Creating Comedy Narratives for Stage and Screen

Chris Head

• Editore: Methuen Drama
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350155787
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoria: Television

This accessible and engaging text covering sketch, sitcom and comedy drama, alongside improvisation and stand-up, brings together a panoply of tools and techniques for creating short and long-form comedy narratives for live performance, TV and online. Referencing a broad range of comedy from both sides of the Atlantic, spanning several decades and including material on contemporary internet sketches, it offers all kinds of useful advice on creating comic narratives for stage and screen: using life experience as raw material; constructing comedy worlds; creating comic characters, their relationships and interactions; structuring sketches, scenes and routines; and developing and plotting stories. The book's interviewees, from the UK and the USA, feature stand-ups, sketch comics, improvisers and TV comedy producers, and include Steve Kaplan, Hollywood comedy guru and author of The Hidden Tools of Comedy, Will Hines teacher and improviser from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre and Lucy Lumsden TV producer and former Controller of Comedy Commissioning for BBC. Written by "the ideal person to nurture new talent" (The Guardian), Creating Comedy Narratives for Stage & Screen includes material you won't find anywhere else and is a stimulating resource for comedy students and their teachers, with a range and a depth that will be appreciated by even the most eclectic and multi-hyphenated writers and performers.

PART ONE

Inspiration

Chapter 1

The Comedy of Your Life

In my work as a comedy director, teacher and script editor, I work with many writers and writer-performers on developing narratives for sketches, short films, sitcom scripts, comedy drama, stand-up and more. If you are a writer-performer you’re holding the right book, and you are just the kind of person the comedy industry is particularly interested in. If you’re simply a writer, take heart. I’m sure you’re confident, charming and charismatic, but I was speaking recently with a TV comedy producer who says in gatherings of comedy people she seeks out the quiet, withdrawn, awkward writers! (So maybe play down that charisma a bit.) As a writer, there’s lots in this book for you, but if I may jump straight in with a big bit of advice for you, the writer, start performing too. If this is well outside your comfort zone, before you throw the book across the room (that’ll cause a scene if you’re browsing in a bookshop) – or less dramatically before you close the browser tab – I’m not suggesting you try and make a career of it. Just think of performing as a way to become a better writer. You could take some classes (stand-up, improv, acting, clowning) or at the very least start performing your scripts aloud with others. This will have a big knock-on effect on the naturalness and fluency of your dialogue and more.

Now, whatever form you’re working in, the most immediate source of comedy is your own self and life experience. So, in this opening chapter we’ll talk about your comedic self, the comedy persona that you present to audiences through your writing and performing, and the ways in which the raw ingredients of your life can be cooked up into comedy narratives. While your comedic self is present in all your work, the starkest and most immediate way to explore it is in stand-up, so we’ll start from your persona in stand-up, making links with creating fictional characters. Full-length autobiographical stand-up shows then segue into autobiographical sitcom/comedy drama, which finally leads into improv in narrative comedy as another way of bringing your own self and voice into the work.

I regularly refer to the brilliant books of Hollywood comedy consultant Steve Kaplan, so I was cock-a-hoop to speak with him for this book. I began by asking him about the stand-up’s persona and he told me, ‘Stand-ups who are unsuccessful go out there and make comments about other people, just pointing their finger. Whereas a really good stand-up, like George Carlin, isn’t just finding fault with others, he’s creating a character who is expressing those thoughts, and at the same time you’re laughing at him because he’s the cranky old man. It’s the persona that makes us laugh, not necessarily the nasty jibe or the observation. I think it’s more important to write out of character than to come up with funny things to say or funny things to do. A good stand-up either takes the blame or shares the blame.’

In other words, you’re either laughing at your own failings directly or acknowledging them alongside lampooning others. The majority of successful stand-ups share, laugh at and play with their negative sides. Kaplan says:

It’s important that whatever you do, you are in effect saying, ‘I’m a fucked-up human being, but it’s okay because so are you.’ In a way, a comedian is like Jesus Christ because they are going to confess their sins for everybody else. You, the audience member, don’t have to confess your sins, but here’s why you’re laughing: you know that this sin of the comedian’s is also yours. But it’s okay, you don’t have to confess to the guy sitting next to you. The comedian will take it on for you.

The same is true in comedy screenwriting, where you can reveal the truth of your failings and embarrassments through the characters and situations you create.

Positives and negatives

In stand-up, then, what will make your comedy persona effective is drawing out and sharing your bad sides: your unskilful, shameful, embarrassing aspects. The good news from the point of view of your self-esteem is that to create a balanced persona, you need to show both negative and positive sides to the audience. All negative and you are so dislikeable as to turn the audience off. (Although there are outliers who can find an audience despite this.) All positive and it’s very hard to find the funny. With a balanced persona, the positive things are why the audience will like you and the negative things are why they will find you funny.

Below is a table of 108 positive and 108 negative qualities. Ask someone you know well (and who will be relaxed and playful about doing this) to peruse this list and pick two positives and a negative for you. Even from a simple list of three words there are hints of the outlines of your comedic self. I recently asked my partner Kate to do this as an illustration of the exercise for a group, and for me she picked ‘affectionate, decisive and impractical’. It’s a fascinating exercise, as I wouldn’t have picked these three for myself and after the warm glow of the two positives (and having sucked up the negative), I could now start working with these three attributes comedically. Try and find ways, as Tony Allen suggests in his book Attitude, of switching attitude; for instance, from positive to negative (and vice-versa). Say, for example, I am wanting to express affection for someone (positive), I could then go on to plan an entirely impractical way of doing it (negative). Or perhaps I am discussing some impractical solutions to a problem (negative) but then I could decisively pick one: a positive trait, but it won’t be a positive outcome. Here we come to the interesting area where positive qualities cause problems, and misguided, impractical or simply insane methods to solve problems are at the heart of comedy.

To go deeper, pick three positives and three negatives, so you have a wider range of options to switch between. You will end up with something like this: Courteous, Generous, Philosophical/Clingy, Impatient, Rigid. If you’re working on a character, as with your stand-up persona, the positive qualities will be why we like the character and the negative why we find them funny. When everything is going well for the character and they’re comfortable, they will be manifesting their positive qualities. As soon as they are challenged, the negative will come out. Try writing a scene where they are attempting to get something they want from another character and are showing one or more of their positive qualities. Then as soon as they meet resistance, switch to one or more of the negative. The more pronounced and sudden the switches, the more vivid and comical a character will be.

A game you (or your characters) can play with the positives and negatives is to try to embody one or more of the positives but you keep being undermined and tripped up by one or more of the negatives. For example, I work with an improvisation exercise where you (or the character) are recalling a situation where you had to do something in your family life or in your relationship that was disagreeable but felt obliged to do it. The game is to try to talk about it generously and magnanimously, but for the bitterness and annoyance to keep slipping out around the edges. So, you’re trying to project positivity but the negativity is nonetheless being communicated. This gap between what you’re trying to project and what the audience perceive is where much character comedy is to be found. The bigger the gap, the bigger the potential comic value.

Positives		Negatives
Accepting	Broad-minded	Aggressive	Bitter
Affable	Calm	Apathetic	Blunt
Affectionate	Candid	Arrogant	Boastful
Amiable	Careful	Authoritarian	Boring
Amicable	Caring	Belligerent	Bossy
Balanced	Charming	Bigoted	Callous
Brave	Cheerful	Bitchy	Car...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Inspiration
• 1 The Comedy of Your Life
• 2 People Watching
• 3 Write What You Know and Love (or Hate)
• Part Two Action
• 4 Games and Worlds
• 5 SREP: Set-up, Reveal, Escalation, Payoff
• 6 Character Behaviour and Awareness
• 7 ‘What If?’ in Online Comedy and Beyond
• Part Three Show
• 8 Bosses, Strivers and Fools
• 9 Characters Driving the Narrative
• 10 Story Structure
• Suggested Further Reading
• Index
• Copyright