Tag Archives: Jimmy Fallon

How to Create a New Comedy/Talk Show

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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.

The Caroline Rhea ShowI 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.

James CordenTake 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.

Stephen ColbertFor 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.

Chevy Chase

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 LenoJay 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

3d2To 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!

How to Write a Funny Caption

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Say you want to write a funny caption for this cartoon, which was the subject of Caption Contest #447 in The New Yorker.

New Yorker contest

You write funny captions for uncaptioned cartoons the same way you’d write jokes about a Found Photo, which is an unaltered photo that wasn’t originally intended to be funny. Examples of Found Photos are the animal photos on the website I Can Has Cheezburger?…

I Can Has Cheezburger? photo of puppy

…and the athletes’ headshots in the comedy piece “Superlatives” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

Athlete headshot from "Superlatives" on "Tonight Show"

Follow these steps to write a funny caption for a cartoon, photo, or other picture:

A) Briefly describe the scene in the picture using its handles. The handles are the one or two most distinctive people or things in the picture and the action that those people or things are performing. This descriptive sentence will bridge the visual picture and a verbal punch line, i.e., the funny caption.

In the case of the New Yorker contest cartoon, the descriptive sentence would be something like, “A guy’s pets have psychotherapy.”

B) Use that descriptive sentence and the Punch Line Makers to create a funny caption. The Punch Line Makers are the six proven techniques for creating punch lines that I cover in my book Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.

In the case of the New Yorker contest cartoon, the winning writer, Alonso Cisneros, apparently used Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic. Here’s how he went about it.

The topic—the descriptive sentence—is “A guy’s pets have psychotherapy.”

New Yorker contestBrainstorming on the handle “pets” produces associations like “hair on the furniture,” “shelter animal,” “adoption,” “cat food,” “veterinarian,” “do tricks,” and “leash laws.”

Brainstorming on the handle “psychotherapy” yields associations like “depression,” “fifty-minute hour,” “my parents hate me,” “childhood trauma,” “I was adopted,” “couch,” and “Freud.”

At least one association, the one involving adoption, appears in similar form on both lists. Linking those two associations results in the winning caption:

“My pets found out they were adopted.”

C) Edit the caption using the Joke Maximizers. The Joke Maximizers are twelve tools for editing jokes to make them as funny as possible; I list them in my book. The writer of the winning caption used these Punch Line Makers:

Punch Line Maker #1: Shorten as much as possible. The caption doesn’t have any unnecessary words or syllables.

Punch Line Maker #2: End on the laugh trigger. The most surprising word in the caption—“adopted”—is at the very end.

Punch Line Maker #4: Make everything clear. Every word in the caption is simple. Not only that, the words “my pets” make it clear that the man on the couch is talking. That’s important because it’s not immediately clear from the drawing itself which human or animal is talking, if any.

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How the Two Jimmies Can Prepare for Colbert

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Jimmy FallonAs 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.

Stephen Colbert with two Emmys

  • 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:

 

T-shirt of Jay Leno as Mr. BrainDon’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.

 

 

David Letterman on Time magazine cover, Aug. 30, 1993Shoot 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.

Seth Meyers Did Not Steal My Joke

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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.”

Solange elevator

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?

hurricane

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.3d2

 

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.

Deflated-NFL-FootballBut 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