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 what is required of us, we may be able to find more interesting, different, and funny lines. At least we know that we have explored beyond the average amount of possibilities.
It prevents us from quitting too soon: To me, this is one of the biggest faults of comedy writers—we quit too soon. We give up much too early on both the premise we’re working on and the specific joke we’re working on. Our tendency is to say, “Well, I’ve written a joke, now I can start writing the next joke.” But is that joke you’ve written in the best possible form to extract laughs. Would a word change improve it? Would a more well-defined setup line help the punch? Would a different payoff be funnier?
This advice to write more applies not only to the quantity of writing but also to the quality of your writing. If you give each joke a little more thought, you may provide better jokes.
We may also quit too soon on a premise. If we’re writing a sitcom, we may assign action and dialogue to the characters and then move on. But might there be different actions the characters could take in this situation? Are there different words they could say? All of this is worth a little more consideration.
I’ll repeat these ideas again because they will be useful in teaching yourself to write comedy and because they will be extremely helpful to you throughout your comedy writing career. Write to a quota and overwrite.
The PAL was a big deal in our neighborhood when I was young. PAL was an acronym for the Police Athletic League. The local police precincts would form youth teams and play against each other around the city. I played baseball for them, as did almost every other kid in the area. One day, the sergeant who managed our team invited us into the gym in the basement of the 41st Precinct. To us youngsters, it was spectacular. It was a regular gym, just like we would see in the movies. It had punching bags and dumbbells, and the pièce de résistance was an actual boxing ring right there in the center of the room.
The policemen who ran this precinct’s PAL were putting together a boxing team. They gave us a few lessons on how to jab and protect ourselves from a jab and a little bit of basic footwork for a boxer. It was heady stuff for kids our age, and we all decided to become boxers. I thought it would be a wonderful life because all of the fighters I saw were famous, they were rich, they dressed nice, and they were surrounded by gorgeous women. It was everything a twelve-year-old longed for in life.
After our fundamental boxing lessons, the policemen paired us off for a few rounds of actual sparring. I was put in against a kid I didn’t even know, but I was quick and clever so I thought he’d be no match for me.
I threw a few jabs as we were taught, and I blocked his as I was taught. Then he abandoned the standard moves and launched an uppercut that stunned and staggered me. The cop who was refereeing immediately stopped the boxing and told me to go take a break. I was happy to.
I went into the bathroom and threw some water on my face to refresh my woozy self. When I glanced in the mirror, I noticed that all my teeth were outlined in blood. My opponent didn’t knock any of my teeth out, but he did jar them loose from their moorings a tad. He also jarred loose my desire to become a famous, rich, well-dressed, womanizing boxer.
My dreams of becoming a vicious, determined fighter who would waffle opponents around the head and face were appealing to me. Once it dawned on me that other folks might want to waffle me around the head and face, I wisely opted out of that particular sport. The purpose of this
