By Ched Rickman · March 30, 2010
So I was shooting this thing a few weeks ago, a little non-union gig that frankly, was barely worth my time. I would have rather made less money NOT acting at my day job, this is how weak the script was for this segment. Now, I know as an actor who actually makes some decent money from acting, I shouldn’t be pissing and moaning because this wasn’t How I Met Your Mother or whatever, but also, with acting being my primary source of income, I can consider it my job, and I feel it’s every American’s God-given right to be able to bitch about work. I could be an actor or a garbage man, doesn’t matter, a shitty day at work is a shitty day at work, and this day wasn’t going particularly well, so I’m entitled, and you can just fuck right off.
However, I had to question the credentials, or um, brain of the director who was not only rewriting the entire script on the fly (being sure to read the new lines to me in a delivery he expected me to replicate exactly, thus taking the acting out of the actor after butchering the writing of the writer), but also to insert exclusively sexual jokes as the new material. We’re talking the type of stuff that only 6th graders would utter and attempt to sound serious, and even then their sixth grade friends would stare at them blankly and punch them, not laughing the entire time.
This guy was getting those blank looks from me. The idea that he may have been suggesting this trash to me as a joke was about a thousand times funnier than the actual material, until he stared back with firm-eyed, square-jawed intent, intimating that he really did think this was fucking gold and I would love it. It’s one thing to have to deal with material that could benefit from a punch-up by a tree sloth, but it’s even worse when the shit you’re shoveled is supposed to be delivered in a patently unfunny, unoriginal way, as well:
HIM: Do you watch [generic sports show]?
ME: No.
HIM: Do you know [host of said show]?
ME: Sort of…
HIM: Read it like him.
I tend to think there are few hard and fast rules about writing. Yeah there are certain guidelines to scripts, but plenty of rules are broken or bent in any screenplay that gets to screen. Likewise in comedy, very few definite dos and don’ts; the rule of three comes to mind, always agreeing with your partner in improv. But, this, my friends, is a hard and fast rule if you want anyone to think you have an ounce of original creativity in your head: a good old fashioned “balls” joke relating to sports is NEVER FUCKING FUNNY. It wasn’t funny in grade school gym class, it’s not funny in any of the countless movies that fall back on this nugget, and it sure as shit is not funny when someone getting paid to direct me is suggesting I utter
it with any semblance of seriousness.
But what the fuck would I know, I’m just an actor.
