Hidden Tools of Comedy by Kaplan Steven

Author:Kaplan, Steven [Kaplan, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Michael Wiese Productions
Published: 2013-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

WORLD VIEW

A lot of times when you write secondary characters, they function as types, like the nervous guy, the jock, the this, the that. Or you might write a character who’s dumb, or mean, or greedy. The problem with those kinds of character choices is that they’re one-dimensional states of being, and as such, are inherently static. Say you’re writing a nervous character. Well, when does he stop being nervous? When you arbitrarily choose some other state of being. However, arbitrary personality changes can be counterproductive, as we saw earlier in that scene from Alex & Emma.

I have a friend who used to be on this show called Herman’s Head. The premise was that Herman was a young fact-checker whose internal conflicts were represented by characters playing Ego, Intelligence, Lust, etc. My friend played Anxiety. Whatever was happening with Herman, he was anxious. Whatever the situation was, he was anxious. As you might imagine, it became a mite predictable.

Rather than thinking about characters being personifications of emotions or states of being, it’s more useful to consider how they see the world in their own particular way — their World View, because a world view can be changed or altered by experience.

For instance, if you see the world as a scary place, that might make you anxious. But no one wants to stay anxious. If you see the world as a scary place you’d try to make it less scary, right, because who wants to be miserable? There are only two kinds of people in the world who want to be miserable: poets and method actors. Everybody else wants to feel better or at least shorten the amount of time they’re feeling bad.

So if you see that the world is a scary place and you go home, what do you do? Lock the door, perhaps. Check under the bed. Keep all the lights on. Have a drink. Have another. Maybe smoke a cigarette. Maybe eat a double double chocolate Häagen-Dazs ice cream. Go into your panic room, turn on music. And finally, relax.

Your characters see things in specific, unique ways. Acting on the way they see things creates comic behavior. Lisa Kudrow on the NPR show Fresh Air said that her approach to the character of Phoebe on Friends was that she (Phoebe) was “unreasonably optimistic and cheerful about absolutely everything.” She saw things in their best light, even when there was little reason or evidence to do so. This “seeing” created comic behavior, rather than simply playing the label of “kooky” or “ditsy.” And it’s not only interacting with the other characters in the script, but interacting in specific ways with everything in the character’s environment.

A great example of this was Tony Shalhoub’s Monk. One of my favorite recent comic creations in terms of character, Adrian Monk is a phobic-centric detective who is afraid of everything. He has like 400 phobias. He should always be anxious, right? There’s a scene in one episode of Monk in which you see Monk in a white suit in a safe room.

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