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.

The circles are everywhere, if you know to look for them. They’re on the whiteboards around Dan Harmon’s office, on sheets tacked to his walls, on a notepad on the floor of his car. Each one is hand-drawn and divided into quadrants with scribbled notes and numbers sprouting along the edges. They look like little targets.

Harmon, 38, is the creator of Community, a sitcom about a group of community-college study buddies and the most giddily experimental show on network TV. He began doodling the circles in the late ’90s, while stuck on a screenplay. He wanted to codify the storytelling process—to find the hidden structure powering the movies and TV shows, even songs, he’d been absorbing since he was a kid. “I was thinking, there must be some symmetry to this,” he says of how stories are told. “Some simplicity.” So he watched a lot of Die Hard, boiled down a lot of Joseph Campbell, and came up with the circle, an algorithm that distills a narrative into eight steps:

Wired.com | Read the Full Article

Via FeatureFilm1000

…To think of writing a story as a discovery to the unknown is for the novelist, a quality that sets the novel apart as a different form of artistic achievement, but when it comes to screenplay structure, the screenwriter has little business sitting at that table of the unknown.

The reality is that the screenwriter faces a lot of limitations. Only has so much time. Only so many pages. Can only write what we can see. And the audience expects a lot – and at very specific plot points, whether they realize it or not. And it’s true that knowing your ending is a key component to deciding on how to start your screenplay, but the first few pages of your script carry more weight than most of us can possibly imagine.

— The Script Lab | Read The Full Article

Question: I have completed my screenplay, but I never wrote a treatment. I met a producer who wants to see a treatment only. Some people say a treatment should be three pages long, some say 12. Any advice?

Michael Halperin, author of ‘Writing the Killer Treatment,’ responds:

Before starting out on a treatment based on a completed screenplay, you have to ask questions. Does the producer actually want a treatment, or does he want a synopsis of the screenplay? Some producers continue to confuse one with the other. Writers go off and write their treatments and deliver them. Producers wonder how come they have a document, instead of a paragraph.

Assuming this producer understands the difference, you have to determine how long your treatment will run. There is no firm answer. Some treatments run a few pages while others run almost as long as the screenplay itself. A good rule of thumb is ‘the shorter the better,’ considering that most producers are incredibly busy and might be more receptive to a concise treatment

It’s much harder to write a short treatment because you need to express all the feelings, emotions, direction of the story, sense of characters and their relationships in a foreshortened manner.

Outline the beats of the screenplay to give yourself a guide before writing the treatment. Once you have the beats winnowed down to the basics, develop the treatment.

Begin with the story line (the so-called TV Guide-line) that encapsulates your story within one or two exciting sentences. For example, if I wrote the story line for Tolstoy’s gigantic tome ‘Anna Karenina,’ it would read: ‘A woman forced into a loveless marriage has a child, falls desperately in love with another man she cannot marry and commits suicide by throwing herself under the wheels of a train.’

Start your treatment with the inciting incident and the protagonist’s reaction/relation to it. Write with active verbs and try to avoid inactive verbs (any form of ‘to be’). The treatment should hold the reader’s interest and move the producer through it very fast. Avoid detail that gets in the way of telling the story. The less written, the less there exists for anyone to shoot it down.

Treatments express story, action, character and plot points. Therefore, almost every paragraph should propel all four of those elements toward a dynamic conclusion.

It may take several rewrites before you’re satisfied with the treatment. Hone it; polish it until it bounces off the page with confidence. Never be satisfied with a treatment or a screenplay that’s good. It must be the absolute best work you can do in this highly competitive field.

Author, playwright and screenwriter Michael Halperin teaches screenwriting and broadcasting at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles as well as a writing seminar at the American Film Institute and screenwriting seminars at UCLA’s Writers Program. He has written for popular television programs, among them ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation,’ ‘Falcon Crest,’ ‘Quincy’ and the animated series ‘Masters of the Universe.’ He is the author of three books on writing and co-author of the best-selling novel for children, ‘Jacob’s Rescue.’

Source with permission: The Writers Store