Screenwriting Experts Pilar Alessandra and Peter Desberg Crack The Craft of Comedy Writing

By: Andrew L. Schwartz

On The Page is a weekly podcast hosted by Pilar Alessandra, a writing teacher and former story analyst for Dreamworks SKG. Her podcast focuses on breaking down and understanding the craft of screenwriting and features many prominent voices in the industry. 

Episode 518 titled, Now That’s Funny!, features Peter Desberg, a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in stage fright who has worked with numerous stand-up comedians and writers. Peter is also the author of six joke books along with sixteen other non-humorous titles. His recent work, Now That’s Funny!, is an intimate look into the minds of twenty-four of Hollywood’s funniest comedy writers from shows such as The Simpsons, Modern Family, Saturday Night Live, Cheers!, and much more.

In the episode, Pilar and Peter discuss the art of comedy writing.

On the Comedy Writing Process — 

There’s a great quote that says, “the greatest form of fiction is the autobiography.” The problem you run into when asking somebody about their process is they may be telling you the process very accurately, they may be romanticizing things, or they may be telling you how they wish they wrote.

To get a clear idea of each writer’s process, Peter and Jeffrey wrote a short generic comedy premise and gave it to each of these writers and show runners to develop on the spot.

Premise: a woman in her fifties is living a very comfortable life until her husband’s sudden death. After learning that she and her late husband had spent everything he had earned, she is left with no money or skills leaving her forced to fend for herself. As such, she decides to call her daughter living in NYC to tell her she’s moving in.

Peter — We watched to see if the writers would focus more on story or character and the answer was: neither, they focused on conflict.

On Conflict in Comedy —

You don’t have to create an obstacle out of thin air. You can work with the stuff that’s grounded in real-life conflict.

Introducing conflict into the above premise — 

Walt Bennett, Writer on The Cosby Show — here is a woman about to visit her daughter, so we can create a lot of conflict by having the mother show up unannounced. Taking that a step further, we’re all generally afraid of unannounced visits, but what could be the absolute worst time for one to happen? Of course, that would be in the afternoon when the boyfriend is over and suddenly there’s a knock on the door. But how can we make that even worse? Also in attendance is the entire moving company and some extended family half way into the building with a couch that will barely fit through the door.

Bob Myer, Showrunner on Roseanne — it took Bob five or six minutes to come up with a perfect network TV sitcom episode. When asked to make it a little darker, he replied, “how dark do you want it?” Bob changed the young girl’s character so that she was a private investigator with a serious drug habit, which made her an attractive underdog. He set up this situation where she’s about to solve a big case and goes home to change (but really do drugs). She gets to the important meeting that’ll help her with the case, and it turns out to be an intervention by her mother and everyone she knows.

An old comedy writer once said, “we hope we have all of this creativity and intuition, but as comedy writers we need to rely on certain tricks. If I need a laugh, I make the phone ring because the busier a character is when the phone rings, the funnier it will be.” 

Obviously drugs and sex are stronger than a ringing phone, but the concept is the same.

On Characters and Conflict —

Give your character some qualities that make them likable, but also give them a handicap that makes you worry about them — a flaw that will complicate things, which can still be funny.

The way writers approach character likability today is through empathy. With a character suffering from an addiction, we like them because we empathize with them. Some people may be afraid to go darker because they’ll think it won’t make their character likable. In reality, it makes the character more like us — we all have our secrets and/or addictions.

On the Seven Kinds of Plots —

If you want people to remember things, build it into a story.

Peter — I’m reading a really interesting book called, The Seven Basic Plots,written by Christopher Booker. His argument is there are only seven plots because we organize things in terms of story and there are only seven basic kinds of story. 

Stories are constructed in a certain way that makes us process them in engaging ways, and to do that we need certain plot points. In a monster story, we need a situation where we hear a little bit about this monster in the beginning but we don’t see him right away. Then, we have a hero that is somehow put in a position he didn’t want to be in where he has to fight the monster. Later, he looks like he’s going to really well and then all of sudden everything is lost and he has to find a new way to defeat the monster. These are some of the basic elements of story and we are finding more and more that humans connect most with stories.

On Two Kinds of Comedy Writers — 

There are two kinds of comedy writers: those who are better at jokes and those who are better at story. About 1/4 of the people who we interviewed in the book had graduate degrees in math and science — these were all story guys; they went for structure and story.

On Structuring a Joke — 

In writing a script, jokes are expendable, if a joke doesn’t serve one of two purposes: if it doesn’t move the story or show a character, you don’t want it in there.

Standup comics tell jokes, but when you’re writing comedy, jokes are really tricky elements of story. As a comedy writer you need to be able to switch jokes, which means being able to apply the concept of a joke to a similar type of character. For example, a joke about an accountant could also be applied to a producer.

On Contemporary Comedy Writing — 

You need to know the history of your craft. It would be hard not to suggest that an aspiring writer going back to dip into some of the pioneering techniques of classic comedy writing in the original network TV sitcoms. 

When watching these classic examples, you get the essence of comedy that is built upon certain rhythms and cadences that are tried and true to the craft. 

On Writer’s Block — 

There was recently a huge study done on creativity at UC Berkeley and two findings were concluded — 

One: creative people have the ability to tolerate ambiguity.

Two: they have the ability to suspend judgement.

The thing that kills writers right away is when they write something that they look at and immediately think it’s crap. Hemingway said, “write drunk, edit sober” — the trick is to just get something down on the page without judging it and editing it later.

Give yourself a time limit (a short time limit) to get your script done and take a small bit of time out of every day to work on it and it will get done. 

For all the latest from The Script Lab, be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.