Bring the Funny by Greg DePaul

Author:Greg DePaul
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781138929265
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

The Conceit

Anything the writer presents to the reader to be accepted—and not justified or explained—is a conceit.

A screenplay’s primary conceit is usually set forth early in the story. That’s because just about anything can be accepted by the audience if established early. Wait until the middle of the second act to present a conceit and you’ll likely make the audience feel disrespected.

In a typical zombie movie, the conceit is that dead people are reborn as zombies who attack the living. Establish that early, and the audience will accept it. Introduce that idea—without any foreshadowing to prepare us for it—in the middle of the story, and you’ve screwed up.

What’s a conceit in a comedy?

Think about Old School. Do you really believe that a group of middle-aged men living near a college campus can become a fraternity? As discussed earlier, it’s pretty darn unlikely. That’s why the screenwriters of Old School establish that conceit early and run with it fast. In fact, the entire “explanation” for the conceit is contained within one scene in which the dean of the college, played by Jeremy Piven, discusses the issue with his underling. If you happen to be getting popcorn when that scene plays, you never catch a whiff of it. And that’s a good thing; after all, you came to this movie because you like the premise. And people who like the premise want it to make sense—so they easily accept it as a conceit. They don’t want to be held back by annoying doubts about whether the story could “really happen.”

That’s the biggest advantage you have when creating a conceit—the audience is on your side. They want to believe.

How exactly did the bite of a radioactive spider give Peter Parker super powers? Who knows. Sounds fishy to me. But we do know radiation does whacky stuff to people, and we want to see Spiderman kick bad guys’ butts all over town, so … we go with it. We just need the writer to make a good-faith attempt at establishing the conceit early in the script. To satisfy us and to make us feel like the story is not arbitrary.

Of course you and I know that stories are created by arbitrary whim. I’ve never met the guys who wrote Old School, but I guarantee you they got the idea of a fraternity of middle-aged men before they came up with the paper-thin justification for how it could happen. It happened because they wanted it to happen. They may have thought up half the set pieces for that story before they ever considered how to introduce the conceit.

As I discuss in a previous chapter, you need not know the first act before you dream up the second act. You are well advised to reach for the stars when it comes to brainstorming premises. That’s because—no matter how off-the-wall the concept may be—you can always find a way to justify it. And if, upon re-reading your work, you later find that justification to be rickety, you can just find another one.

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