chapter 4

      Start Small With

      Short Humor and Blogs

       Humor is reason gone mad.

      —Groucho Marx

      Before you run in a marathon, take a brisk walk around the block. Short humor won't make you rich, but it can be a way of testing the water in your new comedy-writing career.

      I tell people who want to be playwrights to start by writing a five- page scene, then move up to a 10-minute play (which means no more than 10 pages). From there they tackle a few variations of a one-act play: first 15-20 pages, then 30 pages, then a long one- act play of 60 pages. Then it's time to write the full-length play (80 pages and up).

      It stands to reason that before taking on a sketch (3-5 pages), TV spec script (35 pages) or a full-length screenplay (110 pages), it might be smart to write something less than one page.

      What is a short humor piece?

      Think of it as something between 500 and 1,000 words that would appear in The Onion, The New Yorker, The New York Times op-ed page, The Huffington Post, and numerous periodicals of all tastes and subjects. And of course there's Mad Magazine and National Lampoon.

      New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has a unique comedic voice. She wrote a piece relating tensions in North Korea to the characters in Mean Girls.

      Woody Allen has been publishing short pieces in The New Yorker since the 1960s. Think of the work of David Sedaris. Steve Martin also has a side career of writing short humor pieces (not to mention plays and novels). To get a sampling of their work, Google The New Yorker and go to their archives.

      Short humor could also be a comical essay for Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Playboy, or any number of men's and women's magazines, not necessarily only humor magazines. The Internet is filled with e-zines and websites that are looking for material. They may not pay anything, but you're getting a credit and exposure.

      The key to short humor is, well, to keep it short.

      If you write something that will fill one page in a mainstream magazine, you have a better chance of selling it. Same with an op-ed piece for The New York Times. Perhaps two or three times a month you'll see something amusing there and they're typically less than 500 words.

      Less is more is the case with virtually all writing, but even more so with the short stuff.

      I'm not talking about short stories. They are an entirely different thing. Other than in oddball contests where people are asked to write a short-short story, most short stories go over that 1,000 limit I mentioned.

      Below is a short humor piece that I wrote for The New York Times.

       How to Run a Network in 12 Easy Steps

      At a secret location high in the Hollywood Hills, a unique support group meets once a week to share the pain of a specialized dysfunction that began during the latter half of the 20th century.

      Its abbreviation is OCPD, otherwise known as Obsessive Compulsive Programming Disorder. Its victims are past and present individuals who have run a network and found themselves in the position of deciding what gets on and what doesn't.

      Here, smuggled out of the meeting place, is the official 12-Step Program agenda for OCPD victims:

      (1). Have the conviction to cancel sitcoms that aren't funny, to renew what is funny, and to know the difference.

      (2). Have the strength not to give Kelsey Grammar another sitcom. He was unforgettable as Frasier and will always be associated with the character no matter how hard he tries not to be.

      (3). Have the faith to resist all inclinations to take genuinely fresh and original concepts and develop them into finished products that only a business major could love.

      (4). Have the self-confidence to not even think about ripping off Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

      (5). Have the courage to use your political contacts to pass federal legislation that would bar any further sitcoms dealing with mismatched roommates, single moms, divorced dads, or oddly blended families.

      (6). Have the nerve to develop programs about flesh-and-blood, recognizable human beings (even if they are animated or aliens).

      (7). Have the self-assurance to eliminate from your vocabulary the words “tried” and “true” (except when used in the following context: “I tried to watch Hank and it's true – it sucked”).

      (8). Have the boldness to say yes to intelligent, witty, cerebral comedies that won't ever be in the Top 10 or Top 20 or even the Top 30 and probably won't generate big advertising bucks and may barely break even, but just might draw in an audience so turned off to most of what's on that it could start a trend and help you take pride in bringing wit back to the boob tube.

      (9). Have the assertiveness to greenlight programs for audiences over 50. Millions of high-end baby boomers who were couch potatoes before the term was even invented are channel-surfing every night. They're tired of watching the icons of their youth trashed on E!'s True Hollywood Story, crop circle theories on the Discovery Channel, and Bill O'Reilly's nightly attempt to be tougher than Mike Wallace.

      (10). Have the integrity to undo the damage your predecessors have done to children by eliminating violence and blatant sexual innuendo that has certainly gotten some of these people really nasty spots in Hell. Always remember: Satan is waiting.

      (11). Have the fortitude to ignore focus groups, demographics, and overeducated, over-opinionated experts and instead ask the person who cleans your office, or delivers your wine, or drops off your FedEx packages what they think. And never, ever forget that these are called “regular” people, who watch TV to relax at the end of a hard day.

      (12). Have the wisdom, should you find a “regular” person whose insights are right on the money, to resist all urges to hire him or her as a vice president. Just under 550 words. It has some amusing points.