CHAPTER 12
SITUATION COMEDY

excerpted from 
The Comic Toolbox: 
How to be Funny Even if You're Not

by John
Vorhaus

Some people think situation comedies are easy to write. Some people watch really, really bad sitcoms on TV and say, "Hey, I could do better than that." And you know what? They're probably right. They probably could write sitcoms better than the bad ones. Trouble is, the television industry is already pretty well glutted with writers who can write bad sitcoms. The trick, if you want to succeed in that neck of the weeds, is to write sitcoms better than the best, not the worst of them. If this is your path, I hope in this chapter to give you some signposts and markers to help you blaze the trail. 

If this subject is of no interest to you, I'll write you a pass to study hall.

THE SPEC SCRIPT

The typical passport to the land of sitcom hopes and dreams is the speculative, or spec, script. This is a sample episode of an existing television show that you write to demonstrate your ability to capture the characters' voices, the story structure, and the jokes and rhythms of a given show. In choosing which show to write a spec for, there are a couple of things to keep in mind.

You want to choose a "smart" show. There's no point in writing a spec episode of a silly, bad or derivative situation comedy, because no one who might care to hire you is the least bit interested in reading specs for that sort of show. You want to choose from among the hip, hot, "sexy" shows that are popular at the time of your writing. Here in 1994, the shows most often targeted for spec are Home Improvement, Mad About You, Seinfeld and Roseanne. But you need to know that by the time you read this book, all these shows will have been "specked to death" by the preexisting universe of sitcom wannabes. In a sense you have to get out ahead of the curve, pick and spec a show before it becomes a hit and subsequently gets ground up in the spec sitcom mill. Watch the new sitcoms. Try to be the first on your block to write a spec script for a new show. At the worst, you'll write a spec for a show that doesn't become successful, in which case all you've lost is the time it took you to do the work, but what you've gained is the experience of having done that very work. About a push, I'd say.

As you choose your spec target, ask yourself if you like the show you're specking for. Will you sufficiently enjoy watching and studying it and writing it to devote the weeks and months of work necessary to do a good job on your spec script? Don't kid yourself here: there's no point in writing a spec script for a show you just don't like, no matter how popular or smart it may be, for the simple reason that you won't write the script very well. You may have a very serviceable, workmanlike approach to the writing of that spec, but some essential enthusiasm will be missing, and its absence always shows.

Play to your strengths. Do you have a knack for gags? Then you want to spec a gag-driven show. Do you have "heart?" Then you want to write a sample for a show that has lots of "heartfelt" moments. Can you write kids well? Write a kids' show spec. The purpose of a spec script is to knock 'em dead with your proficiency on the page. Do everything you can to give yourself an edge in that direction. It might be useful at this point to make a list of where you consider yourself to be strong (and not so strong) as a writer. Not only will this help you choose the right show to spec, it will also show you in general terms where your craft needs work.

Finally, can you find your soul in the show? This is really the one key question. In my experience, no sitcom script is any darn good if the writer doesn't put his or her real heart, real feelings, and real emotion into the work. Does the show you've picked offer you this opportunity? If you feel no connection to the characters or the situation of the show, how can you invest your true self in the work? Like a lack of enthusiasm, an absence of heartfelt commitment will torpedo even the best spec effort.

LEARNING THE RULES

To make your spec script shine, you have to learn the rules of the show you're writing for, and then follow those rules in your own spec script. In the last chapter, for example, I mentioned a "rule" for Married... with Children, that Al Bundy always loses. To write a spec episode of this show well, you'd have to know, and follow, that rule.

On Murphy Brown there's often a gag, or even a running gag, about a secretary, but that the stories are never built around a secretary. Failure to follow a rule like this will betray your ignorance of the show's inner workings. It's a rule of Mad About You that the stories always turn on conflict between Paul and Jamie. In Bob Newhart's shows, there's almost always been a telephone monologue, to showcase Bob's trademark strength with this gag. It was a rule of Gilligan's Island that no one ever got off the island. Can you imagine writing a spec episode of Gilligan's Island where they all got away? 

For more on the rules of a show, contemplate what type of comic story the show tells. Remembering that Taxi is a center and eccentrics configuration would lead you to choose a story which placed Judd Hirsch at the center of an eccentric conflict. Then again, remembering that Taxi is off the air would lead you to choose a different show to spec in the first place.

You learn the rules of a show by reading sample scripts of that show and watching taped episodes. You want to read these scripts and watch these episodes over and over again, until you not only have an understanding of the show's form and structure, but also of its hidden logic, its taste in stories, and its sense of humor.

A show's rules extend to all aspects of that show. Which character gets the main story? Who gets the secondary stories? Is someone a straight man? Do characters tell jokes and make wisecracks, or do all the laughs come from the characters' comic perspectives? What sort of language do these people use? What topics are taboo? Do they make reference to the outside world, or do they live within a hermetically sealed sitcom bubble? Will given characters act the fool? To write a spec script correctly, you need all of this information and more. It's not simply a matter of ready, aim, fire the pie. 

SITCOM STORY STRUCTURE

Situation comedies are structured either as two-act or three-act tales. Mad About You, M*A*S*H and Married... with Children are two-act structures; Murphy Brown and The Simpsons play in three acts. Each act ends with an act break, a big dramatic moment which (one hopes) creates a sense of expectation and dread strong enough to hold the viewers' interest across the commercial break and bring them back for more. 

In a two-act structure, think of the act break as the moment of maximum dread. At the act break, things should be as bad for your characters as they can possibly get. If your story is about a husband and a wife fighting, then at the act break, the husband is banished to the couch or the garage or the best friend's house. If your story is about characters trapped in the basement, then the act break is when they discover that a pipe is leaking and the water is starting to rise. If your story is about a character getting blasted on cough medicine with his new boss coming over, then the act break is when the boss arrives, just as the cough medicine kicks in. 

Not many years ago, some genius had the bright idea to divide the show into three parts and thus make room for extra commercials. By this logic, we'll soon have four-act and five-act sitcoms, and eventually twelve-act sitcoms, with commercials every two minutes. Be that as it may, in three-act structure, as in two-act structure, it's necessary for the moment before each commercial to have some real drama and urgency, to carry the viewer over the break. 

I like to think of my three-act act breaks in terms of trouble is coming and trouble is here. At the end of the first act, the characters know that a bad, bad thing is looming on the horizon. At the second act break, the consequences of that bad thing have been brought home. This second break corresponds roughly with the moment of maximum dread in traditional two-act structure. 

In an episode of Murphy Brown, trouble might loom in the form of a summons for Murphy to appear in court and reveal a confidential source. Trouble "is here" when she's thrown in jail for not revealing the source. In an episode of The Simpsons, trouble is coming when Bart learns that he has to write a term paper by tomorrow morning, and trouble is here when he wakes at dawn, having fallen asleep in the middle of his work.

In any event, your act break, or breaks, must create a sense of expectation and dread, a large, pervading, "Oh no!" feeling in your reader or your viewer. Here's where your skill at making bad things worse will really come in handy. Again we face the surprising notion that comedy is less about laughs than about willful, perverse destruction of a character's serenity and peace. Cherish this perversity and use it in your writing; if you use it in real life, they tend to throw you in jail.

No matter what happens in your story, remember that situation comedies are essentially circular; things always end up more or less back where they started. If a character gets fed up with his family and moves out of the house, clearly the act break is the moment when he leaves. Just as clearly, the story will end with the character having moved back home. Why this is so has to do with the episodic nature of commercial television. In the main, audiences return to a sitcom each week precisely to see their favorite characters doing pretty much the same things they did last week and the week before that.

Which is not to say that there's no "change" in a sitcom story. In fact, there's a subtle and interesting change in every sitcom story, and understanding this change is the key to understanding sitcom story structure.

THE ARC OF STABILITY

Sitcom stories start out at a point of old stability, travel through increasing instability, and ultimately arrive at a new stability. You might have an episode, for example, where the old stability is that dad doesn't allow his daughter to date. Through increasing instability, dad and daughter have conflict over this subject. Dad forbids, daughter defies, dad discovers, daughter lies, etc. Finally you'd reach a new stability, in which dad and daughter agree that dating is okay within responsible and agreed-upon limits. (If this sounds like conventional sitcom morality, it is, but then again, television is just a mirror on the world; we tend to tell people exactly what they want to hear. If not, we tend to get cancelled.)

To take another example, the old stability might be a character's denial that she's growing old. Instability might come in the form of an accident or an illness or the death of a relative or friend. The new stability would be the character's realization that she is, in fact, growing old, but that's okay. The arc of travel from old stability to new stability is frequently a trip from denial to acceptance. 

Notice how this type of story flows naturally from a point of departure to a point of maximum remove and back again to a point very near the original point of departure. Also notice that looking at your story on this level is a form of abstraction. Once you've identified an interesting old stability, instability, and new stability, you'll find that there are literally dozens of stories you can explore built around the very same thing. Do yourself a favor and explore all these alternatives at length. Don't assume that the first solution is the best solution; always make room for the new idea. Spend some minutes now and see if you can build some stories on the track from old stability through instability to new stability. I'll start you off.

OLD STABILITY: A husband and wife love each other.
INSTABILITY: They feel mutually unloved, underappreciated, and taken for granted.
NEW STABILITY: They rekindle their romance and love each other anew.

OLD STABILITY: A teenage boy is living at home.
INSTABILITY: He feels crowded by his parents' rules, and moves into a bachelor flat with his buddies, where he discovers that independence ain't all it's cracked up to be.
NEW STABILITY: He returns home with a new appreciation for his family.

OLD STABILITY: A girl is in denial about her parents' death.
INSTABILITY: A pet dies, and in the ensuing pet funeral, the girl falls apart and finally opens herself up to grief.
NEW STABILITY: The girl achieves acceptance of her parents' death.

OLD STABILITY: A man has a job.
INSTABILITY: The man gets laid off.
NEW STABILITY: The man gets a new job.

This last example may seem absurdly elementary, but it's a telling example just the same. If you can't reduce your story to something this simple, then your story is not yet fully understood by you. Like the Comic Throughline, this sort of shortcut serves both as a point of departure for deeper story exploration, and as a means of checking to see that your story has an authentic arc of change. Give it a shot.

OLD STABILITY: 

INSTABILITY: 

NEW STABILITY:

OLD STABILITY: 

INSTABILITY: 

NEW STABILITY:

OLD STABILITY: 

INSTABILITY: 

NEW STABILITY:

OLD STABILITY: 

INSTABILITY: 

NEW STABILITY:

In the end, structure without substance is like a chocolate egg with no nougat center. To make your character's change of state be interesting to the audience, you have to tell a worthwhile story--or two--and link them to a compelling, or at least an engaging theme.

A-STORY, B-STORY AND THEME

Many, though not all situation comedies slice themselves up into a-story and b-story. The a-story is the main story, the big problem, the heavy emotional issue with which a given half-hour of television reality chooses to concern itself. Typically, the a-story is given to the star of the show, the main character. Also, the a-story explores the theme of the episode. Whether that theme is, "tell the truth," or "be true to your school," or "don't do stupid things," it's played out in the largest, deepest, and most dramatic sense in the a-story.

The b-story is much smaller and lighter than the a-story. It usually involves secondary characters. It carries far less emotional weight and gets less screen time than the a-story. In a well crafted sitcom, there's a thematic connection between the a-story and the b-story, in which the b-story comments on and amplifies the meaning of the a-story.

I like to think of the a-story as the melody, and the b-story as the harmony. If your a-story had Mr. Wacky hassling his boss for a raise, for example, then your b-story might involve Wacky's kids dunning him for a bigger allowance. If your a-story involved Wacky trying to kick his heroin habit, the b-story might involve Mrs. Wacky battling a coffee jones.

Do the a-story and the b-story have to be connected in this way? No, of course not: In the a-story, Wacky goes to jail, and in the b-story, his kid has a zit. Or it may be that the a-story and the b-story only intersect when one solves the problem of the other. For instance, if Mr. Wacky ha a dilemma over whether to fudge his taxes, he might find the answer in forcing his daughter do her own algebra homework, rather than cheat off a friend. Are stories stronger if they're thematically linked? I think so. It's harder to get this kind of story right, but the reward is worth the effort.

ANOTHER SITCOM STORY SHORTCUT 

Because not all strategies work for all writers, I'd like to introduce yet another quick-and-dirty way to get a line on your sitcom story. To use this shortcut, think in the following terms: introduction, complication, consequence, and relevance.

The introduction to a sitcom story is the thing that gets the trouble started or puts the tale in motion. An out-of-town guest arrives. An old girlfriend turns up. A first date looms. A driver's license expires. A party is planned. 

The complication is the thing that makes the bad situation worse. If the introduction is one character taking cough medicine, the complication is another character bringing the boss home for dinner. If the introduction is one character running for school office, the complication is another character entering the race. If the introduction is a character weaving a lie into an English essay, the complication is that essay winning a major prize. If the introduction is Mr. Wacky going to the doctor, the complication is discovering he only has three weeks to live.

The consequence is the result of the conflict created by the introduction and the complication. If two people are running for the same office, then the consequence is the outcome of the election. In the cough medicine story, the consequence is when the cough medicine blows up, so to speak, in the boss's face. The consequence of Mr. Wacky facing death is his coming to terms with his mortality, only to discover (since we'd like to run the series for another five years or so) that he's not actually dying after all.

The relevance is simply a statement of the story's theme. Stand by your friends. Do the right thing. Don't fear the future. Stop and smell the roses. Accept your own mortality. Shower the people you love with love; that sort of thing.
Here's how an episode of Gilligan's Island might lay out. Introduction: an alien spacecraft lands on the island. Complication: Gilligan befriends the aliens, who agree to take him home. Consequence: Gilligan worries that the aliens will be exploited and lets them leave without him. Relevance: Do the right thing, even if it costs you. 

Or suppose you had a sitcom called Bed and Breakfast about a couple's conflict over how to run their little inn. Knowing nothing about these characters and their lives, you could nevertheless construct a neat little four-sentence story (or ten) for them.

Introduction: Buddy books his old frat-rat pals and their poker game into the bed and breakfast. Complication: Beth mistakenly books a group of genteel bird-watchers for the same weekend. Consequence: Things get out of hand, and Beth and Buddy have to cooperate to manage the crowd. Relevance: Communication is a really good thing.

You may think that storytelling of this sort is facile; all surface, no substance. Certainly you don't know everything you need to know about a story in four sentences. But everything you need to know is implied in those four sentences--if they're the right ones.

If you're up to the challenge, take an existing situation comedy, or make up one of your own, and see if you can crack some shortcut stories for that show. 

My show is called Mr. Wacky, and it's about a former kids' show host now running a retirement home for over-the-hill actors.

Wacky sets up an illegal casino to raise money to pay off the I.R.S. The police bust the casino, and Wacky is thrown in jail. Wacky's impassioned courtroom defense beats both the gambling charges and the I.R.S. audit. Theme: You can fight city hall.

Wacky's doctor tells him to go on a diet, but Wacky tries but fails to diet, and ultimately has a heart attack. During his near-death experience, he sees the error of his ways. Theme: Life turns on choices. 

Wacky goes on a game show, where he's a big winner. Then he discovers that the game show is fixed. Sacrificing his new-found fame and fortune, Wackly blows the whistle on the crooked game. Theme: To thine own self be true.

This tool of shorthand storymaking (which works for all kinds of stories, and not just sitcoms) is especially useful when you're "shopping" for story ideas. If you generate a long list of stories developed only to the level of introduction, complication, consequence and relevance, you'll know pretty quickly which are the good ones, without having to do a whole lot of extra work.

Another thing to look for with this shortcut is what I call the implied fireworks scene. A well-structured sitcom story often suggests or implies a big, climactic scene in which all the fireworks explode or all the pies get thrown or all the hidden secrets get revealed. Just as you should be able to draw a line from old stability to new stability, in a well-structured story you can always draw a clear line from your story's introduction to its implied fireworks scene.

If your story's introduction is a character taking home-brewed cough medicine, the implied fireworks scene is when the character acts outrageously in front of the worst possible person at the worst possible time. If your story starts with a lie, any lie, the implied fireworks scene is the one where the truth is finally told. Again, you can't know the details of the implied fireworks scene just in a sentence, but giving it a name tells you where to look for answers.

Often the implied fireworks scene turns on a decision, which decision turns out to be the key to the entire story. Suppose you had a sitcom about a retired pro football player. In a given episode of that series, he might get a shot at returning to the game. Without knowing anything else about that episode, you can pretty well be sure that the implied fireworks scene will be the one where the footballer decides, once and for all, what to do about his lingering pro dreams. He may decide to go for it, but most likely he'll decide to accept things as they are. Why? Because in the main situation comedies end up roughly back where they started. Such is the nature of episodic television. 

Old stability: Character feels that his career is over. Instability: Character gets one last chance. New stability: Character accepts that the past is, indeed, past.

Before you go on, spend some time working with these storytelling tools. Are they really that easy to use? I believe you'll find that they are.

STORY OUTLINES

Before you write a sitcom script, you'll want to write a full and complete story outline. This document is a present-tense telling of your tale, incorporating as much detail, as much real emotion, and as much funny incident as you can cram onto the page. Typically this piece of prose runs ten pages, more or less, but there's no hard-and-fast rule on length. You simply want to tell the story as completely as possible, for your story outline will be the blueprint from which you write the script.

A word of warning: if you're new to writing situation comedies, this is the part of the process you're most likely to overlook. If you're like, oh, say, eight out of ten first-time sitcom scribes, you'll say, "Outline? We don' need no stinkin' outline," and you'll plunge directly into your script, confident of working out the story as you plug along in the script. Folks, take it from someone who's been there, that way lies madness. If you shortchange your time in outline, it will only come back to haunt you in script. Why? Story problems. By writing and rewriting and rewriting your outline many times, you'll reveal your story problems and then solve them as they appear. It is several orders of magnitude easier to fix problems in outline than it is to fix them in script, for the simple reason that you have fewer words, and far fewer pages to change. Do yourself a favor: obsess on the outline; make sure the story works before you go to script.

Here's what a typical paragraph from a story outline might look like:

ACT ONE/SCENE ONE - WACKY LIVING ROOM - DAY.

MR. WACKY is channel-surfing, marveling that all fifty-seven stations have managed to synchronize their commercial breaks. His teenage son, DWIGHT, comes in from school, acting nonchalant but obviously hiding something. Wacky pressures Dwight until Dwight reveals that a girl has asked him out on a date. This is bad? wonders Wacky. Is there something about Dwight's gender identification that Wacky ought to know? No, no, Dwight's a breeder; it's just that this girl has a "fast" reputation, and Dwight heard that she's only interested in his body. Dwight feels exploited. Wacky solemnly agrees that no one deserves to be treated as a sex object, but after Dwight leaves the room, Wacky pumps his fist in triumph: "Yes! My son's a stud!" 

Once you've completed a first draft of your story outline, you want to examine it at length for two things: problems, and opportunities. Problems are flaws in the logic or the sense of your story. Opportunities are all the myriad ways you can make the story stronger and more interesting, and its scenes funnier, livelier and deeper before you even get to script.

When dealing with story problems, you need to think in terms of two kinds of logic: plot logic and story logic. Plot logic is outer logic, the sequence of events that you, the writer, impose on your story. Story logic is the inner logic of your characters, the reasons they have for behaving the way they do. All of your story moves must satisfy both plot logic and story logic. In other words, your characters must do what they do to move the story forward, but their actions have to make sense to the characters themselves. If they don't, you end up with plot robots, characters in a story who serve no purpose but to move the story forward.

Suppose you're writing a spec episode of Mr. Wacky (Are you? I'm flattered...) and you want Mr. Wacky to consider a vasectomy. He can't just wake up one morning and say, "Gee, I think I'd like to have my scrotum opened." Rather, something in the story has to drive him to this point. If his girlfriend has a pregnancy scare, Wacky may decide that the time has come to say goodbye to Old Mr. Spermcount. This sequence satisfies both plot logic and story logic; you, the writer, want to get Wacky into that hospital room, and now Wacky wants to get there too.

If plot logic and story logic don't agree, your readers or viewers will feel dissatisfied. So as you rewrite your story outlines, make sure that every move every character makes is justified by who that character is, what he wants, and how we understand him to behave.

Opportunities in your story outline are places where you can put your comic tools to work. In the example above, I put cynical Mr. Wacky in front of a television and let him react in his cynical way to all those commercials on TV. In rewriting the outline, I may see in this scene an opportunity to exaggerate Wacky's reaction or apply clash of context to Wacky's comic perspective, or even use abstraction to find a far better TV enemy. Home shopping? Televangelists? How can I make his bad situation worse?

It's in rewriting your outline that your story really gets good, and funny. Here's why: every time you rewrite your outline, you go further into your story, you understand it better, and you can mine its comic potential more effectively.

Again from the example above, I might be three or four drafts into the story before I realize there's even more fun to be had from Dwight having two girls after him, or from Wacky falling for the girl's mom, or from Wacky and his son going out on a date together. The mere act of rewriting the outline inevitably makes the story richer, and the characters more consistent, authentic, and interesting.

To make the most of your story outline, you have to write the darn thing, and write it again, and again, and again, until the problems all go away and the opportunities all emerge. Spend some time now--not minutes, but hours or days or weeks--writing and rewriting the outline for your next sitcom script. The more time you spend in outline, the better your eventual script will be.

STORY TO SCRIPT

If you've done your job in outlining your story, it should be fairly easy to write the subsequent script. Well, maybe "easy" is too strong a word. Maybe "not impossible" is the phrase we need. But consider this: writing a script from a thorough and detailed outline is merely the act of translating a story from one form to another. Writing a script without a full outline is like panning for gold with a shrimp fork.

Does a well-wrought outline guarantee no story problems in script? I wish. Unfortunately, in going from story to script we often experience what I call the Grand Canyon effect. No matter how good the canyon looks from the rim, you really won't get to know it until you go down that donkey trail. No matter how thoroughly you've worked out your story, you won't discover all its problems until you hurl yourself into the script.

In chapter fourteen, I'm going to discuss some strategies for writing and rewriting all sorts of scripts, as well as comic novels, non fiction, stand-up acts, etc. For now, I want to touch briefly on the form and format of your sitcom script. Some of this stuff is easy to get right. Some of it... well, some of it is like panning for gold with a shrimp fork. 

Your sitcom script should be more or less as long as long as those of the show for which you're writing. I once asked a story editor how long my script should be, and he said, "As long as you like, so long as it's not less than 40 pages and not more than 42." These days I prefer a more organic approach. Write your story as fully and completely as you can. Cut out everything that's irrelevant or fails to move the story forward. More often than not, you'll end up with a script that runs about right.

If all else fails, mirror the scripts of the show you're writing for. Just do it like they do it, in format and length, and you can't go too far wrong. Professional presentation is important. Your spec script is your calling card; you want it to be your showcase. This means that your characters' names are spelled correctly, that your page layout is consistent and clean, that your copies are crisp, and that typos are eradicated. At minimum, you don't want to give anyone an easy excuse to say no. They'll find plenty of reasons to do that on their own.

You see, there's this phenomenon in Hollywood (and elsewhere, one imagines) called "the black hole of spec scripts." When you send your earnestly-wrought spec script to an agent or a producer or a television show, it joins dozens, maybe hundreds of other, equally earnestly-wrought spec scripts. It helps to form a pile of scripts which could conceivably be used for the construction of Doric columns. Eventually someone will pick your script up off this burgeoning Babylonian tower. If the first thing they see is a typo, or the star's name misspelled, or photocopies of paperclips, they'll throw your script back on the stack and pick up someone else's script instead. It's cruel, but a fact: your script can lie inert, in place, until the show gets cancelled, or the producer passes on, or the agent gets sick of the business and retires to Palm Springs. You want to give your script every advantage in the competition to get read. Start by making it look good. Making it read well is a far harder proposition.

In these later days, when everyone and his dentist has written a spec sitcom, you might not even get a full read. Maybe they'll open it to a page at random, and judge the whole work by what they read there. Think back to what I said about microcosm and macrocosm. Can you see that in order for your script to work as a whole, it must work on every page? Sometimes, unfortunately, one page is all you get.

Learn to test your own script rigorously, and make sure that every page sings, and shows your real strength as a writer. Does that mean you'll get work in television situation comedy? Maybe. Maybe not. Those odds, unfortunately, are long, and they don't look to be getting shorter any time soon. Still, someone has to write the darned shows, the bad ones and the good ones alike, and if you have the talent and the drive, you may be the one. Just don't fool yourself into thinking that situation comedy is only about jokes. As you can see, it's much, much more.