The New Comedy Writing Step by Step

Revised and Updated with Words of Instruction, Encouragement, and Inspiration from Legends of the Comedy Profession

Gene Perret

• Publisher: Quill Driver Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781610351089
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

Three-time Emmy Award-winner Gene Perret's ""Comedy Writing Step by Step"" has been the manual for humor writers for 25 years. In this new book, his first update, Perret offers readers a treasure trove of guidelines and suggestions covering a broad range of comedy writing situations, along with many all-important insights into the selling of one's work. Perret covers all aspects of comedy writing in his uniquely knowledgeable and anecdotal fashion.

PART ONE

DECIDING TO WRITE

“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

—Thomas Mann

- 1-

You Can Write Comedy

I’ve had a ball writing comedy. I’ve written from my kitchen table back in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, from a cocoon-sized office behind my house in California—even from a plane seat on the way to England to help write the command performance show celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation.

I’ve been on vacations with my family where we crammed in a tiring day of sightseeing—and then while the rest of them slept, I shut myself in the bathroom, curled up in the empty tub with pencil and notepad, and turned out my next day’s quota of jokes (…or gags. Throughout this book I’ll use those terms interchangeably.)

I’ve written some good jokes in some bad places and some bad jokes in some good places, but I’ve been delighted with every minute of it. The one overriding message of this volume is that comedy writing is fun. It’s a capitalized FUN…an underlined FUN. It’s fun in italics, and fun in foreign languages: C’est tres amusant, es muy divertido, es macht mir Freude.

Now my wife is gong to object when she buys a copy of this book and reads those opening paragraphs. She has had to listen to my complaints over the years about recalcitrant associates, egomaniacal performers, moronic producers, asinine executives, and people in audiences who wouldn’t know a good joke if it jumped off the stage and extracted a belly laugh from them surgically. What she doesn’t realize is that my complaining about the business is fun to me—she’s the only one not having a good time.

My Comedy Ego and How It Developed

I’ve exulted in all the stages of my career—good and bad. When my career first showed signs of progress, I was so delirious that it wore a bit on my friends and family. I was proud of hobnobbing with celebrities and rarely stopped talking about my accomplishments. Every conversation was sprinkled with my latest witticisms.

In short, I was a bore. You’ll notice as you read through the book that I’ve not been totally cured of this.

While I was in the most critical stage of the disease, I eagerly anticipated taking my checks from Phyllis Diller to the bank each Friday. I’d try to look my humblest—all the while waiting for the teller to notice the celebrity name on the check.

One lady saw the signature, chuckled a bit, and said, “Phyllis Diller, huh?” I modestly lowered my eyes and replied, “Yeah.” Then she called another teller over and showed her the check. Pride swelled so much in me that it seriously threatened the buttons on my shirt.

“Is she anything like the real Phyllis Diller?” the teller asked.

“That is the real Phyllis Diller. She’s a personal friend of mine.” (I had talked to her on the phone.)

The lady calmly studied the check and signature with that air of expertise instinctive to bank tellers, began stamping the documents with whatever they stamp documents with and said firmly, “No, it’s not.”

I never did convince her it really was the real Phyllis Diller. In fact, she almost had me believing I was working for a fraud. This incident was not among the highlights of my career, or even of that particular day, but since then it has been good for laughs.

Another time my wife and I had a few laughs over an experience that is almost the flip side of the Phyllis Diller story. We had been vacationing (please don’t think that all comedy writers do is vacation) at a California resort and were checking out when the cashier informed me that I had received a call from Bob Hope. I was on Hope’s writing staff at the time, and he frequently called in the middle of vacations. In fact, he frequently called in the middle of anything I was doing. The clerk asked, “Is this the real Bob Hope?” I assured him that it was and he offered me a telephone a few feet down the counter.

While I was on the phone, another couple came to check in. The first thing the clerk said to them was, “Have you ever heard of Bob Hope?” They were a little confused as to what this had to do with checking into a hotel but said they had. The counter man motioned toward me with his thumb and said with feigned matter-of-factness, “He’s talking to him.”

I’ve even had some recognition that I didn’t merit. Our writing staff was nominated for an Emmy one year, so the producer invited me to share his rented limousine for the evening—we wanted to arrive in style.

The festivities were being held very near my home, so my four youngsters rode there on their bikes and got right up front behind the police barricades. Our limousine pulled up to the front of the building, we stepped out, and my kids and their friends immediately went wild with screams of delight. Being an incurable ham, I turned and waved to the adoring throng. Now everyone in the crowd started screaming. The fact that they didn’t recognize me as a big star didn’t deter them. They figured scream now and ask questions later.

One lady, though, turned to my most vocal daughter and said, “Who is that?” My daughter told her, “My daddy.”

There’s a flip side to that tale, too. (Are you beginning to notice that all my stories have their own rejoinders?) Once we were at a rehearsal for a Bob Hope show originating from Palm Springs. Former President Gerald Ford was to attend the gala that evening, and some Secret Service men were combing the ballroom with dogs trained to locate bombs. Hope was on stage with a handful of script pages, saw me, and shouted, “Hey, Perret. They keep sniffing out your jokes.”

You may be fearful now that you spent your hard-earned money on a book of Gene Perret anecdotes (I warned you that I’m not completely over my self-aggrandizement phase yet), but I’m just trying to illustrate and emphasize the laughs I’ve had with my comedy-writing career.

That’s really the main reason for this book. I’ve had so much fun writing humor that I wanted to help other people share some of that. And you can.

A Universal Form

You may not believe it, but there is a fear of comedy writing. People feel that it’s almost a sacred profession; the Deity must reach down and anoint their heads before witticisms will germinate.

Nonsense. Comedy is a universally practiced art form. Anyone who has ever performed stand-up comedy knows that the guy at the table in the front who’s had one too many cocktails and is trying to impress his date thinks he can shout out funnier things than you’ve been writing and rehearsing.

Wisecracks are universal. Every time your family gets together I’m sure friendly insult jokes pepper the room. Any time old friends gather, good humor is an invited guest, too. Everybody does jokes.

In my rookie year as a television staff writer, the producers asked our team to come up with a new line for a guest performer. We were doing a tribute to Las Vegas and needed a joke between verses of a song. Ten of us, newcomers and veterans, gathered in a room to write one joke. We threw ideas from 10 A.M. until 1 P.M. without one gag satisfying our collective judgment. When we broke for lunch, most of us stopped in the CBS restroom.

There was a nicely dressed youngster of about 10 in there washing his hands. His hair was neatly combed, but one cowlick stood up in the back. I touched the recalcitrant locks and spoke to his image in the mirror.

“What’s this?”

“Oh, that,” he replied. “That’s my personality.”

And he walked out with the swagger of a performer who had just delivered a gem.

We professionals had just spent thirty man-hours with no results, and this kid came up with a great ad lib in a split second. There’s a touch of comedian in everyone.

I was once the guest of honor at a dinner in my hometown. In attendance was a remarkable former teacher of mine. Remarkable because she was a strong-willed woman of 93 who had never been married. She taught me in the fifth grade and I must admit she looked 93 back then, too. (To her credit, she was the kind of person you could say that to.) A rumor was floating around the banquet hall that this lady had specified in her will she was to have no male pallbearers.

As the guest of honor, I dared to ask her if it were true. She admitted it was. I asked why. “The bastards never took me out while I was alive,” she declared, “I’ll be damned if they’ll do it when I’m dead.”

You don’t get many lines funnier than that.

Of course, comedy isn’t restricted to the cuteness of the very young or the very old. I once spoke to a group about comedy writing and during question and answers someone asked how many writers were typically on the Bob Hope staff. I started to count on my fingers and replied, “Let me see. He has the one good one.”

I thought that was a pretty clever response until someone in the audience hollered out, “And then there was you.”

Everybody tries to be funnier than the performer—and this guy succeeded. (But I got even. I stole that joke from him and use it in my banquet speeches to this day.)

A Matter of Discipline

Being witty upon occasion, though, or even every day, isn’t the same as turning out enough humor to submit to a magazine or to a comic. The difference is not so much in the skill as in the discipline. The discipline can be learned and acquired. As a result of that training, your basic comedy skills can be refined.

When I first began writing for Phyllis Diller, I’d send her two routines a week, which amounted to about sixty jokes. The first time I met Phyllis after working with her over the phone and through correspondence, she said, “You don’t write enough.” I immediately set a quota of ninety jokes per week. It was difficult, and quite a strain for many weeks. Today, in contrast, I can come home from a full day of TV writing and production and, after a relaxed dinner, turn out 120 gags to be delivered to a freelance client the next morning.

Beginner’s Fear

In dealing with beginning writers, the phrase I hear most often is, “Would you just read over my stuff and tell me whether it’s any good or not?” Now when these same people watch TV or go to a nightclub or read a book, no one has to tell them when to laugh. They know a good joke as well as anyone else. They know which material they’re proud of and which they’re not sure about. The statement—“Tell me if it’s any good or not”—expresses fear of mixing with the professionals.

People sometimes label themselves as amateurs and the selling writers as professionals. That’s technically correct, but amateurs don’t have to remain amateurs. Good amateurs become good pros. Many of today’s boxing champions are former Olympic medalists—good amateurs. Now they’re knocking the blocks off of the professionals. We in the humor business know that there are amateur writers out there who will one day will knock our comedy blocks off.

One of the beginner’s fears is caused by comparing his or her writing to the best. But nightclub routines and television shows are the products of many minds. They’ve been rewritten and polished many times over. There’s no way that you can sit at your kitchen table and duplicate that kind of communal expertise, but the important thing is that you don’t have to.

Young comics have come to me and other writers many times and asked for just one piece of material that will get them a spot on Letterman or Leno, catapult them to national prominence, and allow them to set up residence on Easy Street for the rest of their professional lives. They promise to send the writer a few bucks after they’ve made it.

If I could write the piece of comedy that would accomplish that, I’d deliver it myself and build my own abode on Easy Street. But I can’t do that. My friends can’t do that. Neil Simon can’t do that. Nobody can sit in front of the keyboard and create that piece of material. Why should a beginner expect to?

Ed Simmons was a writer who broke into television when television was just breaking on the scene. He wrote for Martha Raye’s show, Martin and Lewis, Red Skelton, and others. He won five Emmys as the producer and head writer of The Carol Burnett Show. He said this about television writing opportunities:

On the down side, TV is not accessible to new writers, the door is closed and new writers are neither needed nor wanted. That’s what some say. Yet, on the up side, every year dozens of new writers break through. There is no set formula. One of the best ways is to get an agent who cares about new writers. There aren’t too many. Another way is to get your material to an ...