What Are You Laughing At?

How to Write Humor for Screenplays, Stories, and More

Brad Schreiber

• Publisher: Allworth
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781621536017
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Escritura de guiones de cine

**Winner of the 2022 William Randolph Hearst Award for Outstanding Service in Professional Journalism** "People have forgotten how to be funny, " says Chris Vogler in his foreword to What Are You Laughing at? Luckily, experienced and award-winning humor writer Brad Schreiber is here to remind us all how it's done. If laughter is the best medicine, be prepared to feel fit as a fiddle after perusing these pages. Brad's clever wit and well-timed punch lines are sure to leave you grasping your sides, while his wise advice will ensure that you're able to follow in his comedic footsteps. With more than seventy excerpts from such expert prose and screenwriters as Woody Allen, Steve Martin, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., as well as unique writing exercises for all situations, this comprehensive tutorial will teach you how to write humor prose for any literary form, including screenwriting, story writing, theater, television, and audio/radio. Additionally, readers are given sage advice on different tactics for writing comedic fiction versus comedic nonfiction. Some of the topics discussed include:

• Life experience versus imagination
• How to use humor to develop theme/setting, character, and dialogue
• Rhythm and sound of words
• Vulgarity and bad taste
• How to market your humor prose in the digital market
• Thoroughly revised and updated, and with new information on writing short, humorous films, What Are You Laughing at? is your endless source to learning the art of comedy.

CHAPTER 1

Comedic Structure

THE NATURE OF HUMOR

Well, how do you like my writing so far?

While there are few rules about writing humor, generally Shock or Surprise are present, as in the line above.

Most professional writing insists you write in complete, rational, grammatical sentences.

Humor, not all that mostly.

I think of comedy as “the skewed vision,” seeing events, people and possibilities that are off-center.

Humor writing has few rules and in many ways, this is one of its greatest rewards. In joke writing, often the “Rule of Threes” is invoked. That is, setup, repetition and joke. In other words, here’s a situation, here’s more of the same and now, a twist.

This rule does not have a bearing on writing prose humor and screenplays. And the forms are multiple and wonderfully variable.

Humorous fiction can include a short story, novel, song, poem, monologue.

Humorous nonfiction can include an article, essay, memoir, speech.

Humorous screenplays can be for shorts or features, live action or animation, studio or independent.

This book is for writers of humor. This book is for writers of obituaries. This book is for people who don’t write and don’t plan to write but pay for cable or satellite TV and are still not amused.

Nontraditional humorous prose has an elasticity you cannot find in other nonpoetic forms. You can comedically redo a shopping list, a diary of someone famous/infamous or an instruction manual (more on non-traditional forms in Chapter 12).

On the subject of manuals, there was a collection of female humor published by the National Lampoon, entitled Titters. It contained a phony instruction manual for a certain well-known tampon, Clampax Pontoons, written by Emily Prager, with art done in similar, cutaway style, light blue ink for text and directions that required the user to be fairly good at gymnastics.

Humor is as personal as how we dress. And sometimes, in as bad taste. But taste is in the mouth of the beholder.

HEALING ASPECTS OF HUMOR

But the curative power of laughter cannot be overpraised. One need only examine the work of Norman Cousins or Deepak Chopra to appreciate its healthy aspects. Dr. Bernie Siegel, in a lecture on humor and healing, read from an article about two men who were in their eighties. Both had previously been critically ill, and yet, they did not let it affect their quality of life.

“One of the best things about Francis,” claimed one of the senior men, “is his memory problems. I can tell him a joke and four days later, I tell him the same joke and he laughs at it again.”

In the class I’ve taught for UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, entitled, strangely, Writing Humorous Fiction and Nonfiction, I once had a student who worked as an EMT—Emergency Medical Technician. One of the first humor pieces he wrote was about an EMT fumbling about with burnt bodies, charred beyond recognition, that he pulled out of a destroyed house.

The good news? When he read it, no one threw up.

Even better news? He really wanted to learn the principles of writing humor, and by the final week, his Final Project was met by gales of laughter. It was about him, as a James Bond-type secret agent, saving the world in a ridiculous plot against a disgusting, fat, oily villain who constantly stroked a cat and emanated pure evil … and was coincidentally named Brad Schreiber.

Now, if a man who spends most of his week dealing with fires, explosions and car wrecks can lighten up, why can’t you?

IF IT’S PAINFUL, WHY AM I LAUGHING?

This leads to the proposition that comedy always seems to contain some form of pain. John Vorhaus, in his book The Comic Toolbox, comes up with the equation comedy = truth plus pain.

The comedian Carol Burnett has summarized it, “Comedy is pain plus time.”

Writer and cartoonist James Thurber contended, “Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.”

Perhaps Mel Brooks has put the whole pain/pleasure picture into focus best. He said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

Think about it. Which is more amusing? A kid scuffing his shoe on a floor, waiting to use a public bathroom? Or the same kid hopping from foot to foot, making faces and eventually kicking the bathroom door?

That’s not funny, some of you say. It’s cruel. Maybe so. But the fact is this: We laugh at things we ourselves don’t wish to experience.

CONFUSION CREATES HUMOR

I was once hired to write a book proposal that concerned the insanely adventurous comedian/performance artist/hoaxer Andy Kaufman. Andy, I learned, became very involved with the Transcendental Meditation movement.

At one point, he was present at a retreat with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and asked about the nature of humor. Andy wanted to know what made people laugh, and the Maharishi replied it was the confusion in one’s mind hearing something that momentarily made no sense but, upon further reflection, did so, in an odd way.

Admittedly, some people will laugh at your non sequitur, a statement or conclusion that doesn’t seem to connect to what preceded it, and others will shake their heads and look at you as if you have an arm growing out of your forehead. Your “sense of humor” is really more your “preference of humor.”

And as Larry Gelbart said, “You don’t have a sense of humor. It has you.”

Thus, if you write something and no one thinks it is amusing, you can say they have a different preference. You can say they are complete imbeciles. But you can’t say they have no sense of humor whatsoever.

Unless they are Russian. Or possibly German.

COMEDY’S ENEMIES (HUMOR’S TUMORS): CLICHÉ AND MEEKNESS

“I think to be oversensitive about clichés is like being oversensitive about table manners.”

—Evelyn Waugh

The most common error of writers of humor is to make lazy choices.

Comedic Clichés are ideas or jokes that have already been done before and that you personally found so amusing, you thought you could rephrase it and make us all happy. Well, you’re wrong. We want to be surprised.

So, what is a Comedic Cliché?

• Foreigners who drive cabs and work in convenience stores

• Cops hanging out in doughnut shops

• Priests who drink too much

• Hookers with hearts of gold

• Anything in a tabloid newspaper, at this point

What we are saying is you have to go pretty far afield to mine humor from such topics. For example, there are such bizarre stories in the tabloids, it is a stretch to top them.

I’m a fan of the surrealist comedy group The Firesign Theatre. In fact, I have cowritten the autobiography of one of its founding members, Phil Proctor. Firesign once recorded a bit about a supermarket tabloid newspaper called The Daily Toilet.

In part:

ANNOUNCER 1: John Kennedy’s come back in a UFO with a great new diet!

ANNOUNCER 2: Where’d you read that?

ANNOUNCER 1: I read it in the Toilet. The Daily Toilet.

By combining three kinds of stories in one headline, Firesign managed to send up tabloids, no easy task, because those papers by now have become a Comedic Cliché.

Meekness is the other great kidney stone to be passed out of the body comedic. Writers often get mildly amusing ideas and simply go with them, refusing to try to better them.

For example, consider the difference between these:

“He’s pretty fun to be with—for a guy just out of a twelve-step program.”

“He’s pretty fun to be with—for a guy just out of a twelve-step program for recovering mimes.”

By making bold choices and not necessarily succumbing to the first thing that comes into your head, you increase the charm of your writing.

And I seem to have broken my own rule. Isn’t making fun of mimes a Comedic Cliché?

Beating up or insulting mimes is a cliché. Seeing one in a group setting, trying to stop pretending he’s stuck in a cube while wearing normal clothes and no white face makeup, is something else again.

Don’t go for the common target and don’t let your writing get lazy.

If you are going to make fun of Californians, don’t bring up granola and crystals. It’s old.

Everyone here knows it’s past lives regression and pineapple juice enemas. For now.

SOME PRINCIPLES OF COMEDIC STRUCTURE

There are certain basic principles for creating humor. Some are combined together for comedic effect. And since we were talking about pineapple juice enemas, let us start with …

1. Shock or Surprise

I began the beginning of this first chapter by asking you how you liked the book, since I knew you would not be prepared for it. This is what aids the effectiveness of humor—the lack of preparation for what is to come.

Shock suggests cold, clammy skin or having one’s eyes roll back in one’s head. If you can make someone laugh that hard, you’re damn good.

No, in this context, Shock is a strongly visceral reaction that, we hope, leads to amusement.

Surprise is a less jarring form of Shock.

After Surprise, as everyone knows, comes Pleasant Bewilderment and then Whimsical Passing Interest, but that’s heading in the wrong direction, so never mind.

Shock or Surprise is the undergarment that holds in the unsightly flab of humor writing. Remove it at your own risk. Either Shock or Surprise deals with not just the jolt, but the inappropriateness of the dialogue, action, narrative and so on.

You see a stranger on the street, smile and warmly say, “Nice day.” The stranger responds by shouting at you, “Don’t tell me what kind of day to have!”

Whether this is a shock or just a surprise, I will leave to you. But this ultracranky stranger’s inappropriate response is made funnier by the fact that you didn’t tell him/her what kind of day to have at all.

An excellent example of shocking imagery and verbiage in humor writing comes from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The father of so-called “Gonzo Journalism,” Thompson began by realizing that his journalistic coverage of the Kentucky Derby horse race was not going to be as interesting as his stream-of-consciousness observations about covering the event.

In Fear and Loathing, subtitled A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, Thompson and his 300-pound Samoan attorney partake of far too much alcohol and a full assortment of drugs, and before they ever get to the assigned event, Vegas’s Mint 400 off-road bike and dunebuggy race, they walk into the Circus-Circus Hotel.

“The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the War,” he claims and goes on to describe an insane, high wire act over the gambling tables, which includes:

… a half-naked fourteen-year-old girl being chased through the air by a snarling wolverine, which is suddenly locked in a death battle with two silver-painted Polacks who come swinging down from opposite balconies and meet in mid-air on the wolverine’s neck … both Polacks seize the animal as they fall straight toward the craps table—but they bounce off the net; they separate and spring back towards the roof in three different directions, and just as they’re about to fall again they are grabbed out of the air by three Korean kittens and trapezed off to one of the balconies.

We have certain expectations of what goes on in a circus (even in Las Vegas). By describing this circus in a humorously jarring way (admittedly affected by the ether the two characters have just breathed), Thompson sets an appropriately delirious tone for the rest of the book.

2. Juxtaposition

By definition, in juxtaposing two elements in humor writing, you contrast or compare them. Again, we are straining until veins encircle our Adam’s apples to fight expectation, to create unique perspectives in our combinations of ideas.

I mentioned the cliché of the hooker with the heart of gold, toughened by life’s demands, who suddenly opens her heart and either falls in love or does an uncharacteristically good deed.

In the movies, she usually winds up dead for her efforts.

What about the idea of a hooker with a bra...