Late-Night Writing Archives

Writing Political Comedy

Posted on August 13, 2016 by Joe Toplyn

Writing political jokes is trickier than writing jokes about non-political topics. How do you write political comedy when a large segment of your audience might boo you instead of laughing?

A miscalculated political joke can split your audience in two.

Political topics are very tempting for a comedy writer because an audience is likely to care about them, especially in an election year. If an audience cares about the topic of a joke, the joke tends to get a bigger laugh.

Donald Trump shouting

But political issues, personalities, and news stories can be very polarizing.

Hillary Clinton shouting

So how do you write a political joke to maximize audience laughter?

Do what you should do when writing any joke: write punch lines that are true. That is, consider your audience very carefully and only write punch lines that say things that most of your audience would agree with.

For example, this joke would probably get laughs at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser:

But at a Donald Trump fundraiser, the same joke would probably get muttered complaints.

Trump University sign On a comedy/talk show on a broadcast network, that joke would probably split the audience. That’s because any general audience probably includes a lot of Trump supporters who wouldn’t agree that Trump University was a scam.

So if you’re aiming for mass appeal, write punch lines that pretty much everybody will accept as true whatever their political leanings.

Hillary Clinton's pantsuits That doesn’t mean you should only write easy, hacky jokes about overused associations like Hillary’s pantsuits…

Donald Trump's hair

…and Trump’s hair.

Instead, build your jokes around fresh associations that almost all of your intended audience will still accept as true.

For example, this joke would probably make a general audience laugh.

Hillary Clinton and her Blackberry Yes, that joke is about Hillary. But it doesn’t say anything negative about her personally. It only says that her sending emails using her personal Blackberries has caused political problems for her. And that’s hard for even her supporters to dispute.

To decide whether a general audience will accept some association of a topic as true, absorb a lot of news and commentary from across the political spectrum. If both left-leaning and right-leaning media outlets are saying the same thing about someone or something, your punch line can, too.

Of course, a few members of a general audience would probably be offended by the mere fact that you wrote a joke about Hillary. To keep those people on your side, make your next joke about Trump.

Here’s a Trump joke that’s unlikely to split a general audience:

Comedy craftspeople may notice that I wrote that last joke using my Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic.

3d2

For more about my six Punch Line Makers, get my book Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.

Writing for Late-Night TV: A Panel Discussion

Posted on May 3, 2016 by Joe Toplyn

Recently I had the privilege of participating in a panel discussion about writing for late-night TV. It was sponsored by the Center for Communication and Made in NY.

I’ve been told the event was very informative. You can watch this video and judge for yourself.

For many more tips and techniques, buy the book mentioned in the video, Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.

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Killer Comedy on “Late Night”

Posted on May 3, 2016 by Joe Toplyn

In my book I tell an anecdote about how a joke I wrote for “Late Night with David Letterman” almost fractured my skull. This video brings the anecdote to life. The lesson: Safety First.

A heavy steel hinge on “The A-Team Stunt Alarm” comes within inches of splashing my brains all over a pillow. Watch it happen starting at the 2 minute mark.

For more tales of my late-night encounters with The Reaper, get Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.

The book "Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV"

How to Create a New Comedy/Talk Show

Posted on February 16, 2015 by Joe Toplyn

You have a host. Your assignment is to build a new comedy/talk show around him or her. How do you even begin to do that?

Recently The New York Times went behind the scenes to give a glimpse into how James Corden and his staff are creating their version of Late Late Show, premiering on March 23, 2015.

And soon Stephen Colbert and his team will begin to shape a new Late Show, to debut on September 8, 2015.

New comedy/talk shows are also being created around Chelsea Handler, Grace Helbig, and other hosts.

I know what that process is like. I assisted in the birth of The Chevy Chase Show and The Caroline Rhea Show.

And I saw what worked and what didn’t work during my many years on the writing staffs of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Show with David Letterman.

So how would I go about creating a new comedy/talk show? I’d start by asking questions like these:

What is our host good at?

You want your show to have your host doing what they do best as often as possible. That way your host will have fun and perform at the top of their game, which means the audience will enjoy watching them.

Take James Corden. He’s a Tony Award-winning Broadway star, so his Late Late Show will probably have him performing many comedy scenes and songs. A clue that this is true: the Times article mentions that James hired writer David Javerbaum, with whom I worked on Late Show with David Letterman. In addition to his extensive experience in late night, D. J. is also an award-winning musical-theater lyricist and librettist.

What is our competition doing?

TV viewers crave familiarity but also freshness. Ideally your new show will offer viewers types of entertainment they’re not getting anywhere else in late night.

For example, Stephen Colbert and his Late Show team may look at Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show and sense an opportunity to do more barbed comedy about politics, celebrities, and current events.

What is physically possible to produce week after week?

The time and money available to produce the show are limited so you can’t always do what you want.

That’s the way it was with Saturday Night Live alumnus Chevy Chase. He’s a gifted sketch performer, so ideally The Chevy Chase Show would have resembled SNL. But no late-night show has the writing budget, production resources, and rehearsal time to air even a half-hour of scripted sketches five nights a week.

How much time is our host willing to devote to the show?

Producing elaborate comedy pieces, like taped TV show parodies, takes up a lot of a host’s time. Producing comedy pieces like field pieces outside of regular business hours also takes a host’s time. If your host can’t or won’t put in that time, they’ll be limiting what comedy you can present on the show.

Jay Leno could only perform a thirty-joke monologue on each episode of the Tonight Show because he devoted every free moment during the day, and several hours at night, to working on it.

Okay, fine, but what should we actually do on the show?

Use the answers to the above questions to create your new show by customizing the generic comedy/talk show template. In addition to your host, these are the elements of that generic template:

Sidekick
Other staffer-performers
Guests, including musical guests
Studio audience
Desk
Comedy pieces

To tailor your comedy pieces to fit your new show and host, get my book, Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV. It’s a comprehensive manual of ways to pack a comedy/talk show with laughs:

cold openings and cold closes
the monologue
the main and second comedy pieces
guest segment extras
bumpers

Good luck to the new entrants in late-night!

The Reader’s Digest? Cool!

Posted on November 21, 2014 by Joe Toplyn

[Possibly NSFW because of the photo of Kim K.]

I had just posted this joke on Twitter:

Kim Kardashian on cover of Paper

Yes, sometimes I tweet jokes about Kim Kardashian’s butt.

Which is one reason I was surprised when my friend Phil told me that he’d seen one of my tweets in the Reader’s Digest.

He mailed me his copy of the Dec 2014/Jan 2015 issue. Here’s my tweet, in the “Laugh Lines” article on page 127:

Getting a joke in the Reader’s Digest is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. Yeah, I know most people don’t think of the magazine as cool. But it played an early role in steering me towards a career as a professional writer.

As a preteen I read my mother’s Reader’s Digests cover to cover. Each one was a tasting menu of attention-grabbing and invitingly short features.

The true stories expanded my horizons and sparked my imagination. The how-to articles fed my curiosity about how the real world operates.

But I especially gravitated toward the jokes, like the ones in “Humor in Uniform” and “Laughter is the Best Medicine.” I must have started cracking more jokes myself because on one sixth-grade report card my mark in Conduct slipped from its usual A to a B-minus.

The Reader’s Digest was turning me into a class clown.

The magazine also played a role in my getting onto the Harvard Lampoon, my first step on the road to professional comedy.

One of the writing samples I submitted was a parody of a Reader’s Digest cover. A fake inspirational article was entitled, “Betty: The Nurse Who Wouldn’t Die, by Richard Speck.”

[Only six years earlier Speck had murdered eight student nurses, so my joke was a real test of the well-known formula “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.”]

David Letterman's Reader's Digest joke A decade later I was crafting jokes for David Letterman, who appears in that same “Laugh Lines” article with me.

And now my comedy has come full circle, back to the cradle where it was nurtured, the Reader’s Digest. And that’s pretty cool.

Reader's Digest Laugh Lines

Plus the magazine paid me $25 for that Twitter joke. So, sucker for positive reinforcement that I am, I decided to write another one for them.

Why did the Reader’s Digest pick up my first joke?

In my book, Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV, I talk about how important it is to capture the “voice” of the host. I’ve written for hosts from Dave Letterman to Caroline Rhea to Jay Leno. Now apparently I had captured the voice of the Reader’s Digest—homespun, good-natured, Middle American.

Can I do it again? Here’s my new joke:

Buy that joke, Reader’s Digest, and I’ll subscribe. That would be the least I could do for the magazine that gave birth to it.

Why We Laugh at Late-Night TV

Posted on September 5, 2014 by Joe Toplyn

What makes people laugh?

Scholars and theologians have been trying to answer that question since the dawn of comedy. Now Peter McGraw has a theory, the benign violation theory, which he discusses in his entertaining new book The Humor Code, co-written with Joel Warner.

The benign violation theory of humor says that, as Peter puts it, “Laughter only occurs when something is both wrong and okay.” Does that theory crack the humor code of late-night comedy/talk shows? Yes, but only up to a point.

As I put together my book Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV I realized I needed a theory to explain why people laugh. A convincing theory of laughter would make all the comedy writing advice in my book seem less random.

So I did some research and decided that the benign violation theory makes a lot of sense. But the more I thought about how jokes are actually written and about what makes one version of a joke funnier than another, the more I realized that I had to tweak the theory to make it fit the short-form comedy found on late-night TV. The amended theory that I use in my book I call the Surprise Theory of Laughter.

The Surprise Theory of Laughter: We laugh when we’re surprised that an incongruity turns out to be harmless.

My Surprise Theory differs from the benign violation theory in two key ways. The first key difference is this:

The Surprise Theory implies that a sequence of events, rather than simultaneous events, produces laughter. To be more specific, laughter results when something first seems incongruous (a violation) and then is revealed to be harmless (benign).

Let’s see how this sequence of events unfolds in a typical late-night monologue joke, one that I recently wrote and posted on Twitter:

“Alaska Airlines frequent-flier lounges have pancake printers that make 180 pancakes an hour. So now passengers can join the Mile Wide Club.”

When listeners hear “Mile Wide Club” their first thought is, “That’s wrong. It’s supposed to be ‘Mile High Club.’ That’s what airline passengers join.” But then a split-second later they realize that “Mile Wide Club” actually does make sense because eating all those pancakes would make passengers extremely fat.

The initial violation of the listeners’ worldview turns out to be benign. So the listeners laugh, like prehistoric cavepeople signaling to their cave families that some suspiciously rustling grass does not hide a deadly saber-toothed cat after all but instead a couple of mating monkeys.

The second key difference between the benign violation theory and my Surprise Theory of Laughter is this:

The Surprise Theory acknowledges the importance of, yes, surprise in producing laughter. Building on Peter’s words, the Surprise Theory says that laughter only occurs when something is first wrong and then, surprisingly, okay.

To see how important surprise is, let’s remove some of it from the sample joke this way:

“Alaska Airlines frequent-flier lounges have pancake printers that make 180 pancakes an hour. So now instead of joining the Mile High Club, passengers can join the Mile Wide Club.”

That revised joke wouldn’t get as big a laugh, would it? The reason is because as soon as listeners hear “Mile High Club” they start expecting a play on those words as the punch line. So “Mile Wide Club” isn’t quite as surprising when it finally arrives. As Joke Maximizer #5 in my book advises: Don’t telegraph the punch line.

Here’s a different way I could rewrite the original joke to reduce the surprise:

“Alaska Airlines frequent-flier lounges have pancake printers that make 180 pancakes an hour. So now joining the Mile Wide Club is something else passengers can do.”

That revised joke puts what I call the laugh trigger—the most unexpected, surprising word or two in the punch line—in the middle of the joke. So when listeners hear “Mile Wide Club” they know the meat of the punch line before the joke is even finished. As a result, their laughter is more diffuse and not as strong. Writers can avoid that problem by applying my book’s Joke Maximizer #2 and ending their jokes on the laugh trigger.

Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV is packed with other practical tips, tricks, and techniques that demonstrate the Surprise Theory of Laughter in action. Taken together they provide ample evidence that the benign violation theory only begins to explain what makes people laugh.

This post is based on a guest post I wrote for the website of The Humor Code. See how the co-author of the book, Peter McGraw, responded to my argument here. He wasn’t entirely convinced.

Why the Internet Hasn’t Changed Late Night

Posted on July 30, 2014 by Joe Toplyn

A lot of people think the Internet has fundamentally altered the nature of late-night comedy/talk shows. But I don’t.

Take the article by Jason Lynch in The Daily Beast last April that sports this headline and subhead:

For one thing, “that time slot after the local news” does matter. It matters a lot. Only people who watch a show on TV get counted in the ratings. People who only watch clips online don’t.

High TV ratings result in big money from TV advertising. But even millions of views online don’t result in much money at all.

So “that time slot after the local news” is vitally important.

For another thing, late night is not “all about YouTube, Twitter, and engaging with audiences on the Internet.” That’s the same as saying late night is “all about getting audiences to watch your promotional comedy clips on the Internet.”

But late night has never been “all about” getting audiences to watch your promotional clips.

Instead, late night is, and always has been, “all about” having great short-form comedy pieces on your show in the first place.

The fact that you can use those great comedy pieces to create great promotional videos for your show is secondary.

And the the fact that audiences can now watch those promotional videos on the Internet in addition to watching them on primetime TV doesn’t qualify as a hijacking.

Here’s an example of how late-night TV worked before the Internet. When I was co-head writer of The Chevy Chase Show our main goal was not to create viral videos—a good thing, because the Internet as we know it didn’t exist.

Our main goal was to create funny comedy pieces under about five minutes long–Internet-sized, as it turns out–to fit between commercial breaks.

That’s why we aired this hidden camera prank involving Chevy at the Hollywood Wax Museum.

Even if we had had the Internet, we would have shot the same comedy piece.

Sure, if the Internet had been available that video probably would have gone viral online and given the show a nice promotional boost.

But the promotional effect would have been a side benefit, not the main reason for doing the piece.

The main reason was to put on a good show.

Learn how to create short-form–Internet-sized–comedy pieces in my book Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.

How the Two Jimmies Can Prepare for Colbert

Posted on July 4, 2014 by Joe Toplyn

As I write this, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon is dominating its competition. Since its premiere on February 17, 2014, Tonight has earned a 1.28 rating in Adults 18-49, compared to a .65 for Jimmy Kimmel Live and a .51 for Late Show with David Letterman.

But the game is changing. Sometime in 2015 Stephen Colbert will take over Late Show and he’ll be a formidable opponent. Here’s why:

Colbert is versatile. He’s done stand-up and improv. He’s a sketch performer and a writer. He’s a savvy and quick-witted interviewer. That means he can do whatever it takes to keep his show entertaining month after month.

Colbert is hard-working. He’s been doing The Colbert Report for almost nine years, so he’s proven he can handle the demands of a late-night comedy/talk show.

Colbert is smart. He and his team know how to turn out a quality show. Last year The Colbert Report won two Primetime Emmys.

So what should the two Jimmies and their staffs do to get ready for Colbert? Here are a couple of suggestions:

Don’t coast on what’s working now. Over the next six months, develop lots of new comedy pieces. You want your show to be as fresh as possible when Colbert gives viewers another option. For example, when I was co-head writer of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno I spearheaded the addition of characters like Mr. Brain. That new, popular comedy material helped Tonight catch up with Late Show.

Shoot lots of taped pieces, particularly field pieces, in the weeks leading up Colbert’s premiere. Then air those taped pieces during the first couple of weeks after the premiere. Field pieces tend to score big with audiences; learn why in my post “5 Reasons to Do Field Pieces.” Late Show with David Letterman used this tactic very successfully to launch itself against The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Tonight took months to recover from the prerecorded onslaught, as described in my book Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.

So those are some ways the two Jimmies can prepare for the premiere of Colbert’s Late Show: develop lots of new comedy pieces and air a lot of taped pieces.

And, by the way, I’d make the same suggestions to Colbert and his team.

The Hugh Grant Fallacy

Posted on June 20, 2014 by Joe Toplyn

Hugh Grant's mug shot This week, on June 18, Access Hollywood perpetuated a longstanding misconception about The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. A voiceover referred to “the game changer, when in 1995 Hugh Grant came on shortly after his dalliance with a prostitute. Jay beat Letterman in the ratings that night and stayed number one for nineteen years.”

Game-changer? So Hugh Grant’s appearance on Tonight was solely responsible for the show’s ratings dominance for almost two decades? Ridiculous.

In fact, the night Grant appeared (July 10, 1995) wasn’t even the first night that Tonight topped Late Show in the ratings. By that time Tonight had been routinely beating Late Show every single Thursday night for months thanks to the huge lead-in provided by the hit show ER. And many weeks the ratings gap between Tonight and Late Show was only a tenth of a point.

So why do the media keep trotting out Hugh Grant? Because he makes for a fun, easy-to-follow story: “Ain’t life crazy? The only reason Jay got to number one is because some dumb Hollywood actor got caught with a hooker.” And Grant did play a role in a ratings milestone: the week he appeared on Tonight was the first week that the show beat Late Show when measured over an entire week of head-to-head original episodes. But Tonight won three nights that week, not just the night that Grant guested.

The truth is, Access Hollywood, that no one single “game changer” led to Tonight taking the late-night crown from Late Show. Many factors changed the game. I describe one of those factors in my post “When O. J. Simpson Killed, So Did Jay Leno.” For more, read my book, Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.

When O. J. Simpson Killed, So Did Jay Leno

Posted on June 12, 2014 by Joe Toplyn

As a host of the Tonight show, Jay Leno was typically regarded by the media as dull, not edgy. For example, a February 2014 article by Daniel D’Addario on the website Salon bears the headlines: “Jay Leno thrived by being America’s dullest man. With less edge than David Letterman or Conan O’Brien, Leno was the perfect host for one of the last huge franchises.”

I never understood that “dull” assessment of Jay. One reason is that the main job of the host of the Tonight show is to keep the show number one in the timeslot. And that means appealing to as many American television viewers as possible. And that means performing comedy that most viewers want to watch, comedy that most viewers find interesting, the opposite of dull. A Tonight show host who most viewers actually found dull would soon be out of a job. And Jay realized that. So he put on a show that, as the ratings prove, wasn’t dull. Year after year, it attracted the most viewers. Jay did his job.

I also never understood how the media could claim that Jay wasn’t “edgy.” Jay did a lot of risky comedy. For example, back in 1994 and 1995 he and his writers (myself included) regularly mined a grisly double homicide for jokes. I’m referring, of course, to the O. J. Simpson murder case.

Think about that. Every night for months Jay invited the audience to laugh about aspects of a tragic, bloody act of butchery. Does that mean that Jay was “America’s dullest man”? Not when one of the Tonight show’s signature bits, the Dancing Itos, lookalikes for the trial’s Judge Ito, made it into People magazine. Does it mean that Jay had “less edge” than the other late-night hosts? Not when Jay was the only one of them routinely wading into the dark and treacherous waters of homicide humor.

Jay’s show even included several parody videos that treated the O.J. murder trial as a sitcom. See one here, followed by a look at the Dancing Itos in action.

The fact is, the O.J. comedy on the Tonight show killed, in the “got huge laughs” sense of the word. It killed because it was edgy and the late-night audience at the time craved edgy. Jay gave most late-night viewers what they wanted to see. Jay did his job.

And now O. J. Simpson is back in the news because this week is the 20^th anniversary of that heinous crime, the prelude to The Trial of the Century. So, for old times’ sake, I wrote this new O.J. joke:

“According to a friend, O.J. Simpson has gained a lot of weight in prison. The good news is O. J. finally found the real killer…and ate him.”

That was the job.

For more on how the Tonight show handled O. J. comedy, read my new book, Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.