Genre: Comedy/Sci-Fi
Premise: A married couple attending a gender reveal party are quickly informed that they must stop the reveal party at all costs… or the world will blow up.
About: This script finished top 10 on the Black List. Jack Waz has been slowly working his way up the ranks. He was a writer’s assistant on Starz’s, Get Shorty. He wrote a small TV movie called, “Love Blooms.” And now he’s made it to the Black List.
Writer: Jack Waz
Details: 99 pages
Is it finally going to happen?
Am I going to genuinely laugh during a comedy screenplay?
It’d be a first.
Why is being funny so hard for people?
I’m hilarious. Just be more like me.
This script’s got a head start, though, cause I love the logline. As I stated in my annual Black List assessment post, I think gender reveal parties are HI-larious in how stupidly insane they are. Especially because of how much it sucks when you find out it isn’t a boy.
Carson, it’s 4 days into the New Year. Let’s not get cancelled!
Meg and Andy, both in their 30s and still acting like they’re in their 20s (getting wasted every night), reluctantly agree to go to Meg’s sister’s (Grace) gender reveal party. Since these two are not into kids, going to a gender reveal party is their own personal nightmare.
Of course, it’s about to become an actual nightmare, because once they get there and everyone settles in, a giant shipping container is opened and blue balloons shoot out into the sky. It’s a boy!
Except Air Force One happens to be flying by at that very second, the balloons get pulled into the engine, the engine explodes, the president dies, and the United States retaliates against Russia and China, who they think shot the president down, and ten minutes later there is no earth.
Luckily, right before Meg and Andy die, some guy named Tank shows up. He’s buff, naked, wears a fanny pack, and is from the future. He tells them he’s time traveled back here to stop this gender reveal party in the hopes of saving the world.
So Tank time travels them back to the morning, tells them they’ve got five shots at stopping the gender reveal party. And off they go. But in their initial attempt, which includes popping all the balloons ahead of time, the sister’s husband has a backup plan! A series of fireworks go off that, when they blow up, reveal the gender. Oh, except it triggers a massive earthquake and the earth splits in two!
The group quickly learn that there are forces bigger than them determined to make sure this reveal happens. They will have to outwit fate to save the planet. But, more importantly, put an end to this evil attention-seeking practice that soon-to-be parents all across the United States participate in – the gender reveal party!
Baby Boom, which definitely needs a title change with the words, “Gender Reveal Party” in it somewhere, is its own unique beast. It’s a quasi-time loop comedy with a spritz of Final Destination thrown in.
The script is written in a brisk effortless style, as every comedy should be. The structure is solid, as it’s divided into five sections, each with a big goal (prevent the world from blowing up).
But for me, it’s more of a “smile” comedy than an “lol” comedy. To be fair, most comedy scripts I read get nowhere close to “smile” level. They live closer to “neutral” and “scowl” level. So I don’t want it to sound like I’m dissing Baby Boom for only making me smile. That’s actually a compliment.
Here’s the thing I’ve learned about comedy.
It’s mostly about performance. It’s about the actor adding their own flourish to the action, to the line, to the performance. When you think about the funniest moments you’ve watched (imagine Step Brothers for example), virtually none of them work without that particular actor delivering that particular line or that particular action in that moment in that particular way.
So it’s hard to judge comedy on the page.
With that said, it goes to show that if you *can* manage to make a script funny on the page, you have something incredibly special. So I’m always looking for that. Even if it is a unicorn.
One thing that can really ramp up your comedy is stakes. The reason for this is that when stakes are higher, it creates tension. We feel that tension since more is on the line. This creates a tightening of your body and primes it for release, which of course comes in the form of laughter. When you don’t have that tightening, there’s no need for release.
Baby Boom low-key doesn’t have any stakes.
On the surface, it looks like it does. The world is at stake!
But they tell us, right from the beginning, that we’re going to get five shots at this. So we know we’re good for the next 75 minutes. They’re going to make it out of each world-ending catastrophe just fine.
Baby Boom has stakes in its fifth and final attempt. But you’ve asked us to endure four meaningless sections to get to the actual danger.
Just so you know, this is not a hard and fast rule. There are examples of screenplays that work with low stakes. To do this, though, you have to excel in other areas of your script, usually the character front. But I just wasn’t into the characters here. I mean, I thought they were fine. Meg and Andy did a solid job taking us through this journey.
But my ultimate character litmus test is, “Would they be interesting without this particular plot surrounding them?” Are Meg and Andy interesting as everyday people? If we were to follow them around for a day, would we be infatuated with them? Not really. There’s some late script stuff where they battle whether they’re ready to have their own child that’s pretty good. But as people, I only ever smiled at a few things they said or did.
Tank was clearly constructed to be the breakout character here but he was just too wacky for me. A naked guy from the future wearing only a fanny pack is a funny image but it felt like it belonged in a South Park episode, not this movie.
Despite all this, I thought the Final Destination angle was a stroke of genius. Waz seemed to anticipate a problem with all the repetition that came with the five similar sequences. So he made sure to keep us guessing on how the world was going to go belly up each time. My favorite was the AI takeover. I thought that was clever. And the Air Force One accident was fun as well.
As confident as I feel in my assessment, I’m aware that I haven’t laughed at a comedy script in forever so the problem could very well be me. Also, this script reminded me A LOT of the script Michael Waldron wrote to get on the Black List, The Worst Guy in the World and the Girl Who Came To Kill Him. And we all know how things turned out for him.
Anyway, did anybody read this? What did you think?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It used to be that you could sell a comedy script pretty quickly by following the simple rule of capitalizing on a popular cultural trend. Remember when “Bromance” was a thing? There were like five comedy specs about bromances that sold. When Uber came out, we got a couple of ride-share comedies, with, “Stuber” getting produced. Wedding Crashers is another example. Baby Boom’s high placement on the Black List proves there’s still interest in this approach. So if you’re looking for a comedy idea, this is a good well to draw from. Maybe we can all brainstorm in the comments section current popular culture terms that would make good movies. Getting cancelled is probably a good starting point.
