Bring the Funny

The Essential Companion for the Comedy Screenwriter

Greg DePaul

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317399810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

A sharp, funny book about comedy screenwriting from a successful screenwriter that uses recent – as in this century – movies you've actually seen as examples.

Greg DePaul (Screenwriter, Bride Wars, Saving Silverman ) has sold scripts to Miramax, Fox, Disney, New Line, Sony, MGM and Village Roadshow. He's worked with comedy stars like Jack Black, Kate Hudson, Jason Biggs and Amanda Peet.

Now Greg takes everything he knows about writing comedy and breaking into the biz, tosses it into a blender and serves up this tasty, fat-free smoothie of a book that's easy to read, brutally honest, and straight from the heart... of Hollywood.

Bring the Funny is chock full o' tricks, strategies and insider terms used by successful comedy screenwriters, including:

Comic Justice Wrylies Genre-Bending Shadow Characters

The BDR's The Two-Hander The Conceit Comedic Escalation

Gapping A.I.C. Fish Outta Water The Idea Factory

Really Important Comedy Screenwriting Rules Number 99 and 100

If you're looking to write funnier and better screenplays, you want this book. But if you're ready to pack up your car, drive out to L.A., and dive into a career as a comedy screenwriter, you need this book. Now.

Buy it, jam it into your pocket, and hit the gas. Greg's got your back.

Act 1

You vs. Yourself

1

The Funny

What Is the Funny?

Honestly, I have no idea.

I can only tell you that I have the Funny and I know plenty of other screenwriters who have it, too. I also know screenwriters who do not have it.

I once dated a successful TV drama writer. She took everything she did very, very seriously and couldn’t crack a joke to save her life. Years later, I met a woman who was born with a considerable funny bone, my wife. We have two kids. Sometimes I think back on what I could have gotten out of marrying that first woman, the woefully unfunny one. As we were in California, I could have ended up with half of her bank account in a massive divorce settlement. But, alas, I wanted the funny girl. And funny kids.

And thank God for it. Because I love them funny kids. And the wife.

In any event, the Funny is hard to define. But I certainly know when I see it … in movies.

In The Hangover, it’s the fun-loving desire to see everything get more crazy, more out of control, more dangerous.

In The Lego Movie, it’s the urge to tell an epic story in a tongue-in-cheek manner, making fun of the yarn as it is being spun.

In Anchorman, it’s the silly thrill of seeing a big, goofy curmudgeon bungle and misstep through every situation he finds himself in.

I don’t know how I got the funny. My parents weren’t funny. My mother was a housewife, and my father was an attorney who specialized in defending murderers. That’s not funny, right? Well, it was to me. There was something about a guy making a living from death that always struck me as funny.

But enough about me.

Now I want you to ask yourself …

Do I Have the Funny?

I sure hope so.

If you love to joke around with your friends and live for those moments when you can crack wise, you probably do. If you were the class clown, almost certainly. If you’re normally shy, but secretly giggle to yourself when you see an old lady slowly pushing her walker up a steep hill toward a banana peel, most definitely. Note: if you put the banana peel in her path, then you are both funny and sick, for which you should seek help.

Of course, not everyone who has the funny shows it. I’ve known comedy writers who rarely utter a funny word and then sit down and write themselves a cracklingly raucous screenplay. Perhaps that’s you.

If you want to find out how funny you are, spend no time doubting yourself. Think instead of that quote from the Bible—which, to some, is a very funny book, indeed. The quote goes something like this: “Act as if ye have the Funny, and the Funny will follow.”

OK, that’s not exactly, word-for-word, from the Bible, but you get the idea. The point is—if you have the funny and you want to apply it to screenwriting, you’re holding the right book. Stick it in your back pocket and it’ll be like you’ve got a little me hanging onto your butt wherever you go. OK, that came out wrong. Let’s start over …

Years ago, when I was breaking into screenwriting, I had a difficult struggle on my hands. I had moved to Los Angeles, had no friends, and was working a dreary day job to pay the rent. At night, after work, I fought to keep myself glued to the chair so I could write my way into Hollywood. Sometimes I fell asleep at the computer and woke up the next morning with the imprint of a space bar on my forehead.

When I called my dad back East and told him how hard I was working and how exhausted I was, he mailed me a note that read, “Hang in there. Sleep less, work more.”

Dad was practical.

So I quit my day job, sold my car for rent money, and did nothing but write for months. Thus began my full-time pursuit of the funny.

Eventually I started writing with a partner, Hank Nelken, who also quit his day job in search of the funny. Together, we pushed ourselves to sleep less and work more. Within a year we sold our first script. Within three years, Sony Pictures was shooting our movie.

So if you’re still unsure if you have the funny, the best advice I can give is to act as if ye have faith and find out.

No, You Can’t Order It Online

Would you believe there is screenwriting software that purports to make you funny? Would you believe there are writers who would buy it? That’s funny.

When I first decided to screenwrite, I bought all the reigning books on the subject by all the well-known gurus. I urge you to do the same. In fact, read every book about screenwriting—twice. After all, if you really want to write screenplays that sell and get made, you should be reading everything you can possibly find on the subject you’re about to spend years of your life pursuing.

However, most of those books suffer from one or more of these faults:

1. 1) The authors have little or no track record as screenwriters.
2. 2) Their books don’t deal with writing funny.
3. 3) They often use old movies as examples—movies you probably haven’t seen unless you’re, well, old.

To my knowledge, this is the first and only book by a produced screenwriter about comedy screenwriting that only discusses recent movies. And by “recent,” I mean movies made in the twenty-first century—the one we’re living in. The oldest movie I reference here is a classic called Saving Silverman (2001). The latest is Trainwreck (2015).

Now that I’ve implied Bring the Funny is the greatest thing about this new century (other than, say, smart phones or pizza delivery by drone), I want to take a quick step back and make sure you’ve read Screenplay, by Syd Field. It explains the three-act structure, which applies to almost all movies, and is referenced in this book. Read it along with Robert McKee’s Story and Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!, both of which should remain on your bookshelf throughout your screenwriting career.

Remember: there is no fast and easy way to bring the funny. It requires heaping amounts of talent and hard work. From this point on, I’m going to assume you have the funny and show you strategies and habits for writing comedy screenplays that will shorten your learning curve and maximize what God (or nature or whatever) gave you.

This book isn’t a step-by-step guide or a paint-by-numbers workbook. It’s a companion—organized by subject matter and meant to be kept by your writing table for repeated use. Read the chapters in reverse order if you like. But read them.

And just to keep you on your toes, I want you to take this …

Pop Quiz!

1. 1. The Funny is:
   1. A) Hard to define.
   2. B) Easy to see in movies like The Hangover, The Lego Movie, and Anchorman.
   3. C) What that TV drama writer in Greg’s story did not have.
   4. D) All of the above.
2. 2. If you wanna find out if you have the Funny, you should:
   1. A) See a doctor immediately.
   2. B) Ask Greg’s dad. He seems to know stuff.
   3. C) Toss a banana peel in front of an old lady. Laughing yet, sicko?
   4. D) Act as if ye have the funny.
3. 3. When it comes to books about screenwriting, you should read:
   1. A) Books by Robert McKee, Syd Field, and Blake Snyder.
   2. B) Books by Greg DePaul.
   3. C) All of the above, over and over, until you can recite them out loud by memory. Personally, I like to do mine with a Scottish accent, but it’s up to you.
   4. D) The Torah. Hey, can’t hurt.

2

Everything Matters

When I first arrived in Hollywood, I had no friends and no connections. But before I could start making friends and connections, I needed to pay the rent. So I went to a temp agency.

That’s where I met Doug, the manager of the agency. Doug was extremely heavy and very chatty. Before I could hand him my resume, he cut to the chase …

“Writer or actor?” he said.

“Writer,” I told him.

“I’m a comic actor,” he told me. And he went on to explain exactly how he intended to be the next hugely successful overweight movie star.

This was the late 1990s. According to Doug, there was an unbroken chain of funny obese movie stars stretching all the way from Fatty Arbuckle in the 1920s to John Belushi in the 1980s and Chris Farley in the 1990s. Naturally, Doug would be the next to break … soon.

Now if I had a dollar for every wacky story every crazy Hollywood actor ever told me about how he or she was destined for fame, I’d be a bazillionaire. But Doug did tell me something useful.

He told me to go see John Shaner.

John Shaner is a produced screenwriter who, as far as I know, still lives in Hollywood, where he gives private lessons in screenwriting to a small group of students.

I started taking lessons from John. And John happens to be an old friend of Jack Nicholson, who apparently once told John that his motto for success in the entertainment industry is this: everything matters.

That’s right. Everything.

So if you’re a screenwriter, it means the story matters, the dialogue matters, the format, the punctuation, the spelling, the title, the type of brads you use to bind the script …

It all matters.

And if you want to succeed as a screenwriter, you must bend every part of your life toward that overarching goal. Because it all matters. The car you drive, the place you live, the people you date, your socks.

Yes, your socks. You probably think I’m kidding at this point, but even that matters. Yes, even your attitude about me, Greg, matters because following my advice will help you, and I can’t help you if you think I don’t matter.

OK, I’ll stop.

But know this: if you’re diving into a career as a comedy screenwriter, you’re jumping headfirst into a hornet’s nest of talented, desperate people from all over the world … all with an overwhelming drive to make it before you. Despite you.

They will feast on your bones. Your comedy bones.

Which is why you need to close your eyes, kick your feet together like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and say, over and over, to yourself—everything matters.

Then do some heavy breathing and read on, because I’m only just starting to school you.

Prepare Yourself

Speaking of stuff that matters, I’m going to tell you the most important key to success as a screenwriter—diagramming.

Bored yet? Don’t be. Skip ahead and ignore this section at your peril, because the skill I am about to show you is as necessary for your success as would be a compass to a person lost in the wilderness. Or flint. You use flint to make fire, right? I don’t know. I’ve never been lost in the wilderness. But I have been lost in Hollywood, and diagramming is the skill that kept me from panicking and running back to Maryland, from whence I came, with my tail between my legs.

Whenever I go to a party hosted by a successful screenwriter—and I define successful as, well, having better credits than, say, me—I find myself nosing around.

At some point, I’ll need to visit the rest room, and, when I do, I make sure to wander there via the longest possible route through as much of the house as possible. The reason—I want to see the host’s office, or at least the library. Wherever she or he actually sits and writes.

And what I inevitably find in that office or library—and sometimes the bathroom—is a huge pile of scripts. And those scripts are usually accompanied by extensive notes. That’s because successful screenwriters read each other’s work. Compulsively.

If you are a TV writer, you read TV scripts. If you are a comedy screenwriter, you read every comedy screenplay for every comedy film that’s ever been made: the ones you love, the on...