How Tos

I’ve heard people say you can’t learn how to be funny. I don’t actually agree with this. You can learn to be funny, but if you aren’t naturally funny, it will be a lot harder. Mostly that’s because someone who naturally likes making their friends laugh just has more practice than someone who’s never tried it. Also, as with any art form, some people are better at it than others.

Beyond that, jokes have a mechanical component that can be taught. Very generally, a joke has two parts to it, the set up and the punchline. The set up leads the listener to make an assumption about the outcome. The punchline shatters the listener’s assumption and replaces it with another equally applicable idea that matches with the set up.

I’ll use a joke I wrote as an example:
“Dating is difficult for me because I would really like to be a virgin when I settle down. That’s why I’m saving my butt for marriage.”

The set up of the joke is “Dating is difficult for me because I would really like to be a virgin when I settle down.” This statement leads listeners to believe that my goal is to live a very chaste life until I am married. The punchline,  “That’s why I’m saving my butt for marriage,” shatters this assumption because it suggests I’m not very chaste at all.

In general, the bigger the surprise on the punchline, the better. The rule of thumb is the punchline should still be something the audience can believe or substitute for their initial assumptions.

If you are new to comedy and want to work on writing, creating one liners that use this formula is a good way to start. Over time, the formula becomes less obvious, but is often still in play. Sometimes, you don’t need to include a misdirect in a joke, you can rely on common knowledge. Using another joke I wrote as an example:

“Hey feminists, 70% of a penny for your thoughts?”

This joke relies on a couple of things. First, this joke assumes the audience knows that the stereotype for feminists is that they can be uptight about being teased. You would assume you would tread lightly around people who represent this stereotype, and instead I’ve done the opposite by saying something rude. The second shattering of assumptions here is by changing an old saying “A penny for your thoughts.” People expect to hear that, and instead hear “70% of a penny for your thoughts.” The comment is also a commentary on how women are paid less than men, so at the end, it’s ironic rather than actually insulting to feminists. However, I don’t have to explain feminists or the saying “a penny for your thoughts” because the crowd is already familiar with these things, so the set up is very short… in this example it’s “Hey feminists.”

The more jokes you write and perform, the less the basic joke structure will show over time. It will become more ingrained, and with some people it disappears completely, and it seems like they are just having a funny conversation with you.

If you do use one liners in an act and tend to be more structure oriented about what you do, minimum you want 4 laughs per minute, with 5 being ideal, and anything more than that being AWESOME.

It is also important to note that this is not the only formula for telling jokes. Some things are funny because someone has good timing, or because they are familiar. Also, while most comedians strive to come up with punchlines that an audience doesn’t see coming, sometimes jokes where you can see what’s coming are funny just because of the anticipation.

Here are a few tips for getting more followers on Twitter:

1. Be interesting, entertaining, or useful. You can attract followers by providing a product or service. If you’re a comedian, always be funny. If you’re a business, provide useful tips about your industry, or interesting images from events or samples of your products. Figuring out how to be interesting, entertaining, or useful takes some exploration. If you want to use Twitter, plan to spend some free time learning what works in general, and then what works specifically for you.

2. Develop a personal brand, or a company brand. You can attract followers by being very clear about who you are and what you do. You should be able to summarize your product or service in a sentence and ideally, just a few descriptive words. The clearer you are about yourself or your business, the easier it is for somebody to decide if you’re worth following.

3. Be consistent. Post content that sticks to your goals for Twitter. If you want to be viewed as hilarious, be funny all the time. If you want people to think you’re an expert at say, hair care, then post things that demonstrate this. Try not to vary what you are doing too much, since that will confuse people. A little variety is still okay. For example, you could include a couple of personal tweets with useful tweets about your company. Or you could mention a hobby in between funny tweets.

4. Engage other people. Everyone has been in a one-sided conversation in real life where somebody just talks about him/herself the whole time. Avoid being this person on Twitter! @reply to people, follow back if you find them interesting, give them stars and retweets where appropriate. You don’t have to interact with every single person who interacts with you, but you should interact with people at some level – there’s a reason it’s called social media. Don’t be fake about it.

5. Don’t be a whiny bitch. Avoid asking people directly for retweets or follows or tweeting a link about a product or service over and over or bitching about people who don’t follow or people who unfollow. The exception is if you are hilarious/entertaining/engaging when whining. Since the number 1 rule is to be interesting, entertaining or useful, if you can whine and be any of these, whine away.

6. Write about current topics. While it’s not always easy, coming up with tweets that tie into what’s going on at the moment can get you a lot of attention.

7. Be patient. If you have under 1000 Twitter followers, it can be difficult to get your tweets the attention they may deserve. This is because at any given time, less people are likely to be viewing your tweet than people with 10,000 followers. Give it time, you will get there with a little work and more of your tweets will get attention.

8. Play hashtag games. If a hashtag is trending, and you think of something really funny or interesting or useful, you can get a lot of followers if they like what you have to say.

9. Leverage your other social networks. Ask your friends in other social networks if they will follow you on Twitter. That might be Facebook, or it could be in person at a party. Be careful not to be too pushy – not everyone is into following people on Twitter.

10. Post something every day. If you aren’t posting every day, it’s hard to get people excited about following you. While you should post every day, try not to post too much. What’s right for you will become apparent over time.11. Remember Twitter is a soft sell tool. Don’t be afraid to tell people what you do, or advertise something you think they may want to hear about. Just don’t over do it. Twitter is a community first – so be interesting and useful and entertaining FIRST and someone who suggests they buy/look at something second. 12. If you post a link or picture, be descriptive, and post stuff that doesn’t suck. “Hey, lookit my picture/link” is the gist of most picture or link posts. Nobody will want to click it, and if you post a lot of these, it gets very boring. Tell people what they are getting and why it is worth it to click. Also, post links and pictures that don’t suck. Somebody who liked one of your links or pictures is probably going to be willing to click another link or picture of yours…but not if the first time around was lame.

This post contains my opinions on how to give people great feedback.

For this post – giving feedback is not to be confused with reviewing something in an article format. Feedback is private and geared towards helping improve the work of the person who requested feedback. A review is something different. Additionally, this blog post focuses on giving feedback to friends who ask you to look at their work vs. other situations.

The best feedback method I’ve ever seen, and which I employ regularly, is called “the Sh** Sandwich Method.” I am sure it has a fancier title somewhere else, but basically how it works is like this:

1. Bread – say something nice about what you are providing feedback on
2. Sh** – say something about how the work can be improved
3. Bread – offer an additional compliment

This method generally lets you be very honest with people. By burying criticism in the middle, you allow people to walk away feeling like they did some things well and they need to improve other things – which is pretty much true of anything ever created. Some would-be givers of feedback find it hard to believe that this method allows honesty, because there are built in compliments for steps 1 and 3. Right, but if we flip it the other way around, there is a built in complaint section too. It turns out you can be fake by being overly complimentary AND you can be fake by being overly negative. So…just don’t be fake either way, ok? Good. Moving on.

For step 1 – don’t be fake. Say something nice about what you are reviewing that is accurate. If you hate what you are reviewing, then step 1 will be a challenge. However, it is a fact that most of the time, no matter how crappy something you are looking at might be, there are probably one or two things that are good. They might be very small things, but they are there. If you find yourself in the situation that you cannot find one positive thing about whatever you are supposed to provide feedback for, then you probably need a different blog post than this one… something with a title like “How to Weasel Out of Providing Feedback on Absolute Crap.” I’ll leave that up to you though.

Step 1 is actually super important because, often times people think they don’t need to include praise in feedback. You do need to include it. When people offer only information about what somebody else can improve, it gives the impression that there wasn’t anything good. If most of the work is good, you are giving somebody an inaccurate picture of what you think. On the flipside, if most of the work was crappy, the mention of one or two nice things makes it easier for the other person to hear the rest.

For step 2 – again don’t be fake. The trick for the “sh**” part of the sandwich, is to offer feedback that is productive and specific while at the same time concise. Since this can be complicated, I’ll provide some examples of bad and then good feedback statements.

Bad: “I am going to be honest/brutally honest…” – This isn’t a great way to start feedback because why would you point out that you are being honest for only the negative part of your feedback? Maybe you just said ‘XYZ is great. Ok now let me be honest.’ Does that mean the compliment was fake? If it was fake, try not to give the compliment. It also supports the ongoing misconception that honesty is about being negative. Just start your feedback without evaluating how honest/dishonest you are going to be.

Bad: “I didn’t like it.” – Ideally when you provide feedback you want to provide specifics about why you don’t like the work. Maybe you find a character’s actions unbelievable, or a certain scene is dull, etc. Say that instead.

Bad: “I didn’t like this very specific thing that you must fix in this very specific way.” – Being specific about problems is good, but telling someone how they should fix it is generally annoying. Parents do this. Avoid being parental, at the very least because it will just make the person receiving feedback shut down.

Bad: “I don’t think the main character should be a female bohemian. I think you should make the character a guy, and he should be an accountant…” – The problem with this kind of feedback is it just ignores the project. At its best, feedback tries to stay true to the vision of the story, film, artwork, whatever (I’m using script metaphors a lot in here since that’s what I’ve been focused on lately). Try to provide feedback that helps people make their existing story more than it was to start with versus turning it into a completely different story. This can be tough if you’re checking out a complete train wreck, but do your best to help fix what’s there rather than making something new.

Good feedback usually is focused on specifics and presented in a way that is solvable. Sometimes, you don’t need to offer a suggested solution, you just need to focus the person on the problem area. Some examples of good feedback:

Good: “I don’t like scene 5, it seems like a repeat of the jokes in scene 3 with nothing new added in. Also, XYZ character’s line seems too on the nose.” – This is great feedback and actually pretty close to a comment I got from a friend on one of my scripts. What makes it good is it is very specific. I was able to figure out where the problem spot was and determine a fix for it.

Good: “This character is not very likeable. It seems important that we like this person and care about what she is doing. Maybe you could make her more likeable by …” – This is great feedback because it presents a problem and offers solutions in the form of suggestions. By suggesting, the person receiving the feedback does not feel obligated to make corrections, or do them in a particular way.

While you are providing the “Sh**” part of the feedback sandwich, some other tricks are in the language you use. How much you can say depends on the relationship you have with the person you’re speaking with.

Useful Phrases: Phrases like “I’m trying to help you because I want you to succeed” or “You could improve this by” or “I suggest that for this section you ___” go a long way in making people feel that you are not attacking them, rather you are helping them.

Concise Language: Condensing your remarks makes feedback easier for people to handle because it makes the issue you state seem smaller. The more space a comment takes up, the more it seems like a big deal. It’s hard to balance being concise with being specific, and sometimes you end up doing a trade-off. Trade-offs might be taking specific instances of a recurring problem and stating it as one issue. For example, instead of telling someone each instance that a character’s dialogue sounds unrealistic, you might just say ‘this character’s dialogue often seems unrealistic in the story, you might want to go through and read their lines out loud to see if there are ways to make them sound better.’ If the person asks for specifics then you can offer more details.

Another trade-off you might need to make occurs if you need to give feedback on something that has tons of issues. Rather than providing a person with a list of every last thing that isn’t working, choosing two or three major issues can sometimes get through to the person better. Probably, the person will write more than one draft, so a few big issues to work on is enough. If you get to review a later draft, you can mention some of the other problems then. In this way the person doesn’t feel overwhelmed with problems to fix in the script.

For step 3 – wrap up with mention of the work’s good qualities.

For all steps, take time and care in providing your comments. Remember that if someone asks you to give feedback on their work, it is usually because he/she thinks highly of your opinion. It is often a compliment to be asked to provide feedback, so be sure to be respectful when you share your thoughts.

The best feedback is sincere, thoughtful, and provided in a way where the clear intent is to help someone else succeed.

I’ve been working on a few different scripts recently and had some people contact me to ask how I would write a sitcom script. Some of the free self-help items I found online seem overly vague – things like 1. Think of an idea for a sitcom episode. 2. Write your sitcom episode. 3. Edit your sitcom episode so it is a better episode… This kind of stuff made me think writing something up might help a lot of people who want to write a sitcom script.*

I’ll organize this in sections from general advice to structural rules when writing a sitcom episode. You can apply the general advice to any tv show, but the structural advice is about sitcoms.

General Advice

1. The show should be currently on-air.

2. A really long running show is harder to write for. It is more likely the plot you thought of has already been done in some form.

3. Watch every episode of the show you want to write for back to back if possible. This helps you absorb the show’s natural rhythms.

4. Take super anal retentive notes about settings while watching the most current season of the show. Where does everyone usually sit or stand on screen? Do they use one set more often than the others for scenes? How are rooms set up and how do they relate to one another? Does it matter? Where do the writers take liberties / what is likely to stay consistent across episodes?

5. Get hard copies of scripts for the show. Sometimes this is difficult. Get at least one script, recent is better.

6. Learn proper general script formatting and then the specifics for the show you’re interested in. I recommend Syd Field’s Screenplay. It’s very straightforward and well organized.

7. Write your script in Final Draft, or if you want to use something cheaper, make sure it has the correct template for writing a script in there. Approximations of templates are not ok most of the time from what I’ve seen. The format for scripts helps you avoid writing lines that are too long for the characters and it helps you write a script that is an appropriate length.

8. Keep episodes of the show handy when you start to write. If you’re not sure about a room set up, or if a character would say something, watch the show again to figure it out. Lots of times you can take liberties, but check on the show to see if they change around set ups a lot or not.

9. Count the number of scenes in 2-3 episodes and average them. That’s about how many scenes you want in your script.

10. Time scenes in 2-3 episodes. The average scene length is something you’ll want to match in your script.

11. Watch the story structure of the show carefully. A + B plot is common, but sometimes the B plot is very insignificant, or it wraps into the A plot in a certain way. For example on some shows, the B plot is separate from the A plot but manages to tie in by the end. On other shows, the B plot is a subtle element of the A plot that is really more of a theme that pops up repeatedly while the A plot drives the story. Etc.

12. When you write dialogue, shorter lines are better. This is where the correct script format comes in handy. If your characters have lines that run over three rows regularly, they are saying too much at once. Break it down into shorter lines with more interaction between the characters.

Structure

This is generic structural info you will need to tweak based on the show you’re watching. Very generally, the following applies to a sitcom –

1. Standard sitcom length = 22 minutes

2. Standard number of scenes = 28

3. Standard number of pages = 35-40

4. Scenes are generally 1-3 minutes long each (not too many 3 minute ones!)

5. If the sitcom has a teaser, it likely runs about 2-3 minutes and then there’s a commercial break.

5a. If there is no teaser, the other acts will be slightly longer.

6. Act One = 7-8 minutes and you should have set up your A & B plot. There’s a commercial break, and the break should fall right after something the viewer wants to find out about (so they sit through the commercials waiting).

7. Act Two = 7-8 minutes, A & B plots move forward trying to resolve the conflict created in Act One. By the end of the 7-8 minutes, the solution should be discovered and partially resolved, or ready to resolve in a way that meets with success. Again, you should have something interesting happen at the end of this act as there is another commercial break. You again want the viewer interested enough to sit through commercials and watch the conclusion of the story.

8. Conclusion = 3-4 minutes

GENERAL THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND – This structural information is incredibly generic. Each show has its own way of doing things. It is typical for a sitcom to have a few more or less scenes than 28 depending on the show. If you time and count scenes and look at page count in a script and match to all of that, you should be on the right track.

Writing

Everyone has a different way of writing and developing material. However, no matter what your style, if you are writing for TV, structure is very important. The acts of your sitcom need to line up correctly with commercial breaks. This is much harder to do if you don’t think about it carefully before writing your script. I recommend cards (read more about this in Syd Field’s book), or a list. Write out steps for everything that you want to happen and everything that needs to happen. Write one step/event per card. (You may lose some cards shaping the story.) Then shuffle the cards to best tell your story AND fit the structure for the half-hour episode.

Revising

If you have time, putting your draft down and walking away for a couple of days or more can help you see it with fresh eyes when you return. Otherwise, a great way to improve your script is to ask some close friends to review it. Choose people who are good at analyzing writing and giving constructive feedback.

*NOTE: If you’re not sure what A-plot/B-plot, teaser, acts, story arcs, etc. mean exactly you should read up on each of these. If you understand them intuitively great! It’s just vocabulary then. If you don’t understand them intuitively, then it’s a fantastic way to get the hang of structure in writing.