When you’re a comedy writer, you can get away with a lot of crap — a structurally unsound story, cardboard-cutout characters, overly expositional dialogue — because the prime goal is: be more funny. Not that I, personally, want my script to suffer from those problems. I just happen to know from experience that plenty of nuts-and-bolts problems disappear if the reader is laughing his or her ass off. When your goal is maximum comedy exploitation, there’s really one ethical code to follow: don’t steal jokes.
This hits on an ethical tricky gray area similar to one I’ve dealt with before: the writing equivalent of, “If a tree falls and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Certainly, but if some half-assed screenwriter writes a terrible script that no one above my bottom-feeding level will ever read, is it appropriate to swipe their work, make it kick ass, and try to run with it?
The answer is “no,” and that applies to stealing big things like story and character, and small things like a single, tiny joke.
It’s a slippery slope, though. It’s hard to explain, but when I used to work with a partner, he’d sometimes call me out because I was stealing something — an intonation or inflection, or a rhythm — even if I wasn’t stealing the joke itself. He could hear it in his head, exactly as I wrote it, patterned after some semi-obscure Simpsons line I found hilarious. Objectively, if someone who had no clue who I was took a look at the screenplay, there’s about a 99% chance they wouldn’t recognize it. There’s nothing in the joke that is inherently swiped — the words are different, the goal of the joke is different, the character saying it is completely different. It’s just the way I hear things when I’m writing, and my partner knew all the same references and knew exactly what I was going for, so he’d yea or nay it, depending on the obviousness of the similarities.
I don’t see a problem with taking something esoteric and slippery like that and repurposing it. Maybe that makes me a washed-up hack, but to me it’s like more like an “influence” than an outright theft. For several years, The Simpsons was the funniest thing on TV. Those episodes are so ingrained in me from reruns and DVDs that it’s just become a natural, often unconscious part of my joke factory. I’d never intentionally steal a joke from them; in fact, I’d never even intentionally swipe the various facets within the joke. If I read it later and recognize something, I’ll put it down to the influence the show had on me. If I consciously think, “Man, this is way too similar to a Simpsons joke” (another advantage to having a frightening mental catalogue of episodes sitting in my brain), I won’t use it. Does that make sense or just come across like a weak defense? …Well, fuck off.
Well, defenses aside, there was this one time…
I had to get out of a scene, but it had no ending. The gag goes like this: the protagonist has unofficially joined a mysterious club — all he needs to do is sign his name on the contract. They ply him with a woman, who sexes him up good, then convinces him to sign the contract without reading it. Now, I could have done this any number of ways — or I could have omitted the scene altogether — but it’s a movie about deviant lawyers. If there’s one thing people associate with lawyers, it’s convoluted contracts signed in blood. I wanted to keep it, because otherwise I feared someone would ask why I didn’t include something like it…but I couldn’t find my way out of the scene.
Going back to the tree-falling slippery slope, I thought of a joke. It’s a joke I knew wasn’t mine — one that, for some reason, despite the zillions of hours of comedy I’ve viewed, it endured in the back of my mind and, hell, may have been the reason I set up the contract scene the way I did.
See, there was a little show on Fox called Action. Oh, sure, everybody knows about it now — it’s the canceled-before-its-time cult-classic, now available on DVD. But when I wrote this screenplay, all it had was a short run on Fox, a full (13-episode) run on FX, and my vague, glimmering memories. Hell, it’s been so long I might have misremembered the joke, which would have allowed me to avoid the whole ethical quandary.
Anyway, there’s an episode of Action where the writer character gets writer’s block, so his producer sends him over a hooker to get him working again. Also, the writer brings a contract that the writer must sign. So they do their thing, he’s feeling good about himself, she busts out the contract, and he starts looking over it.
“Hey,” he says. “It says this has to be witnessed and signed by a notary public.”
And the hooker seductively says, “I’m a notary.”
That’s a pretty good joke! And I stole it. That was my way out of the scene, and it’s one of the rare cases in my script where swiping somebody else’s joke wholesale managed to work in my script. I’m a big fan of character-based jokes, so much of the time I couldn’t steal a joke if I wanted to (and I don’t want to) because it’d feel out of character. This was different — the protagonist was a very similar character to the writer on Action, the circumstances of the woman providing the sexing-up were identical. It made perfect sense. But it was stolen.
At the time, I didn’t think as much of it. Like I said, nobody had seen the show in years; there was a high probability nobody would remember the show or that particular joke well enough to call me on it. I still didn’t like the idea, but at the time, it seemed like the easiest way to get past this scene and fulfill my deadline.
I had pretty much forgotten about the joke until Amelia begged me to read a good script. So I went back through this to polish it up, and there it sat, a pathetic example of plagiarism and broken secret comedy-writing codes. But re-reading the scene, I realized there’s a perfect button.
A perfect, original button. I deleted the stolen joke and replaced it with my new ending. Then I sat there wondering why it took me so long to figure it out.
Posted by Stan on July 7, 2008 3:17 PM