The documentary of Ken Berns:

The Atlantic: What inspired you to explore storytelling as a topic for this film?

Sarah Klein and Tom Mason: Everyone loves a great story. Stories teach us things, move us emotionally, and form the basis of the way we understand the world. As filmmakers, we’ve been telling stories for a while now — but at a certain point we realized that it’s actually really hard to explain what makes a good story. We know it when we see it, but the recipe always proves elusive. Ken Burns has been telling incredible stories for decades, and we thought that if anyone would have a thoughtful perspective on this, it’d be him. So this project started as our own exploration to figure out what that magic dust is that brings his stories to life.

It takes guts to make a documentary about one of documentary cinema’s most iconic filmmakers. How did you approach it?

We were definitely nervous about it. Ken Burns has defined documentary for our whole lives. We both remember sitting with our families watching The Civil War series in awe. We came to this project with a lot of questions and very little idea where they’d lead. He was incredibly patient, and brought his own curiosity and open mind to the conversation about how he tells stories and why. The first time we sent him a cut, we both poured a couple glasses of bourbon and crossed our fingers. Luckily, he liked it.

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REPUTATION IS ALL YOU HAVE. In a business where much of the deal-making and negotiations are verbal, your word and your reputation is EVERYTHING. The film industry is small. Everyone who is established can easily make contact with anyone else or can get the straight scoop by making a few calls. How much you are paid, your title on a project, how hard you work, how honest you are, how you treat people— there are no secrets. The business is populated by talkers. Even “enemies” communicate all the time. There is no place to hide. If you are seen as creative, reliable, capable, and easy to work with, you will find luck. If you are seen as difficult, a primadonna, high-strung, or irrational you will be known that way even by people who haven’t met you. No one cares that you’re tired or have had a rough day. With no track record, it won’t matter how talented you are. When it comes to a decision as to whether or not to work with you, the decision will be negative. They will say, “Life is too short.” If you promise things and don’t come through, that will follow you and you will have damaged your credibility. Delivering what you say you can deliver is key. Extenuating circumstances don’t count. You’re trying to break into an industry of impatient people. Rationalizations won’t work. These people have seen it all and maybe done it successfully themselves.

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It’s always interesting to hear the story behind the story — the inspiration and motivation that led to the ultimate creation. Often exploring this side of the story can lead to the interesting anecdotes and surprising details that audiences love to hear. Covering the who, what, where, when and how is important, but the “why” is often the most interesting part of the story. A good BTS will cover the motivation behind the project, explain what came before and preview what may happen in the future. This is most often and most easily done by interviewing the project’s creators.

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But just because the series went out of production in 1997 in the United States doesn’t mean it’s passé. The concept, characters, and even scripts from the original Fox series have been remade in countries all over the world. Here are 12 productions from around the world.

Via Neatorama

Bulgaria

The newest version is called Zheneni s deca v Balgaria, which translates to Married with Children in Bulgaria. You can watch the entire first episode at YouTube (and you’ll find other episodes if you can read the titles). The series debut last month inspired redditor sudurjalimonovsok to post a picture of the TV family. The resulting thread had redditors from all over the world showing us their countries’ versions of the show.

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The very first cameras, of course, were Daguerrotypes and the images they made were positives on silver plates coated with Iodine and developed using fumes from Mercury. You can probably already tell this had a few drawbacks. Positive images can’t be reproduced so one picture was one picture — if you wanted a copy for Aunt Bessie you had to take another picture. Silver is silver, so each picture was rather pricey (up to a month’s pay for a working man). I guess inhaling mercury fumes in the darkroom all day didn’t exactly lead to a lot of healthy old photographers walking around either.

Not long after that, the albumin process was developed. This let photographers make negative images on glass plates coated with albumen. Glass is a lot cheaper than silver, which helped make photographs affordable. Since the images were negatives you could make as many prints as you might like from a single photograph, so things like picture books came into being. Images on glass could be projected in ‘magic lanterns’ so risque images of ladies ankles and such could be projected at the gentleman’s clubs of the day. So the albumen process made it possible for photographers to achieve the same goals they have today: getting published in book form and getting pretty girls to pose partially undressed.

Albumin had it’s drawbacks, though. The process was difficult and time consuming, requiring the plates to be prepared fresh just before each photographic shot. Carrying around a few hundred glass plates got rather heavy, and glass breaks. And the major source of albumen, in case you don’t know, is from egg whites. Photography became so popular that it actually led to egg shortages. As many as 1,000,000 eggs a year were used for photography in England alone.

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All comedy is built around the same principles. Laughter is the release when we are taken quite suddenly from one expectation to a completely unexpected one.

by HebeDesigns”

The Setup – Why did the Chicken cross the Road?

The first joke everyone learns. This opening line sets up our expectations. Because of our experience with English we may be expecting a deeply thought out answer – a motivation that sheds light on the Chicken’s innate soul… This is also called a “build up” – we’re setting up the audience to think a certain way. What comes next is the punchline.

The Unexpected – To prove to the possum it could actually be done

I bet you were thinking “to get to the other side”. But that was to be expected… The punchline is something completely unexpected, a curveball, a new way of thinking that STILL makes sense. The disconnect between the buildup and the punchline is the essence of comedy – a set up that gets you to think a certain way and then we hit you (punch) with something you didn’t expect.

At the core, all comedy works in this way. From stand up to gross out, smart humor to the lowest of lows.

Now, let’s take a look at a comedy sketch I found this morning that I feel perfectly demonstrate comedic form in sketch writing:

Let’s break this down because there’s nothing like taking something fun and analyzing the hell out of it to make it boring.

The Setup starts with two women talking about a bake sale. The language (and performance) is overly bright and cheery. Even the small throwaway joke (“yum, yum AND YUM!”) fits into this fictional world of “sunshine and lollipops”.

And then we see the exception…

This is also example of the Rule of Three. There are three participants in the bake sale – the first baker sets up the tone of the scene. The second baker establishes the norm (yes, its normal to be cheery) and the third baker breaks the norm.

Now it could be any number of bakers at the table. It could be four or five. But three is the most economical number – one to establish, one to set a norm, one to break it. Any less would not have the impact and any more would just be repetitious.

“I made the nether-pastry of Al-Desh-Rah, the Donut that will End the World”

This is a huge leap from the cheerful rhetoric of the girls. The goth’s monologue is full of rich dark imagery.

“It’s dough is milled between the skulls of men executed for crimes that thieves and murderers alike forsake as ghastly and unforgivable.”

Even on a micro level we are seeing the essence here comedy here. These lines are about a donut – any life time experience reading cook books or visiting a bakery would lead you to believe that confectioneries are not spoken about in this proper gothic manner. Although this may not be the “Punch” of a punchline – the disconnect builds up the sketch in an amusing manner.

“It’s cooked in the boiling fat of animals that have feasted on their own young… It’s icing is a congealed mass of sorrow and despair made viscous with the saccharine discharge of sugar cane plants watered with the blood of the damned… it also has sprinkles”

Here the writer chose four items to list (Floured milled by skulls, cooked in fat, icing, sprinkles) each of these cooking processes described in long dark details to ultimately lead up to the short “Sprinkles” line. Instead of using the Rule of Three the writer goes with four and it works just fine as each of the three cooking stages has its own amusing lines and jokes written in. If the writer did wish to tighten the script here’s where a set of lines could be dropped… but as it is it works fine as an amusing set up to the final punchline.

The final punchline is a role reversal. The Goth, after all that build up, calls back to the “Yum, yum and YUM” joke earlier, dropping the dark nature.

So…

What makes strong comedic writing is the rich layering of setups and unexpected twists. From a holistic view of an entire scene or sequence down to the individual lines themselves, good comedic writing is rich with these patterns of setups and twists.

When writing comedy be mindful of the comedic pattern and figure out how everything fits into the pattern that you want to establish. There are no hard fast rules of comedy but if you understand the mechanisms of what makes something funny, you hone your ear for what’s funny.

Few professions are as subjective to the opinions of others as creative ones. Perhaps because artists are usually self-proclaimed. Yes, you can get a college degree in your artistic field, but that doesn’t make you an artist, does it? Usually not. You’re an artist when you decide to be one.

The only problem is we don’t trust ourselves, enough, do we? And we fall into the trap of validation. Or rather, letting other people’s opinions and job titles decide whether or not we really are artists.

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