Inside Jokes for Outside Viewers
Have you ever watched a movie that just sucks a painful amount of ass, but it seems like the cast (and probably crew) had a whole lot of fun making it? If the movie’s mediocre enough, the high spirits of the cast can make it approach good. The recent Jeff Bridges vehicle The Amateurs has a shitload of flaws, and at the end of the day it’s a pretty terrible movie, but they’re all having such a visible amount of fun with each other and with the material (which isn’t even very good) that you want to like it.
Sometimes, though, a movie is so, so tragically awful that nothing can save them. In the case of comedies, I think a lot of this has to do with the inside-joke factor. Inside jokes can be problematic for material that’s intended for release to the public; you aren’t making a movie and writing a book for the benefit of yourself and your friends. While they might laugh hysterically at your joke — in part because they know you, in part because you’re making reference to something only you and a small group of friends truly understand — an independent judge might greet your hilarity with a stony, possibly angry face.
I recently had to review a no-budget indie called The Windy City Incident. I say “had,” even though I volunteered for the assignment, because when the DVD arrived, I felt completely duped. The distributor must have a fantastic marketing department, because they made the movie sound like a scream, a little diamond in the rough, rough world of shitty direct-to-video indies. I’ve never seen a worse, more ineptly made movie. Ever. Labored gags that aren’t funny to start, then repeat far beyond the patience of any sane person. Then you flip on the audio commentary and hear the writers/directors giggling at the hijinks. Until I listened to the commentary, I sincerely believed these two men made this movie solely to get emaciated young actors to strip and simulate sex acts while they filmed, but no, they seemed to sincerely think they were making a compelling, hilarious movie.
The problem, it turns out, is that the movie is wall-to-wall inside jokes. Some people have good enough comic instincts to understand the difference between a joke that’s as close to universally funny as a single joke can get and a joke that’s only funny to you and your best friend. If you aren’t sure, it’s easy enough to vet the quality by springing them on unsuspecting people unfamiliar with the outside joke, or to attempt stand-up comedy and understand the sound of 100-200 people not laughing.* But somebody just saying, “Hey, I’m gonna make a movie that’s nothing but a series of consecutive inside jokes” — that’s an idea so terrible I only attempted it once, and I never finished it.
Bottom line: if you want to write a comedy, make sure people you don’t know think it’s funny. If you’re taking a class or part of a writing group that doesn’t consist primarily of friends, force someone new to read your work. Try to find the person least like you, and don’t accuse them of “not getting it” if they don’t find it funny. If they don’t offer, ask them for an explanation of why the jokes didn’t click with them. Even better, find someone who isn’t even a writer — a peripheral friend of your second cousin or something — and tell them it doesn’t matter if they don’t know shit about structure or movies. You just want to know if it makes them laugh.
The hardest part in writing a comedy is making it funny, and in order to do that you have to not only understand your audience, you need to understand your audience doesn’t consist solely of your 12 closest friends.
*I paraphrased/stole that from one of the few truly funny and insightful moments of Aaron Sorkin’s dreadful flop, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. [Back]
Posted by Stan on May 23, 2008 4:14 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Career-Based Rambling, How Not to Write a Screenplay | Digg It
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