Sitcom Pilots - Introducing Characters Early

After much procrastination, the time has finally come to tear apart the script to Dead End Job (sitcom pilot), and do a massive re-write.

With the BAFTA Rocliffe Forum competition deadline around the corner, we have set our deadline and hopefully the motivation and pushing force needed to get this rewrite off the ground.

The pilot has been sitting in the ‘drawer’ for a good half year since receiving some great and very useful feedback and now Taro and I are finally ready to tackle it - we have a board, post-it notes, and most of all, lots of notes and ideas on how to make it stronger.

One of the feedbacks we received was that our first scene only establishes a couple of the main characters and one of the ‘rules’ of sitcoms is to introduce all the main players right at the beginning, so adding a new character half-way through could be confusing.

I read somewhere that the pilot for Taxi managed to do this in a very creative way, by having a broken phone from which people could call anywhere they wished for free, we got a glimpse into all the characters, whilst still adding a little drama when Alex calls his daughter, whom he hadn’t seen or heard from in 15 years.

I recently watched the pilot to Friends and that was pretty excellent too, and if you haven’t watched it during one of the many re-plays, I recommend watching it right away. Now. Go!

Right, so as you hopefully noticed, we get introduced to all the characters from the go and through very clear dialogue, get a sense of their identity, all this whilst also setting up the Ross and Rachel saga that will carry the series through 10 seasons.

Based on that, how can Taro and I make our characters stronger and immediately tell our audience who these people are and what they are searching for? 

Before we start re-writing, and this is not procrastinating, it’s research, we have decided that we will be watching as many sitcom pilots as possible in the next week or two. Coincidentally, look what just popped up on my Twitter feed this week:

I took the opportunity to Storify the interesting conversation that followed between Bitter Script Reader and his followers on Twitter.

Lots of food for thought, and hopefully the more pilots we watch, the more we’ll start to see a pattern emerge and if we’re lucky it will be so engraved in our memories that writing might as well just happen by Osmosis. 

Feel free to make me any Sitcom recommendations, it would also be great to watch some that maybe break the rules and are still great.

Have you Laughed Today yet?

I recently watched 5minutes of Lead Balloon and found myself laughing a lot. How have I never heard of this programme before? Since I started writing comedy I’ve been paying a lot more attention to the different sitcoms and comedies around.

Apparently an adult laughs on average 17 times a day, it might not be much, but to me it seems like a healthy amount of times; but if someone does laugh that much then why is it so hard to make one laugh deliberately?

There is an art to writing comedy and like any genre, there will be people who either love it or hate it.

I remember watching Married with Children when I was younger. We would all sit and watch it with my Dad and he would laugh out loud (yes, he would lol) from beginning to end, my mum on the other hand didn’t find any of the characters likeable. I am sure she would approve of the more recent take on family comedy, Modern Family, also staring Ed O’Neil.

I know some people of a certain generation who didn't like Friends. A group of youngsters all ‘living in sin’ just didn’t fit in with their values. If they gave it a chance they would realise it wasn’t about whether or not they had sex, it was about the interactions. Although having said that, sex is funny! It is always a recurring theme in many comedies, why? Because it’s awkward, it’s clumsy, it can be taboo and is rarely sexy. As Lucy V Hay writes in her blog, you can tell a lot about people and their relationship through sex.

I digress; this is a post about comedy, not SEX.

Over the years I’ve come across a few people who think Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is one of the funniest films they have ever seen. I personally don’t get it and after watching it, I could not watch any films that Jim Carrey starred in. For me, his exaggerated facial expressions were just trying too hard to be funny.

That leads me to question how comedy on paper translates to screen? It is as much about the story and gags as it is about the performance. An average performance without all the right pauses could leave a lot to be desired; likewise, an excellent delivery of a mediocre comedy script will just be mediocre. How many times have we watched a comedy because of its cast, only to be disappointed? I can think of a few.

I’m now on a mission to read the script for Ace Ventura simply to find out whether or not I would like it better. Unfortunately, it seems that whenever I read a script of a film or TV series that I have already watched, I can’t help but imagine the characters as played by the respective actors, so reading Ace Ventura without imagining Jim Carey playing the lead role could be a challenge.

Whether it makes you laugh or not, a comedy should still read as a comedy, that is, one should be able to identify its genre without much thought to it. So if you have to think too much about the genre, or even worse, if you’ve written a comedy and someone mistakes it for a horror, then it’s time for a re-write.

It is hard to make everyone laugh at a comedy, so I try to at least write something that I find funny. If you can get just one person to laugh, then hopefully you’re on a roll. Do you know what? Laughter is infectious; the more people who laugh at something, the more other people will laugh too. Notice next time you are in a movie theatre watching a comedy. The minute someone laughs out loud at something, others will join in, and the more people laugh, the more others will realise it’s ok to laugh and will join in. 

Sit-down Comedy

I am one of six, not that there are six of me, that would have been unbearable. Seriously, who can imagine sharing a roof with six of me, all bossing each other around and always being right. Instead, I have five siblings, and thankfully I'm the only boss.

As one can imagine, in such a large household, there is bound to be some drama, but there is also a lot of silliness and laughter. Add to the mix a father who is constantly coming up with his own dad-like jokes and you have my family.

I like to think that I inherited my dad's silly sarcasm. One of my brother-in-law's calls me a liar, but to me it's humour. I merely give silly questions absurd replies, if he believes me, well then he just doesn't get it.

Inevitably I married someone who shares the same humour, oh and he's also always right too. I am however, still the boss. Besides the humour, we also share a love of film-making, which is how we met to start with. Fast forward nine years and we have now become writing partners.

Since the end of last year we have been writing comedy. This is all very new and strange to me as until that point I considered myself a drama writer and had never even thought of writing comedy. I could never imagine myself as a stand up comedian, I'm more of a sit-down comedian. My mind is too slow to come up with quick witty comments and comebacks, but with a pen in hand, no pressure to perform, it seems to come out; at least I laugh at my jokes, so that's one person.

We first started to write a sitcom purely because of the BBC writersroom Laughing Stock competition. I had so much fun writing it that I feel like we have a lot more where it came from. We submitted our first ever sitcom pilot after about 10 drafts and it's already been modified again since. There's a big chance that out of 1808 entries it will not be among the 25 shortlisted, although it would be so bloody amazing if we made the shortlist. It is funny, honest.

Ever since completing and submitting the sitcom pilot, we have already been brainstorming and outlining other comedy ideas. I am very excited about our projects and hope to keep it up.

This is definitely the year for comedy with an upcoming sitcom workshop and festival this April:

• Introduction to Sitcom Writing - April 2nd
• London Comedy Writers Festival - April 9th & 10th

Laugh with me or laugh at me, at least someone is laughing.