Comedy is one of the hardest things to teach. While some jokes certainly have a structure you can slot elements into, so much humor is situational, based on timing, delivery, and shared knowledge with the audience. It's almost ephemeral. How can you possibly teach someone to be funny?
John Vorhaus recently spoke with Film Courage about the comedy basics he likes to teach.
Vorhaus wrote for The Wonder Years, Head of the Class, and Married... With Children before turning to teaching. The Comic Toolbox: How to Be Funny Even if You're Not was published in 1994 and is now in its fifth printing.
Vorhaus walks Film Courage through three of his core tools: the rule of three, the inappropriate response, and comic opposites. If you write comedy for the screen (features, TV, sketch, shorts, whatever), you're going to want this vocabulary in your notebook.
Check out the full conversation below.
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The Rule of Three
You probably know the rule of three because it's not limited to comedy and comes intuitively. Events tend to happen in threes in writing, whether it's a bit or not. The story usually comes in three acts; dialogue will list threes, etc.
But in comedy, you might have two elements leading into a third, which is the punchline.
Vorhaus explains what's happening underneath.
"On a technical level, it works like this. The first cliché establishes a point, a point of view and attitude. The second cliché establishes a second point and a connected point. And these two points create a line. Just like in geometry, two points create a line. The third thing that comes along cuts across the line. It defeats the expectation."
Cutting across the line is a subversion of some kind. Subversion is a storytelling technique in which an author sets up a clear reader expectation—such as a familiar trope, plot path, or genre convention—and then delivers a different, surprising outcome.
Vorhaus says, "The classic example of this is, doctor says, 'I've got bad news for you. You have a brain tumor, heart disease, and a really ugly tie.' A brain tumor says medical emergency, medical threat. Heart disease reinforces medical threat. 'Wow, this person has a really serious problem.' Then the third thing that comes along goes against the grain of that line and defeats it or deflates it by giving a third item in the list that's trivial and out of sync with the other two."
If you want a second angle, comedian Robert Mack teaches the same rule. Vorhaus explains it geometrically (two points make a line, the third one cuts across), but Mack explains it as pattern recognition.
The first beat is groundwork. The second beat allows the audience to see the pattern. The third beat breaks that pattern.
Mack also adds that the rule of three can work in dialogue, in a scene, or in a whole callback structure across a film.
The Inappropriate Response
Surprise can also come in how inappropriate a character acts in a situation. And surprise, being subversion, is something that comedy thrives on.
"I love an inappropriate response," Vorhaus says. "This is like if you had a desert island comic tool, like only one comic tool you could bring to a desert island, this would be the one. Because here's the way it works. In any human situation we find ourselves in—a film interview, a classroom, a church service, a hospital, a grocery store, anywhere you can think of. There's a very, very narrow range of behaviors that are appropriate to the situation."
This is where that commonality with the audience comes in. Most people understand social cues. You shouldn't sing at a funeral. You shouldn't have diarrhea while trying on wedding dresses. You shouldn't mimic Bugs Bunny with someone you don't know well.
Every situation has a limited number of appropriate behaviors and an infinite universe of inappropriate ones. Comedy comes from picking any inappropriate response and dropping it in.
Vorhaus creates another example.
"Let's imagine we're in the middle of a car chase, and there are two people in the car, and we've got to catch the bad guys, and the other is, 'I'm worried about my fuel economy. I'm not going to race because it's bad for my fuel economy.' That is an inappropriate response. It does not belong in the situation of a car chase. That's what makes it funny."
If you're trying to write comedy, try that formula. Eliminate everything that belongs, then contemplate what doesn't. This can be a quick way to reach a few jokes per page.
'Step Brothers' Credit: Columbia Pictures
Comic Opposites and the Five-Step Character Generator
A comic filter is how a character sees the world, and comic opposites are what you get when you put two contradictory filters in the same room. Vorhaus walks through the five steps.
"A comic character has a way of looking at the world, and that way of looking at the world drives the character's actions and drives the character's comedy. In order to create a very simple type of comic story, you can simply create a character, assign that character a comic filter, then think of the opposite of that comic filter, and put those two characters together."
This simple premise drives so many great comedies, from Tommy Boy to Emperor's New Groove to other movies that aren't David Spade vehicles.
Vorhaus has five steps for creating characters like these. Using Sheldon and Leonard from The Big Bang Theory as the example:
- Think of a character and assign them a rule. Sheldon's rule is "I win, always."
- Think of the opposite rule. Leonard's rule is that sometimes other people have to win.
- Assign that opposite rule to a second character.
- Put them together. In the same location for a lot of time, ideally.
- Make them fight about everything.
"Comic opposites is direct war between two characters," Vorhaus says. "Center and eccentrics is one [normal] character at war with a cast of [eccentric] characters. So comic opposites is a little bit simpler, but the structure is basically the same. Lock them in a situation, give them strong opposing points of view, and make them fight about stuff."
