comedy writing Archives

If You Wish to Be a Writer, Write. Right? Wrong!

Posted on November 2, 2016 by Joe Toplyn

Bust of Epictetus

Aspiring writers often hear the poor advice of the Greek philosopher Epictetus, who is quoted as saying, “If you wish to be a writer, write.”

For example, this blogger states, “If you want to be a writer, then all you have to do is write. That’s all there is to it, just start writing.”

I think that’s poor advice because that’s not “all there is” to writing. That’s like telling somebody who has never driven a car before, “If you want to be a driver, just start driving. That’s all there is to it.”

Writer Stephen King gets much closer to making sense when he recommends this: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

But even Stephen King’s advice is incomplete. Read a lot of what?

This is my advice to aspiring writers:

If you wish to be a writer, start by reading books about how to write.

Here’s why my advice makes sense in the context of writing scripts for TV and film:

Writing well, like driving well, means following a lot of rules. It just does. Writing great scripts requires knowing how to structure a story, create characters, build compelling scenes, and so much more.

Figuring out those writing rules by yourself—by reading hundreds of scripts, say—would take a huge amount of time. And most people value their time too much to spend it on reinventing the wheel.

Taking classes to learn those writing rules would cost a lot more money than buying a few books, even if such classes were available.

Writing without knowing those rules will result in your writing badly. You will get demoralized by your lack of success. And you will annoy your friends when you give them your bad drafts to read for their feedback.

After you’ve climbed way up the learning curve by reading a few books about how to write, then read something else: actual produced scripts in your favorite genre. Study those real-world examples of how professionals followed the rules that you’ve learned.

Many TV and movie scripts are available for free online, like at Simply Scripts and The Daily Script.

Car crashed into telephone pole After you’ve read a lot of how-to books and scripts, then, and only then, write something yourself.

With a firm grasp of the writing rules of the road, drive your script safely down entertaining avenues to a satisfying destination instead of into a bad neighborhood or a telephone pole.

Here are a few of my favorite writing how-to books, to get you started:

For TV writers:

The TV Writer’s Workbook, by Ellen Sandler

Writing Television Sitcoms, by Evan Smith

For movie writers:

The Anatomy of Story, by John Truby

Writing Screenplays That Sell, by Michael Hauge

The Writer’s Journey, by Christopher Vogler

Plus my friend Greg DePaul just wrote the book Bring the Funny: The Essential Companion for the Comedy Screenwriter. I’m eager to read it because he’s a hilarious guy with solid screenwriting credentials.

And, of course, if you want to write short-form comedy—the kind you see on late-night TV—get my book, Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.

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.

Seth Meyers Did Not Steal My Joke

Posted on June 5, 2014 by Joe Toplyn

Ideas get stolen in show business all the time but less often than you might think.

I teach a class in comedy writing for late-night TV. A couple of nights ago I was giving my students some practice in turning newspaper articles into monologue jokes. Toward the end of the session I mentioned an article with the headline “Ladykillers: Hurricanes with female names may be deadlier.” I suggested that a joke based on that story might go something like this:

“Researchers at the University of Illinois say that hurricanes with female names may be deadlier. The researchers are particularly worried about the next hurricane, Solange.”

The next day I Googled “late night jokes” to see a sampling from the previous night’s monologues. Here’s a joke that Seth Meyers told on “Late Night” the same night I taught my class:

“A new study shows hurricanes with female names are more fatal because people subconsciously assume that they are less dangerous. Though I’d bet people would evacuate pretty quickly for Hurricane Solange.”

If I were a freelance writer who had emailed my hurricane joke to “Late Night” and then watched that night’s monologue, I might have been outraged. The show stole my joke! But the fact is, professional monologue writers on different shows inadvertently write similar jokes all the time. But given all the thousands of possible topical jokes that can be written each day, how can that happen?

It can happen because all the writers on staff at all these shows use the same formulas to write their jokes. In the case of the hurricane joke, that news story had all the characteristics that a professional writer wants to see in a joke topic. For example, the story was likely to capture most people’s interest and nobody died.

And the punch line involving Solange was created using a proven pro writing technique: linking an association of the topic—“dangerous females”—with a high-profile event in pop culture—Beyonce’s sister assaulting Jay Z in an elevator.

So just because two late-night hosts deliver similar jokes doesn’t mean that some writer is a thief. It means that both shows’ writers are working from the same playbook.

For more about that playbook read my new book Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.

Postscript added October 4, 2014

Here’s more evidence that professional comedy writers use the same playbook. Yesterday afternoon, October 3, 2014, I posted this joke on Facebook and Twitter:

“Teresa and Joe Giudice of Real Housewives of New Jersey are going to prison. So now Mr. Giudice will also have a chance to be a housewife.”

Later that evening, Jimmy Fallon told a few monologue jokes on Tonight that culminated with this one:

“And Teresa’s husband, Joe, was actually sentenced to forty-one months in prison. But on the bright side, now he’ll get to be someone’s housewife.”

Those virtually identical jokes were written using my book’s Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic.

Post-Postscript added January 20, 2015

Here’s even more evidence that professional comedy writers all use the same techniques for writing jokes. Yesterday I posted this joke on Twitter and Facebook :

“The NE Patriots are accused of using deflated footballs in a game. But the Patriots insist that their only deflated balls came from steroids.”

A few hours later, Jimmy Fallon delivered a joke on Tonight about the same topic that ended with basically the same punch line:

“The first time there’s been a sports controversy about deflated balls that doesn’t involve steroids.”

Both of those punch lines sprang from my book’s Punch Line Maker #4: Find a play on words in the topic.

But notice that my version of the punch line takes a shot at the Patriots. The Tonight version not only doesn’t refer to the Patriots, it doesn’t even refer to professional football, despite past scandals involving steroid use by NFL players.

Why did Tonight take that more conservative approach to the joke? Possibly because the writer and producers heeded my book’s Comedy Quality Test #2, which states: “Imagine the host delivering the joke.” A Patriots version of the punch line may have seemed too mean, and therefore out of character, for Jimmy Fallon.

And any NFL punch line may have made it tougher to book NFL players on Tonight. Comedy/talk shows need comedy, but they also need high-profile guests for the “talk” part.

Post-Postscript added March 8, 2018

And this article describes a particularly extreme example of the phenomenon I’m talking about. On March 7, 2018, five late-night hosts told essentially the same joke about President Trump and porn star Stormy Daniels.

Article about five hosts telling the same joke