The Comic Toolbox: How to be Funny Even if You're Not Read online

  Copyright © 1994 by John Vorhaus

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  eBook ISBN: 9781935247401

  Cover Design by Heidi Frieder

  Silman-James Press

  Los Angeles, CA

  www.silmanjamespress.com

  TO MAXX; WHO SAYS I MAKE HER LAUGH

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 Comedy Is Truth and Pain

  2 The Will to Risk

  3 The Comic Premise

  4 Comic Characters

  5 Some Tools from the Toolbox

  6 Types of Comic Stories

  7 The Comic Throughline

  8 More Tools from the Toolbox

  9 Practical Jokes

  10 Comedy and Jeopardy

  11 Still More Tools from the Toolbox

  12 Situation Comedy

  13 Sketch Comedy

  14 Toward Polish and Perfection

  15 Scrapmetal and Doughnuts

  16 Homilies & Exhortations

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  If I thanked everybody there was to thank, the acknowledgements would run longer than the book. So thanks to Al and Louise, Nancy and Jim, who may have wondered but never doubted. Thanks to Bill for keeping me on the path and Scott for not letting me off the hook. Thanks to Cliff, who was there at the birth of the Toolbox. Thanks also to Linda and Barbara at the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program. Finally I’d like to thank all my students, from whom I’ve learned so much.

  “FORWARD!”

  to The Comic Toolbox

  Are you one of those sorry folk

  Who cannot write a decent joke,

  Who cannot pen a funny scene

  Because you lack the comic gene?

  Are you convinced that you alone

  Are cursed to walk this earth without a funny bone?

  Take heart, dear friend, for now a book is writ

  To guide you on your quest

  To wrest from deep within, your native wit.

  Voila! The Comic Toolbox by John Vorhaus

  To save you from the jester’s poorhouse.

  It lays you certain basic rules

  That aid the craft of serious fools.

  You’ll learn to slay that dreaded djin,

  The Editor who lives within.

  And once sprung from that self-constructed jail,

  You’ll then be free to risk and free to fail.

  Free to find the premise, choose the word

  That separates the master from the nerd.

  So if you wish to tune your comic craft

  And join the ranks of the professionally daft,

  Then take this book of humor-honing tools

  And join the ranks of jesters, clowns and fools

  Who rise each day and, taking out their pen,

  Bring joy and laughter to their fellow men.

  —Peter Bergman,

  Firesign Theatre, Los Angeles, 1994

  Introduction

  There’s a book by William Strunk and E.B. White called The Elements of Style. When we read it in high school, my friends and I all called it The Elephants of Style, and you can be sure that we thought that this was pretty much the height of hilarity. Well, we also thought that drinking a great deal of Boone’s Farm apple wine and throwing up on neighbors’ lawns was a good idea, so draw your own conclusions. At any rate, The Elements of Style was a seminal book—it packed a ton of useful information about language and writing (and even, in its own offhand way, about life) into a very small number of pages. For a grammar text, it was, and remains, a remarkably good read. I recommend it.

  Strunk and White were big on rules and not at all afraid to take a stand. They hated the passive voice, for instance, and insisted that use of the passive voice led to weak writing. Because I was young and impressionable when I read their book, I made this rule my own. For most of my writing life, I religiously purged the passive voice from my work.

  And then one day I discovered how much fun it was to write in the passive voice. I knew it was wrong; Bill and E.B. had told me it was wrong. But I couldn’t help myself. The words just came spilling out onto the page:

  The room was walked into by a man by whom strong, handsome features were had. A woman was met by him. The bed was lain upon by her. Then the bed was lain upon by him. Clothing was removed from them both. Sex was had. Climax was achieved. Afterward, cigarettes were smoked by them. Suddenly, the door was opened by the husband of the woman by whom the bed was lain upon. A gun was held by him. Some screams were screamed and angry words exchanged. jealousy was felt by the man by whom the gun was held. Firing of the gun was done by him. The flying of bullets took place. Impact was felt by bodies. The floor was hit by bodies. Remorse was then felt by the man by whom the gun was held. The gun was turned upon himself.

  And the rest, as they say, is forensics.

  So slavish had I been in my devotion to the so-called rules of good writing that I had missed out on a piece of real linguistic merriment—a joke, if nothing else. In blind obeisance to the rules, I forgot to have fun. And jeez, if you can’t have fun in writing, or painting or drawing, or acting or twisting balloon animals, or indeed any creative endeavor, why bother?

  So I want to make one thing clear going in: The first rule is that there are no rules. Take all this stuff with a huge, crystalline grain of salt. My tools are my tools, designed for my convenience. If you find them useful, by all means use them. But they’re not gospel, for God’s sake, nor even elements of style.

  On the other hand, I believe very strongly that the rules don’t confine, they define. Creativity is problem-solving. The more (useful) rules we have, and the more rigorously we apply them, the more clearly we understand the problem we’re trying to solve, and the more success we’ll have at solving it. For instance, if your car has a dead battery, it’s a rule that you connect the jumper cables plus-to-plus and minus-to-ground. Connect the plus terminal of one battery to the minus terminal of the other and you’ll end up with a fried battery, and possibly a fried face.

  So as you poke around in this thing called The Comic Toolbox, adopt the useful fiction that everything in it is at least worthy of consideration. If you test these tools and find them user unfriendly, by all means reject them. In doing so, you’ll likely come up with some new ones of your own. They’ll be better for you, because they’ll be yours, conceived by you in an idiom that you understand. But do try out all the tools.

  And especially try the exercises.

  Some may seem difficult, or irrelevant to your work, or just plain stupid. Try them anyhow, if only to prove how just plain stupid they really are. As I’ll take pains to make clear later on, you won’t be graded on your work, nor judged in any sense—not even by you. But you will get much more out of all this material if you put it into play while it’s all fresh in your mind. Scrawl in the margins if you like, or write down your answers in self-deleting computer files if that will help you minimize your emotional risk. But do try the exercises. You’ll only get out of this book what you put in. Or to put it another way, the more you pay, the more it’s worth.

  Several years ago,
I taught a class called Writing from the Alien Perspective. As homework for that class, I assigned the following: “Go out and do something new, something you’ve never done before.” Some people paid for strangers’ meals. Some stole library books. Some played dumb. Some refused to do the assignment, which is something they’d never done before in any class anywhere. Some got arrested. It was that sort of exercise.

  And we discovered something very interesting. The mere act of doing the unexpected thing created one funny moment after another. That revelation led to a new class, called The Comic Toolbox, and that class led to this book. So as you read the book, stop frequently to ask yourself how you can make your creative process fresh and new. I’m not talking about what you write or draw or paint, but about the system by which you bring your material to life. Break old habits, even ones that work. Write in bed. Paint in the park. Draw cartoons on walls. Take yourself by surprise; the more you do this, the funnier you’ll be. If nothing else, you’ll have the experience of doing something new, and the new thing is almost always worth doing, if for nothing but the newness alone.

  A blanket disclaimer before we push on: in this book, I talk a lot about the hero and the character and the writer and reader and viewer. A lot of times I call these people he, though of course I mean both he and she. Language lags behind social change, and the English language still lacks an easy convention for gender-neutral third-person pronouns. Maybe Strunk and White could sort it out, but I’ve just had to muddle through. Thanks for bearing with me.

  Eastern philosophy describes creativity as “carrying buckets to the river.” The river is always there, but sometimes the buckets don’t do their job. As much as anything else, this is a book about building better buckets. Some of them work well for me, and I hope they work well for you, too.

  Sydney, Australia

  April, 1994

  1

  Comedy Is Truth and Pain

  When I was twelve years old, I fell in love with Leslie Parker. She was cute and smart, with blond hair in bangs, and a smile that made my head sweat. All through seventh grade, through lunch hours and band practice and the first yearning boy-girl parties of my aggrieved adolescence, I mooned after that girl as only a hormonally enraged lunatic in the throes of puppy love can moon. I was a sad case.

  And then, one day during math class, while thirty sweaty youngsters in bellbottom pants and “Let It All Hang Out” T-shirts pondered the imponderables of pi, Leslie Parker mentioned in passing that she and her family were moving away. My world imploded like a dark star. The amputation of a cherished body part could not have hurt me worse. My hand shot into the air.

  The teacher, Mr. Desjardins, ignored me. He did that a lot because, I think, I was always asking vexing questions like, “What’s the square root of minus one?” and “Why can’t you divide by zero?” I waved my hand like an idiot, trying to get his attention. No go.

  Ten minutes pass, and Leslie Parker’s stunning revelation fades from everybody’s mind but mine. At last, just before the bell, Mr. Desjardins casts a reluctant nod my way. I stand up. Pathetically and wildly inappropriately, I bleat, “Leslie, where are you moving, and why?” By which, of course, I mean, “Don’t leave me!”

  There was sudden stunned silence, for I had committed the cardinal sin of seventh grade. In a classic act of bad timing, I had revealed my feelings. In the next instant, everyone burst out laughing. Even Mr. Desjardins, that sadist, smothered a chortle in a shirt cuff. Let me tell you that the instant is etched in my memory like acid on a photographic plate, the single most painful and humiliating moment of my life up to that point. (The last such moment? Oh, would that it were so. Remind me some day to tell you about the college co-ed shower fiasco.) And I’ll never forget what Mr. Desjardins said as my classmates’ laughter rang in my ears, and Leslie Parker looked at me like road kill. “They’re not laughing at you, Mr. Vorhaus. They’re laughing with you.”

  He was lying, of course. They were laughing at me. All those little monsters were just taking ghoulish delight in my shame. And why? Because they knew, in their tiny, insecure, prepubescent hearts, that, though I was the one who had stepped on the land mine that time, it could have been any one of them. And so in one single heartbreaking and mortifying instant, I discovered a fundamental rule of humor, though it was many years (and many, many years of therapy) before I recognized it as such:

  COMEDY IS TRUTH AND PAIN.

  I’ll repeat it for you bookstore browsers who are just grazing here to see if this tome is your cup of cranial tea: Comedy is truth and pain.

  When I debased myself before Leslie Parker, I experienced the truth of love and the pain of love lost.

  When a clown catches a pie in the face, it’s truth and pain. You feel for the poor clown all covered with custard, and you also realize that it could have been you, sort of there but for the grace of pie go I

  Traveling-salesman jokes are truth and pain. The truth is that the salesman wants something, and the pain is that he’s never going to get it. In fact, almost every dirty joke rests on truth and pain, because sex is a harrowing experience that we all share—with the possible exception of one Willard McGarvey, who was even more pathetic than I was in seventh grade, and who grew up to become a Benedictine monk. I wonder if Willard’s reading this book. Hello, Willard.

  The truth is that relations between the sexes are problematic. The pain is that we have to deal with the problems if we want the rewards. Consider the following joke:

  Adam says to God, “God, why did you make women so soft?” God says, “So that you will like them.” Adam says, “God, why did you make women so warm and cuddly?” God says, “So that you will like them.” Adam says to God, ‘’But, God, why did you make them so stupid?” God says, “So that they will like you.”

  The joke takes equal shots at the attitudes both of men and women. It makes men look bad, it makes women look bad, but behind all that, there’s shared common experience: We’re all human, we all have gender, and we’re all in this ridiculous soup together. That’s truth, that’s pain, and that’s what makes a joke jump.

  In a classic episode of I Love Lucy, Lucille Ball gets a job in a candy factory where the conveyor belt suddenly starts going faster and faster, leaving poor Lucy desperately stuffing candy in her mouth, trying to stay ahead of the belt. What’s the truth? That situations can get out of hand. And the pain? We pay for our failures.

  Even greeting cards boil down to truth and pain. “I’ll bet you think this envelope is too small for a present,” says the cover of the card. And inside? “Well, you’re right.” That’s truth (I’m cheap), and that’s pain (so you lose).

  My grandfather used to tell this joke:

  A bunch of men are standing outside the pearly gates, waiting to get into heaven. St. Peter approaches and says, “All you men who were henpecked by your wives during your lives, go to the left wall. All you men who weren’t henpecked, go to the right wall.” All the men go to the left wall except one timid little old man, who goes to the right wall. St. Peter crosses to the little old man and says, “All these other men were henpecked in their lives; they went to the left wall. How come you went to the right wall?” Says the little old man, “My wife told me to.”

  Truth and pain. The truth is that some men, sometimes, are henpecked, and the pain is that some men, sometimes, are stuck with it.

  There’s something else present in this joke, and that’s fear of death. Now, some philosophers argue that all human experience reduces to fear of death, so even buying a cheap card instead of a birthday present somehow relates to mortality. Maybe. I dunno. This book is not concerned with such ponderous possibilities. If it were, it would be called The Philosophical Toolbox: How to be Heavy, Even if You’re Not. Nevertheless, it’s true that death, like sex, is fundamental to the human experience. Is it any wonder, then, that so many of our jokes turn on the truth and pain of death?

 
A man dies and goes to hell. Satan tells him that he’ll be shown three rooms, and whichever room he chooses will be his home for all eternity. In the first room, thousands of people are screaming in the agony of endless burning flame. The man asks to see the second room. In the second room, thousands of people are being rent limb from limb by horrible instruments of torture. The man asks to see the third room. In the third room, thousands of people are standing around drinking coffee while raw sewage laps around their knees. ‘’I’ll take this room, “says the man. Whereupon Satan yells out to the crowd, “Okay, coffee break’s over! Everybody back on your head!”

  The truth? There might be a hell. And the pain? It might be hell.

  A man falls off a cliff. As he plummets, he’s heard to mutter, “So far, so good.”

  The truth and the pain: Sometimes we’re victims of fate.

  Religion is similarly an experience that touches us all, because it tries so hard to explain those other human fundamentals, sex and death. Jokes that poke fun at religious figures and situations do so by exposing the truth and the pain of the religious experience: We want to believe; we’re just not sure we do.

  What do you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with an agnostic?

  Someone who rings your doorbell for no apparent reason.

  The truth is that some people strive for faith. The pain is that not everybody gets there. And by the way, people who don’t “get” a joke, or take offense at it, often feel that way because they don’t accept the “truth” that the joke presents. A Jehovah’s Witness wouldn’t find this joke funny because he has faith, and thus doesn’t buy the so-called truth that the joke tries to sell.

  Look, it’s not my intention to prove or disprove the existence of God or the value of faith. My beliefs, your beliefs don’t enter into it. What makes a thing funny is how it impacts the generally held beliefs of the audience hearing the joke. Religion and sex and death are rich areas for humor because they touch some pretty strongly held beliefs.