempt to kill the dad at the hospital. All of those moments were meticulously structured.
I liked this idea. And it’s a smart pitch on the heels of Knives Out’s success. But the execution didn’t do it for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The Emotional Reality Of The Situation – Mia has been waiting for her CSI technician, Nancy, to get to the White House all night. When she finally does, the first thing Nancy says is, “I love what you’ve done with the place.” “Nancy, thank god. Tell me good news,” Mia replies. “The Cavaliers won tonight,” Nancy says. Now you tell me something. Does this sound like the exchange two people would have less than two hours after the president was murdered? Of course not. And yet, I’ve made this mistake myself. We rewrite and re-read a script so many times that we become numb to it and forget what the current emotional situation would really be. We end up dropping knock-knock jokes twenty minutes after a school shooting. Be aware of the emotional reality of the situation always and write dialogue accordingly.
Week 0 (concept)
Week 1 (outline)
Week 2 (first act)
Week 3 (first half of second act)
I’m sure some of you were hoping I would review Godzilla vs. Kong today. If you were hoping for that, I apologize. And then again, I don’t apologize. But I do apologize for making you think I would apologize. Cause I would never apologize for not watching that movie. I know we’re all starved for big-budget Hollywood entertainment but come on!
The second that little girl – King Kong’s Keeper – appeared on screen, I let out a big, “Uh oh.” First of all, nobody’s going to let a little girl near a 100 foot tall 20 ton gorilla, regardless of how much he likes her. But then the deaf thing came in and it was lights out for me.
Deaf characters are so hard to make work (they’ve become such a trope) that the only time you want to use them is if the concept encourages it. In a movie about noise, for example, A Quiet Place, a deaf character makes sense. But when you’re only giving your character an impairment to gain sympathy from the audience, that’s when it’s problematic.
Then again, these blockbusters are meant to please everyone. And I suppose that the average 10 year old doesn’t care if the screenwriter is adding an ariticial impairment to make someone likable. Still, I see tons of blockbusters that don’t stoop to this level. Marvel is good at keeping the lazy stuff out.
But none of that matters today, anyway, because we’ve got bigger problems to tackle. Yes, bigger than even giant lizards! We’re talking about the original King Kong, the second act. The act that separates the men from the boys. Casual screenwriters will often give up during the second act because it’s so hard. Real screenwriters understand that the challenge of the second act is a battle they have to get through in order to win the war.
What often happens while writing your second act is you realize you don’t have as much plot as you thought you did. As a result, you begin writing scenes you know aren’t good, hoping they’ll somehow lead you back to better scenes. But as reality sets in, each subsequent scene gets worse, not better. Eventually, you write so many bad scenes, you begin questioning the script as a whole. And in the most frustrating of scenarios, you give up.
This issue is compounded when you write a comedy because in addition to the plot falling apart, you aren’t laughing as much. And, in a desperate attempt to save the script, you try harder and harder to “write funny.” But it doesn’t work. All of it feels try-hard and, therefore, the opposite of funny.
Of course, there’s a reason why it doesn’t work. When you don’t have scenes that set up the goal, the stakes, the conflict, the scenes don’t have a point. They’re only being written in an attempt to make the reader laugh. And that’s the quickest way to ensure the reader doesn’t laugh.
But I have good news for you: This is a necessary part of the screenwriting process. Just like your characters struggle, you, the writer, will struggle. Especially in the second act. First draft second act is where a ton of writers quit. Don’t quit. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. You just have to keep driving. Don’t judge the writing. Keep getting pages down, no matter how agonizing it feels. We’ll fix the problematic sections in the rewrite.
Let’s recap where we are in the process. We’re basing our draft on a 100 page page-count. First week was pages 1-25. Second week was pages 26-50. That took us to the midpoint of the script. You should’ve written something at the midpoint that changed the course of the story in a way so that the second half of the movie feels different from the first half.
This week, we’ll be writing pages 51-75. This is known as the second half of the second act. And it’s a challenging section for many writers. However, the good news is, we know what we’re writing towards. The end of the second act (page 75) will be your character’s lowest point (the “All is Lost” moment). This is when your character will feel like giving up. They feel as if they’ve tried everything and nothing works.
The end of the second act in The Big Sick is when the parents have to make a critical decision about whether to move Emily (who’s in a coma) to a different hospital. The infection inside her body has moved to her heart. This struggle is shown through Kumail having a breakdown during one of his stand-up sets, venting to the audience how helpless he feels. It is not just the lowest moment in the movie. It’s the lowest moment OF HIS LIFE. Which may be a good way to approach your own “lowest point.”
But that might be too long of a path to walk without guidance. So let’s continue what we’ve been doing, which is to break our second half of the second act into two sequences. Both of them will be [roughly] 12 and half pages. We know what we’re doing with that second sequence. We’re building towards the “All is Lost” moment. The hero thinks, “That’s it. There’s nothing left I can do.” So you can write your second sequence with that directive in mind.
What about the first sequence, though (pages 51-63.5)? What do we do there? That depends on a couple of factors. The first is whether your midpoint is a positive one or a negative one. The second is whether your story is objective-driven or life-driven. I’ll explain the difference between objective-driven and life-driven in a second because it’s the harder lesson to learn. But let’s start with ‘positive’ vs. ‘negative.’
A positive midpoint is going to set your character off on a positive path. In the movie, “Spy,” which I mentioned last week, the midpoint shift is a positive one. Susan befriends the villain, Rayna. So as we move into the second half of the movie, the two are working together in a positive way. It doesn’t mean they don’t still encounter obstacles. In fact, one of the very first things that happen to them is they’re attacked on Rayna’s private jet. But the two of them are working together positively.
Meanwhile, Bridesmaids has a negative midpoint. This occurs when all the women try to fly to a bachelorette party and Annie (Kristin Wiig) has a meltdown that causes the plane to divert. Afterwards, Lillian (the friend who’s getting married), tells Annie that it would be best if she stayed off the wedding planning team. She’s going to let her other friend, Helen, organize everything from now on.
Since this is a negative midpoint, it sets Annie off on a negative path. Her life starts to wander. She goes on a date with the policeman to find some focus, but she freaks out that it’s going too well and sabotages the relationship. Nothing in her life is going the way she wants it to. She eventually gets out of the funk after a pep-up talk from Megan.
Now, what does “objective-driven” mean. That means your hero has a tangible objective they’re trying to achieve. In Spy, Susan is trying to locate and take down the bad guys who have the nuclear bomb. Objective driven movies are always easier to write because no matter where you are in the movie, the main character is always trying to achieve the objective. So after the midpoint of Spy, Susan gets right back in there and attempts to find the bomb. Or find the people who can lead her to the bomb.
“Life-driven” movies are tougher because there isn’t some immediate ‘object’ that the main character has to obtain. This leaves your hero in a much less active place. And it’s always harder to push your plot forward with an inactive hero. That’s where Bridesmaids finds itself. Technically, Annie doesn’t “need” to do anything after she’s booted off the wedding crew other than go back to “life.”
How do you solve this quagmire? There’s no single way. But a lot of times, what life-driven movies will do, is they’ll detour into their subplots. That’s what Bridesmaids does. Annie calls up the policeman because she’s bummed out. They go on a date. They sleep together. He wants to make breakfast. She freaks out and leaves. So that’s probably what you’ll do as well. Hopefully, you’ll have set up some subplots throughout the first half of the story that you can tackle in this section.
Bridesmaids had more subplot options if it wanted them. One of the subplots is Annie’s failed cake business. They could’ve gone to that immediately after the plane incident if they wanted to (they do so later but they could’ve easily made that a bigger focus right away). I’m just trying to help you realize you’re not limited. You have multiple options. And, if you don’t have any subplots set up, maybe still write a subplot sequence for pages 51-63.5 with the intent of setting it up in your rewrite. There’s no screenwriting law that says you can only pay things off that you haven’t already set up in THIS DRAFT. If you’re thinking three-dimensionally, you can always set up payoffs in the next draft.
I know we got technical today and some of this is confusing. But if you’re ever stuck in this section, write down the two checkpoints you have to get to – page 63 and a half and page 75. Write down what happens on those pages and then write towards those moments. If you know, in The Big Sick, that you’re going to write that scene where Kumail breaks down during his stand-up routine on page 75, that’s easier to write towards that scene than if you’re writing towards a black hole.
So there you have it. At the end of this week, we’re going to be in our third act! Just 25 pages left until we finish our first draft. How awesome is that! Until then… KEEP WRITING.
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.
