This comedy element works best within stories where the audience is emotionally engaged with events. This way you can build tension up to the deceptive climax. In the Pink Panther series of films Inspector Clouseau institutes a training program where his hired assistant Kato must attack him “wherever and whenever I least expect it.” This becomes a running gag. However, because Inspector Clouseau is regularly in real danger, the audience is never sure whether it’s the villain or Kato who has just gotten the better of him, and laugh in pleasure and relief when it is Kato.

Comic horror movies regularly use this trope from The Evil Dead to Shaun of the Dead. The clever twist used in Shaun of the Dead was the audience would be shown something that was genuinely dangerous within the world of the film, the protagonists would at first feel threatened, then come up with an explanation that made their fear seem ludicrous and laugh, but the threat was real and they had just managed to unwittingly escape it.

In more dramatic movies you might find a character who upon being told they have cancer burst into fits of wry mirth. The laugh can be ironic or just the quickest way to cope. We may not get any physical relief from a traumatic situation, but the laughter provides the emotional relief that generates resilience and personal heroism.

Fear-relief humour can work for the individual raconteur on stage, and literature has made it work now and then. I remember one moment in the Harry Potter books where this was used. I remember many times laughing at silly ghost stories we used to tell when I was a kid at a slumber party. Probably the most effective media for this element are theatrical productions and film, where it is much easier to generate the sort of emotional focus and climatic tension necessary for big laughs. Give it a try sometime and let me know how you go.

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

Elements of Comedy Introduction

The problem with an English degree is that you go into the subject because of a love of reading. However once it’s your degree, it becomes a chore since you are always reading with a pen in your hand ready to write that graded essay. So what do you do to relax? I was in the position where I was reading and enjoying the high-minded stuff for my degree, and reading pulp fiction to relax.

A famous piece of advice for writers is to read broadly and read deeply. I have learned to become a lover of culture: high, fringe, and mainstream. This has served me well. The artistic works taught me refined language skills, how to evoke emotional depth, and how to broach difficult subjects. The pulp works taught me how to plot, how to generate drama, and how to be accessible to a broad audience.

For comedians I would say we should follow similar advice: take time to watch other comedians and watch a broad diversity of other comedians, not just those doing things similar to your own humour. I am a great fan of Garrison Keillor style humour. He tells stories about farmers and members of small town communities. Yet, we don’t hear many bogan jokes from him. Most of my audience are city folk. I need to be able to reach them, even if I bring in the odd (very odd) cow joke. Also, I can’t be another Garrison Keillor, I can only ever be a Katherine Phelps. So, in order to reach my audience and find my particular voice, I enjoy the boganish humour of Big Al and Claire Hooper. I also watch the charming city humour of Adam Hills. Catherine Deveny’s sharp political humour is worth a look in, though I would drown in sorrow trying to do that stuff myself.

Further I would say that comedians do best when we broadly experience life. You can’t really live the life of a hermit and expect to have enough material to make others laugh. At least dip your toe in some of the current successes/manias even if you will ultimately take them apart with your jokes. I love Harry Potter. It’s very easy for me to tell jokes based on the world of Harry Potter. The DaVinci Code seemed silly to me from the outset. I waited to buy the book when I knew it would start turning up in the two dollar bin at the used bookstore. Fortunately, I was saved from paying any money by a friendly neighbour. The writing was absolutely turgid and the concept ridiculous. But so many people have read it or seen the movie that I now have a point of contact with them through my jokes about that work.

I’m not asking you to force yourself onto experiences you find unpleasant, just be open and free of judgement enough to give a broad variety of things a try. And they don’t all have to be mainstream things. Do something outrageous like take yourself out to an Andean restaurant or an Italian opera. Your impressions of that experience may form the basis of a very funny routine. I remember watching Irish Comedian Ed Byrne doing that by describing the plot to Cosi Fan Tutti while going on about the trials and tribulations of dating. This was laugh until you cry humour.

Your exercise for today is to:

1. Rent a DVD of some comedian or comic film that you wouldn’t normally go to and watch it.
2. Take yourself out to a restaurant or event totally out of the norm for you. For example—go to a knitting fair, eat at an Eastern European cafe, go see a film at the Chinese cinema based on the look of a poster.

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

Some people, I have noticed, genuinely do not get when they are causing others to feel hurt or uncomfortable. Their intentions may be  jovial, but the results are they are either tuned out or disliked. So, this article is going to spell out those areas where a comedian should walk lightly.

The base line with all humour is that YOU are fair game for your own jokes, others less so, except perhaps if you perform equal opportunity ribbing.

Where this is most notably used is in relation to race. You can make fun of your own race, but not someone else’s. Woody Allen is famous for his Jewish humour. Lenny Henry will gently mock certain aspects of the African Jamaican community living in London. Not acceptable was the young blond blue-eyed South African comedian I saw telling jokes about the indigenous African peoples. He wasn’t booed off the stage, but he did receive a shocked silence and is unlikely to have people looking foward to his next performance.

Jokes about physical aesthetics should mostly relate to yourself. If you are bald, tell bald jokes. If you are blond, tell dumb blond jokes. Everyone gets to laugh then, and one segement of your audience doesn’t feel picked upon, but rather lifted up by being part of the joke. We enjoy laughing at our own absurdity and humanity within certain contexts. However, we all have feelings and no one should be made to feel less about themselves over superficialities. The one area where audiences don’t mind jokes about physical aesthetics is when they are aimed specifically at individuals in power or in the media. I would be careful about this, since it still speaks of more general judgements.

The issue of weight goes deeper than just aesthetics. We are looking at issues to do with health, parenting, self-esteem, cultural and advertising messages. Our society currently has been pushing outlooks on gratification and body image that are damaging a huge portion of our population. This all needs to be looked at, certain aspects need to be mocked so that people gain awareness of the issues.  However, you must remember that the people who have paid to come see you, many of them are victims of their families and cultures. Yes, they need to take responsibility for themselves. Alienating them is not going to resolve the problem.

I recall one gig where I had the pleasure of sitting next to a lovely young woman who was telling me about how much she enjoyed the comedian we were about to see. He was a skinny bloke and part way through his routine he quoted a statistic that stated half of all Australians are overweight and about a third are obese (and probably three quarters believe they are overweight). I sucked in my breath and started thinking real hard at him, “Look at your audience, look at your audience.” He obviously was not a telepath because he proceeded to tell some demeaning jokes concerning fat kids. I felt the joy sucked out of the woman next to me and the whole audience go cold. The comedian continued to get some polite laughter, but the audience was clearly waiting for him to finish at that point.

Speaking of alienating half an audience, probably the worst examples of this are male comedians who start telling pointedly sexist jokes. Gone is the era when comedy clubs were almost entirely a boy’s club. People often take dates to enjoy a bit of laughter together at a live show.  Insult the female date and you have also alienated the fellow who hoped to impress his companion by bringing her along. You’ve now insulted almost 100% of the audience. Also, young women are claiming the field of comedy as much their own as rock music, so they are frequently turning up  in groups. I have watched more than one show fall to pieces when a comedian starts making snide remarks about “women” and is then affronted when he gets an angry vocal response from that half of the audience. Certainly, plenty of good jokes can be found in the politics of gender. It works best when you tell jokes on YOUR OWN GENDER, or you make equal opportunity jokes on both genders.

Religion is a particularly sticky area, because some people will react out of all proportion to the slightest joke told at their religion’s expense, even when it is the comedian’s own religion. Personally, I would say that religion is fair game for comedy, because it is an institution that wields power and sometimes wields it unfairly. The best ways to approach this are to a) mostly make jokes about your own religion; b) make fun of particular individuals in a religion who are abusing their position, thereby not assuming that everyone in that religion is equally abusive; and c) make fun of specific harmful practices and not simply cultural differences. Part of this will include accepting people’s right to belief and to believe differently than you do.

Crucial to making a variety of humour work is context. This is why telling jokes on yourself is always a safe bet. You come on stage looking confident and happy to be there, then poke a little fun at yourself, that shows you are a strong enough person to take some ribbing. Your taking such a ribbing helps bolster other people’s ability to withstand some of the judgements and put-downs they face in every day life. When Bugs Bunny does something that is potentially harmful to Elmer Fudd, he is doing this within a cartoon world where harm is superficial and temporary, and never aimed at persons so much as their actions. The context keeps the cartoons playful rather than cruel.

Also, with context you can break all the above recommendations if you are portraying a character who is meant to be laughably awful. In essence the comedian is making fun of people who would tell such inappropriate jokes. Sir Les Patterson and Homer Simpson fall within this category. Your audience will just have to be completely clear on your intent.

The final danger zone has to do with your relationship to the audience. Do not insult or turn on your own audience. I have seen comedians, who when their routine dies, start to antagonise the audience for not finding them funnier. People can understand that we all have an off night. Nevertheless, if you insult them, they will never give you a second chance. These are your customers, these are your fans. Treat them with respect and you will find their loyalty will make up for a few lost laughs.

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

Other unlikely combinations will also cause humour. Many comedy duos like to present a couple of characters who are distinct in ways that makes it improbable they would team up. The most common duo is the “Odd Couple”, where one character is clean and meticulous and the other is slobby and lackadaisical. This was made famous by Neil Simon’s play The Odd Couple, but we also see it in Lano and Woodley, Lister and Rimmer in Red Dwarf, and a number of sitcoms dealing with married life.

These combinations are not automatically people who are “opposites”, but rather people who have characteristics that are likely to cause differences to arise. A ballet dancer is not the “opposite” of a police officer, neither is a hippy, a
conspiracy theorist, nor a grandmotherly community activist, but you can easily imagine humorous scenarios arising from a clash in world outlooks between these combinations. In fact by not being “opposites” the audience is likely to be intrigued and perhaps touched by those times where the gap between these people is bridged, and they find they can cooperate, even if for only a few moments.

Other unlikely combinations may be a threat and what is required to overcome it: zombies succumb to plastic forks. Or the password to a gangsters lair: teddy bears. Or what pleases a potential partner: a particularly dainty young woman who swoons at being given power tools, or a butch young man joyfully accepting the latest issue of Tea Cosies and You. The list goes on. Most of these examples are playing around with cultural expectations and stereotypes. This is why they seem unlikely. More and more women are getting into DIY home renovation, so the humour in a woman happily receiving an electric drill is almost gone.  However, give that same woman a jack hammer and you will probably still get a laugh.

As a late Friday exercise (sorry, I’m moving house ) write:

1. an unlikely duo
2. facing an unlikely threat
3. with an unlikely weapon.

For example: a barmaid and a pixie are forced to rid their land of a dragon and all they have is a brightly coloured ostrich feather.

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

Elements of Comedy Introduction

Comedy is so much about playing with and even exceeding cultural expectations and structures that our definitions of story have to be more flexible than will be taught at film school or courses on writing genre fiction.

As I mentioned in another entry, stories are about change, usually changes brought about by a significant and/or meaningful event. For instance: a people have been living peacefully on an island for generations, then their mountain
explodes into a volcano; two sisters and a mother haven’t spoken in decades, then the mother dies; or a fellow eats a strange purple carrot and is transformed into a talking rabbit. None of these are stories in and of themselves, but we can sense the possibility of a story. We now need to put together a set of elements that will help to clarify the situation and then organise them into a plot.

These are the most relevant elements:

• Events
• Characters:  1) their relationships, 2) their motivations and goals, 3) their efforts
• Challenges
• Changes
• Location
• Time period
• Punchline or moral (optional)

Events

For a short story you may have only one particular event around which other elements develop. For longer stories you may have one large event, plus many smaller events which lead up to and away from that central occurence. For the story about the volcano, you might start by describing an event to do with a tremor, which should be a warning of events to come. After the volcano has blown you may now describe events to do with rescuing survivors. Longer stories may also involve a series of episodic events. This is a common structure for comedic works, written examples would be The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchhausen and Journey to the West.

Characters

A story must have thinking actors who generate, participate in, and bear witness to the events. The actors need not be apparently human: they may be animal, object, or a disembodied concept. However, they must have a self-reflective inner life such that they are making conscious decisions about how they are interacting with their world. We as humans have a great capacity for projecting ourselves onto other people and beings, thereby giving us the capacity for empathy and a broad sense of moral judgement. It’s for this reason that stories such as Peter Rabbit or Wall-E can achieve success.

To place a character within a story we must know who they relate to, how, and how they feel about these connections. Certainly family relations will be important, but so will a character’s relationships with friends, co-workers, and various members of the community. Each relationship will involve the character being of higher, lower or equal status than the other and feeling close or distant—like or dislike.

We make sense of a character’s actions by keeping them consistent with their motivations and goals. Characters always come from some place: experiences, thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and desires. These form their motivations. They are always going some place: they have in mind who they would like to be, what they would like to be doing with whom, and what they would like to achieve in the future.

We come to understand the nature of a character by the external enactment of their inner world. These are the efforts they choose to make. Which efforts they select and the degree to which they are willing to follow through on them will reflect their true priorities and inner growth.

Challenges

I use the term “challenge” instead of “conflict”, because challenges are about process and either characters meet their challenges or they don’t. Conflict on the otherhand can be endless. I also don’t subscribe to the old cultural
viewpoint that it is humanity’s place to dominate nature as if we are in some way wrestling with and defeating a god. So when characters have to deal with harsh natural conditions such as a snowstorm, the snowstorm is in no way actively attempting to dominate them, therefore there is no conflict, but there is the challenge for survival.

The classic challenges are:

• Characters vs characters
• Characters vs the system
• Characters vs nature
• Characters vs themselves

Most stories will involve at some level, whether apparent or not, characters vs themselves. Standup tends to boil these challenges down to tight efficient events that quickly resolve into a punchline. Comic stories also frequently make the resolution of one challenge the basis for the next challenge which will be correspondingly larger until ultimate disaster looms requiring an outrageous solution.

Changes

The primary changes will be characters’s relationship to themselves, others, the shape of their life, and the world as it is. As characters change their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, they will change their outer world. As characters’s world changes, they will change their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. For lengthier storytelling it is important to represent this back and forth tidal flow. Changes do not have to be big to be important or interesting, but they do need to resonate with the concerns of your audience.

Location

You may have more than one location represented in your stories, but they will need to bring context to the change you are presenting.

Time period

This is the scope of your story. Are you including events from over several years, twenty-four hours, twenty minutes, etc and are these events current or perhaps happening in the future or past? In comedy especially you usually want to keep the duration of your events as narrow as possible. Stories sprawling throughout time and space tend to lose humorous pacing. However, comic novelist Terry Pratchett is fond of starting his novels at the beginning of DiscWorld time. Douglas Adams had The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy span from the big bang to the death of the universe.

Punchline or moral

Audience’s no longer find it fashionable to read stories to do with moral upliftment. However, comedy continues to use the moral of the story as a device for creating a capper. The standup will say something like, “And the moral of
the story is…never wear purple shoes in the rain.” The moral is trivial and nonsensical, but told right causes the story to end with a big laugh.

Your exercise for today is to come up with three scenarios. These scenarios will involve a character, an event suggestive of a challenge, what the character is like before facing the event and what they are like afterward. For example:

Character: Justine the grumpy plumber.
Event: A geyser bursts through the centre of a customer’s house.
Before event: Grumpy and lonely.
After event: Wealthy and in love.

Character: Harold the singing garbage pickup man.
Event: A garbage bin becomes the portal to another universe with good and bad aliens.
Before event: Well liked, but not well respected.
After event: Well liked, well loved, respected, and a hero.

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

Transformations are when something or someone changes into something comically distinct. Usually comic transformations are fast, like a prince turning into a frog, but they can also be slow.

The film on which I completed the principle photography last year makes use of both slow and fast transformations. One character, the son of a bogan father, has caught an STD turning him into a fairy. Throughout the movie we watch as he suffers the embarrassment of gaining one fairy-like characteristic after another, such as poofy wings on his back. His transformation is a running gag. Also in this film are a horde of minion ninjas. When the ninjas attack, they are ultimately defeated by our bogan fairy, who with a wave of a sausage stick (his erstaz wand), turns ninjas instantly into harmless mascot bunnies.

The humour in transformations may come from the surprise factor. It may also come from that stage in our childhood development when we learned about the continuity of beingness. A can of beans will continue to be a can of beans, even if we turn away then quickly turn back. Therefore it’s funny to pretend that maybe it turns into a confused warthog. We now know reality doesn’t work that way, so it’s funny to intentionally get it wrong (perhaps a form of
rule breaking humour). This is the same reason why some people find the misplacement of apostrophe’s hilarious.

Inversions have a similar comic impact as transformations, but the change must be swift in order to be funny. Someone at the top of a tall ladder who unexpectedly, but safely, falls to the bottom is funny. Someone at the top of the ladder who climbs down in a minute or two is not.

Usually, someone in a high position suddenly moving to a low position is the funniest inversion. A king instantly
becoming a street sweeper we find funny because it speaks to our frustration and desire to see those above us fall below us. However, someone being given a balloon and improbably being jerked up, such that they are flailing around in a panic—that’s funny. It’s also funny when a bunch of tough guys are all fighting over a prize, thereby making it possible for a little bespectacled geek to go from zero to hero and carry off a trophy twice his size. Mind you, the tough guys have been brought low, but it has been made funny by the exaggerated change in circumstances for the geek.

Inversions can be horizontal as well as vertical, or any directions you like. It’s a matter of going from one extreme to another: old to young, short to tall, weak to strong, etc.

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

Elements of Comedy Introduction

Our current culture has made an idol of violence. Conflict seems to inevitably lead to it, even though that is seldom our experience in every day life. Violence makes films, novels, computer games, etc thrilling and bankable roller-coaster rides. Stories involving violence will inevitably include suffering.  It is the threat of suffering that creates tension and drama in these cases.

“(Storytelling) represents and recreates (a people’s) shared cosmology or model for the manner in which the universe works.”

Norma J. Livo and Sandra A. Rietz, Storytelling: Process & Practice [Littleton, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited, Inc, 1986] p. 14

I’m not saying, don’t tell stories using violence. We need to be able to hold a mirror up to society and to the contents of our own hearts, which often includes violence. I am saying that we need to be aware other stories can be told, particularly for those of us writing comedy.

We have the opportunity to expand the spectrum of how people experience their lives. Otherwise, we as a culture will have a difficult time rising above our own violence to something better—a world of peaceful interactions. You’ve got to believe something better is possible before you are going to take the steps to make it a reality. Our stories, and most especially our humorous ones, makes this possible. Humorous stories have to contain at least an element of hope and/or humanity, or they become solely tragedies.

Stories are about change. The greater the change, the greater the challenges getting there, the greater the effort to achieve the change, the more meaningful the story will seem to its audience. Mind you, even small changes can be
interesting, thought-provoking, and heart-warming.

• Changes
• Challenges
• Mental, physical, and emotional efforts

Conflict will still have a place in these stories, and possibly even violence, but these will not be what makes the stories significant, rather what becomes of the people/characters on their particular journeys.

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

This storytelling technique has been around for a very long time. Alfred Hitchcock popularised the term “MacGuffin” to describe it. In an interview with François Truffaut, Hitchcock relates this story as the origins of the term:

“It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other answers, ‘Oh that’s a McGuffin.’ The first one asks, ‘What’s a McGuffin?’ ‘Well,’ the other man says, ‘It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ and the other one answers ‘Well, then that’s no McGuffin!’ So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.”

MacGuffin’s are invaluable to comic storytelling. Here is a tool which will help to work an audience up to the release that comes with  a punchline. The more you can milk that MacGuffin, the bigger the laugh you are likely to get. The difference between a dramatic MacGuffin and a comedic MacGuffin has to do with the contrast between how much someone desires the MacGuffin and of how much genuine value it holds.  For instance some elderly woman may be into collecting bubble-gum wrappers. Someone has just unwrapped a piece of gum and casually dropped the wrapper. The woman casts aside her walking frame, leaps over a table, beats off ninjas, then throws herself into a dive in order to catch the wrapper before it hits the ground. Comedy gold.

I have a speculative fiction writing group I organise. This last Saturday I gave them the below exercise to do with MacGuffins. So yes, I’m cheating and reusing stuff this week. However, in their case they tried in part to create dramatic situations with my suggestions, which was much harder than your trying to create comedic situations. Your exercise is to write a humorous story based on the suggested MacGuffins within a twenty minute time limit.

• You are part of a delegation to open peaceful relations with another race of sapient beings. The ambassador plans on giving something to the leader of this people as a gesture of goodwill. You find out that the object will probably deeply insult this people.

• You have “The Icon of Kimendo”. This little figurine has mystical powers that sucks all ethereal beings into it under certain circumstances. The problem is that you want to use it to get rid of the bad ghost in the castle, but not the good ghost.

• You have a fairy locked in your wardrobe. The owner of the house in which you are living would toss you into  the street if she found out, but you want to keep it, show your friends, maybe find some way to make money from it.

• One of the technicians on your spaceship (the cute one) has accidentally put the wrong crystal in the navigation unit. It is inspection day and the inspector is a tough one prone to firing people. If he pushes the wrong button, the navigation unit could explode setting the ship adrift and losing lots of jobs. You are in the airshafts trying to fix the situation while he is inspecting.

• A very rich family hold the last bottles of a particular wine that through serendipitous circumstances has all the right ingredients to cure lycanthropy. You have worked hard to hold the right jobs and make the right connections in order to get close to this family. Tonight they are going to share a bottle of this wine. This is also the night you will turn into a werewolf.

• You’re a guy and a unicorn has just decided you are its best buddy. You are about to go to a dance and you don’t want your friends or the girl to know you are a virgin.

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

Ignorance and enlightenment are a matter of who knows what when. Usually the audience is in on the joke. Let’s say Aaron has been dating a big glam-rock star’s daughter. The relationship is quite a sweet one. When Aaron thinks he’s hanging out with a group of roadies and tries to impress by bragging about this relationship, he doesn’t realise that one of them is his girlfriend’s father without the makeup and glam gear. As the audience we watch on in horror and amusement as Aaron shoves his foot unwittingly further and further down his throat. The humour might be compounded by a friend who is frantically waving at Aaron to stop, since he’s understands the situation.

The next step in this scenario might be the girlfriend turns up chirping, “Oh Aaron, you’ve been introduced to Daddy!”  Aaron has now been enlightened as to his predicament and he needs to figure out how much he has given away and begin the painfully humorous effort of trying to dig himself out. When the father becomes enlightened to parts of the situation, as well as the girlfriend, these will also provide moments of uncomfortable humour involving poor silly Aaron.

Some Like It Hot ends with the character of Osgood, who has been determinedly offering marriage to Daphne, finally becoming enlightened that she is a man. He then utters the film’s memorable last line, “Well, nobody’s perfect.” This
enlightens the audience that perhaps Osgood’s sexuality is a bit blurred or that he’s desperate, and gets a laugh. Here the element of ignorance and enlightenment overlaps with the element of surprise and may in fact be a distinct subset.

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

Elements of Comedy: Introduction

For writers of all sorts journals are important places to keep details and impressions in order to better portray situations. For comedians a journal is absolutely vital. Much of comedy has to do with the absurdity of the everyday. You need to pay attention to the funny moments that happen directly to you and remember them. For standup this will provide original material and make it possible to perform it believably since you have lived it.

Last night I went to Ross Noble’s performance at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre (review still to come). He had one or two set pieces, but mostly he riffed off the audience to create his comedy. As freeform and spontaneous as his material seemed much of it came from remembering comic details: comic details from life and the repeated use of comic details he had come up with in the moment. Keeping a comedy journal will help you to hold those comic details in your own mind. The journal will also help in developing your comic perspective: becoming aware of what it is, what’s working for you, and making it bigger and funnier. Practising in your journal will prepare you for more effectively improvising on stage.

Friday’s exercise: Get a notebook and this week write down three funny or potentially funny events or details you experienced.

Example: At the Ross Noble performance a couple of young men were playing covers of various pop songs to keep the audience entertained as they waited to enter the performance area. At one point they burst into a rousing chorus of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” This was strange in itself. Funnier was the beefy male guard at the door singing along.

Peace and kindness,

Katherine