Comedy Writing Self-Taught. Gene Perret
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to be discouraging. You find you can’t keep up the impossible pace, so you abandon your efforts with the excuse, “Well, I tried, but I couldn’t do it.”
Set goals or quotas that are challenging but attainable.
Specific: It’s hard to meet a quota if you don’t really know what that quota is. “I’ll write a lot of one-liners today.” “I’ll write jokes until I can’t think of anything funny to write anymore.” With these sorts of quotas, you don’t really know when you’ve achieved them. They’re too vague. How much is a lot? How can you be sure that you’ve exhausted all the “funniness” that’s in you?
Specify the quantity. Vow to write five jokes a day. Vow to write ten jokes a day. You determine how many you can write because it is your personalized quota, but do make that goal measurable. Determining to write a bunch of pages is not really a quota. Determining to write ten pages is. Determining today to write a lot of words in your novel is not a quota. Determining to write 2,500 words today is.
Goal-oriented: This attribute, too, has to do with being specific. Your quota should guarantee that when you meet it, you have product in hand. It is specific to say “I’ll work on my writing for two hours today—from 10 a.m. to noon.” That’s definitely specific, but it doesn’t necessarily generate any tangible results. It’s quite possible that you could sit at the keyboard for those two hours and produce no usable results. Nevertheless, you’ve fulfilled your promise. You worked for two hours.
It’s commendable that you are dedicated enough to sit at your keyboard for that long. However, it’s more commendable if you generate quality material while you’re sitting there. I’m pretty sure that when your boss hands you a work assignment he doesn’t say, “Work on this for a week.” He’d be more likely to say, “Have this on my desk by Friday.” Results are what count; not how long it takes you to achieve them.
You’re better served if you assign a specific goal to your work. It’s fine to set aside two hours to do it in, but make sure that your two hours of effort create a concrete product. If you reach that goal early, you can take some time off or keep going and produce even more results. If you don’t achieve your specific goal, maybe you have to stay at the keyboard a little longer.
Clients can buy only results, not effort.
Divided into reasonably short segments: We’ve already discovered that interruptions are momentum breakers. However, you can’t write continuously. Both you and your computer deserve a rest sometime. The trick now is to keep the interruptions from interfering with the momentum as much as possible. This is accomplished by keeping the work periods relatively steady. Set your quota for as short a period as is reasonable.
Strangely, there is a difference between resolving to write one act of my four-act teleplay this week and resolving to write all four acts of my teleplay by the end of the month. One function of your quota is to keep you turning out material at a fairly steady rate. Presumably, if you stick to your quota, you will do that.
But let’s look at this difference more closely. Resolving to write four acts of your teleplay by the end of the month means that if you don’t produce one act at the end of the first week, you’re still on quota. Right? If you still have nothing on paper by the end of the second week, you’re still on quota. If you continue to get no writing done, you’re still on quota at the end of the third week. Now you have only one week left to get four acts written. You’ve moved into the “unreasonable” area of your quota. In effect, you’re still living up to your promised quota, but you have destroyed the momentum.
However, if you determine to write one act of your teleplay each week, and you get nothing done that first week, you’re now off quota. You have to get yourself moving. So as we discussed earlier, it’s more beneficial to hit 20 golf balls a day than it is to put it off and hit 600 at the end of the month.
But again, this is your quota. You design it. You can set a schedule that demands daily results or you can set one that allows for results every other day. You can even set weekly goals. Going beyond that time span, though, may defeat the purpose of the quota system.
Another thing that setting shorter time periods accomplishes is that it maintains your interest and enthusiasm in your writing. Putting your quota off for months at a time is tempting fate. It’s too easy to lose passion and abandon your original goal.
Overwriting
The second concept is to overwrite. Overwriting doesn’t imply that you should add so much to your writing that it becomes poorly written. It doesn’t demand that you add bulk to your writing just to get more words onto the paper. What it does mean is that you deliver a little more than is required of you. Always deliver enough of an overflow to allow you or your client to select the best of your output. For instance, if a comedian needs two jokes for an opening segment, you deliver ten. If a sitcom script demands a new punchline on page 15, you jot five or six possible improvements in the margin. You, the producer, or the actor can then select the one that works best. If you’re searching for the next plot point in your teleplay, it may be nice to generate several possibilities. This permits you to consider them all and select the best option.
Overwriting is a fine habit for a comedy writer to develop for several reasons:
It improves the quality of your work: Obviously, by writing more you increase the quantity of your work. Are we suggesting then that in comedy quantity is more important than quality? No, but we are saying that quantity can improve quality. You have more to choose from so your final selections should be top level.
I often illustrate this point by recalling one high school in my hometown that was a perennial football powerhouse. This team was consistently so strong that it was almost a physical threat to many of the other school teams. Why was it so overwhelmingly powerful year in and year out? One reason was that the team had a student body that was five times larger than its competitors. With more students to choose from, the coaches could pick players with more size and bulk. The talent pool was larger so the team usually had more skilled players, too.
Similarly, if you have a client who needs five good jokes and you furnish twenty-five, he or she will be able to pick the five best. That improves the resultant quality.
It helps you to go beyond the obvious: With many humorous premises there are some easy jokes—the references or the punchlines are predictable to practically everyone. There are some jokes that everyone writes—especially nonprofessionals. These are the obvious gags. Often these are the cheap jokes.
Just as these jokes immediately pop into the heads of nonwriters, they jump into the minds of professional comedy writers, too. Only by sticking with the premise and looking for more references and ideas do you come up with jokes that are unique, unexpected, surprising, and funnier.
Those are the jokes that you want to write, but if you don’t resolve to work a little further into the project, to give more than the bare minimum, you may never reach the brilliant lines.
It ensures that you have thought through all of the possibilities: Consider Jeff Foxworthy’s signature routine “You might be a redneck if . . .” That premise feels quite limited. If you were assigned to write punchlines based on that setup, you’d have a difficult time coming up with ten to fifteen solid gags. Yet look at what that setup has produced. Foxworthy, I’m sure, has done hundreds of variations on that line from the stage. He has published books that probably list thousands of solid, funny punchlines based on the redneck premise. And as many as are out there today, thousands more will be written and published in the future. The possibilities are endless.
Yet the temptation is there for us comedy writers to say to ourselves about any subject, “There is nothing else funny about this topic.” However, more, and many times better, lines are still available. By writing a little bit beyond what we feel is our limit, and by vowing to do a little more than