The Ten Commandments of Comedy. Gene Perret
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hit the wall switch in your home because they’re wired in accordance with laws governing electricity. If these items didn’t follow the rules, they wouldn’t work.
There are fundamentals, too, that apply to comedy—rules that must be followed. Some may object that comedy should be free-flowing, improvisational, creative. “I don’t want to follow rules,” they might say. “I just want to do what I want to do to make people laugh. Following some set of regulations would inhibit my originality.” It’s a faulty argument. Would you want to fly to Pittsburgh in a plane that was built by someone who said, “I don’t want to follow rules. I just want to build airplanes the way I want to build them?” Probably not. It’s almost certain that you’d rather fly in one that gets off the ground and stays off it for as long as the pilot wants.
Does adhering to established principles inhibit originality? There are countless types and models of airplanes: single-engine aircraft, giant passenger planes, stealth bombers, huge cargo transports, and hundreds of other variations. Despite their differences, they all fly because they follow the principles of flight. There’s no foreseeable limit to the inventiveness of aeronautical engineers and the machines they will create, yet you can be certain the remarkable aircraft of the future will still follow the principles of flight.
Again, though, some may argue that these examples—airplanes, clocks, and lights—are mechanical. Mechanical items are obliged to follow physical principles. Creative artists, though, should be free of such restrictions. For artists to follow rules, these people might claim, would be to limit their creativity, their genius.
Music, though, is a creative art. There are brilliant classical composers, great song writers, and innovative musicians who work in jazz, rhythm and blues, heavy metal, and so on. Yet all of them are governed by strict, mathematical principles. Scales are well defined. Chords that harmonize with the melody are controlled. Play according to those rules and you can create beautiful music in whichever genre you prefer. Break those rules and the music sounds discordant.
Knowing the principles of music frees rather than inhibits the musician. Many people can pick up a guitar and readily play hundreds of songs by learning just three, maybe four, basic chords. By studying the principles that govern music, though, a musician can then add depth, variation, and charm to the music. If Beethoven had been limited to using three or four basic chords, he might have played some cute ditties for his friends to sing along with at dinner parties, but he could never have written his symphonies and would never have become a musical legend.
The more you know about your craft, the better you can master it . . . and the more enjoyment you can bring to yourself and to others.
A key benefit of knowing the principles of your craft is that it allows you to search back and find flaws in your work. It also gives you the knowledge you need to then correct those problems. It’s always interesting in sports that regardless how well athletes perform, they always insist that they can improve something or other in their performance. How do they do that? Invariably, they return to basics. Knowing what principles apply to their sport, they can check to make sure they’re following those rules and apply corrective measures when needed.
A well received comedy performance is a tremendous high. However, a weak performance is depressing. Comedians say “I bombed” or “I died”—it feels that traumatic. Knowing the rules of comedy allows the humorist to analyze the material or the presentation and discover why the performance bombed, and what must be done to repair it. It’s an effective way to convert a poor or mediocre comedy bit into a one that will have the audience in stitches.
There are rules, precepts, principles, regulations, standards, fundamentals—whatever you want to call them—that control the effectiveness of comedy. I’ve chosen to call them “commandments.” Admittedly, it’s in part a gimmick to get your attention. But The Ten Commandments of Comedy has a biblical tone to it, a sort of threat from above that might be ignored only at one’s peril.
The precepts that follow in this book are the rules that govern making people laugh. There are ten of them, but the order in which they’re listed is irrelevant. For your humor to be effective, you should adhere to all of them. If, for some reason, a joke or a routine doesn’t seem to be producing the results you think it should, it would be wise to review each of the commandments to try to find out where you’re violating or bending the rules.
No one can really explain why people laugh or what prompts them to laugh. People in the profession have timidly accepted that.
“The jokes didn’t work tonight.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. The people just didn’t laugh.”
Suppose you took a watch to the repair shop and asked the jeweler to have a look at it. You say, “Do you know what’s wrong with this watch?”
“Yeah, it’s not working.”
“Why is it not working?”
“I don’t know. It’s just not working.”
You ask, “Does it need a new battery? Does it need cleaning? Does it need winding? Are the gears jammed? What?”
“It’s just not working.”
We wouldn’t accept that from a watch repair shop, but too often we accept it about our comedy routines. It’s simply a mystery that we learn to live with. But that mystery generates a fear. It’s like trying to navigate in a completely darkened room. Many people hesitate to use humor because of this fear. Speakers sometimes say that they’re afraid to open with a joke because no one ever laughs at their jokes.
Learning and being aware of the Ten Commandments of Comedy can brighten that metaphorical darkened room. Comedians and comedy writers can learn why their material needs improvement and where the changes should be made. The Ten Commandments are a checklist you can use to review your presentation. With them, you can now find out why the watch isn’t working and do something to correct the defect.
There’s a story about a gentleman who was a fabulous basketball free-throw shooter. He would often give demonstrations where, blindfolded, he would make shot after shot. One time, he demonstrated his skills and Bill Sharman, the Hall-of-Fame guard who played for the Boston Celtics, was present. Sharman was the league leader in free throws for many years while he played. After the demonstration, this man asked Bill Sharman how he could improve his free-throw shooting talents. Bill Sharman said, “Take off the blindfold.”
That’s what these Ten Commandments will do for you. They’ll help you improve your comedy ability by taking off the blindfold.
I
THOU SHALT SURPRISE
Surprise is such an essential element of comedy that if your joke, story, anecdote, or piece of business doesn’t have a twist or a surprise to it, it’s not comedy. Perhaps the only exception to this is if you get a laugh and then elongate it, keep repeating it, or refer back to it occasionally. Even then, though, the laughter is built on the surprise of the initial gag.
The craft of stage magic is a good illustration of the use of surprise and it parallels the way comics use the same principle. When the magician is locked in chains inside a bag and sealed within a locked trunk, his beautiful assistant stands on the trunk, lifts a curtain around herself and suddenly, almost instantaneously, drops the curtain. In that fraction of a second, she is gone and the magician stands on the trunk. When that moment happens there is an audible gasp from the audience. Wow! That is unbelievable. Surprise is part of every magic illusion, and it should be part of every bit of comedy that’s done—and the impact should be just as astounding as the audience’s amazement at the magician’s skill.
Magicians rarely reveal the secret behind their tricks. Why? Because if the audience knows how the illusion is executed, there is no longer any surprise. Consequently, there’s little entertainment value.
What