How To Write A Comedy
I’m frequently asked if it’s hard to write plays, and I usually reply by quoting George Bernard Shaw’s answer to the same question: “[I]t is either easy or impossible. It may be laborious: that is quite another matter; but unless the novice can do it from the first without serious trouble or uncertainty, he had better not to do it at all. Playwriting is not his job.”
As usual, Shaw is on to something. For someone who has stories to tell, ideas to convey, and can write dialogue easily and swiftly, playwriting may be right up their alley. However, for someone who finds it backbreaking to create the whole new world that a play requires, and for whom it feels equally excruciating to write the verbal give-and-take that is the essence of drama, then in all probability the effort isn’t worth it. The labor simply won’t pay off.
This may well be the ultimate test for choosing to be a playwright. If the work is joyful (however laborious), it’s probably working. If it’s painful on the order of pulling teeth, it’s probably not.
That said, even for those who find it easy to write plays in the Shavian sense – for those who can do it from the first without serious trouble – there are certain recurring techniques that most playwrights find it useful to know. Nothing supplants genuine talent, and you can’t study inspiration; but there are a number of techniques that I personally find useful to bear in mind whenever I sit down to write a play, especially when the play is a comedy.
Over the next several articles in this magazine, I plan to discuss these techniques, drawing on examples from comedies I love and respect. These will include everything from Shakespeare and Moliere to Mamet and Ruhl. Bear in mind that none of the suggestions I plan to make are rules in any strict sense. Being an artist often – nay, usually – means breaking old rules and making your own. That’s one of the wonders of art: it thrives on being unexpected. The element of surprise is one of its greatest weapons, and the surprises appear, by definition, when you least expect them.
One. Start with a strong premise.
Comedies thrive on strong, specific ideas that are themselves innately comic. It’s not enough for a comedy to posit, simply, “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back.” Yes, that sequence underpins dozens of classic comedies – indeed, one of the best comedies of the 1930s, written by Samuel and Bella Spewack, is entitled Boy Meets Girl, and, not coincidentally, it’s about two writers of comedy. But for purposes of constructing a stage comedy, “boy meets girl” is just the starting point, and the best comedies of the last 2,500 years all tend to have strong, idiosyncratic premises that make them instantly recognizable. For example:
A married couple live in a constant state of tension because one of them is hysterical by nature, the other calm. The calm one fathered a boy out of wedlock twenty years ago and the boy is about to get married. The married couple agree to host a dinner for the boy and his fiancée, which will include the fiancée’s parents; and the preparation for the dinner is so stressful that it drives the married couple to the brink of a crisis. But the crisis brings on a new understanding of how much the couple means to each other and they continue on, their love stronger than ever.
This is the premise, of course, for La Cage Aux Folles, which most of us know as a musical but in fact started life as a tremendously successful French stage comedy. The fact that the couple are gay and that the girl’s father is a French minister of morality adds enormously to the strength of the premise.
Another strong opening premise: A man and a woman love each other, but their marriage was a failure. They’re now divorced and they have both just remarried. However, as luck would have it, their respective honeymoons are being spent at adjoining rooms at the same hotel. And they even have connecting balconies – where they meet again for the first time since their divorce. They then fall back in love and run off together, leaving their new spouses to fend for themselves. This is of course the premise of one of the greatest comedies of the twentieth century, Noel Coward’s Private Lives.
For some reason, comedies seem to thrive on strong premises more than dramas. Perhaps a strong premise is a good engine for laughter because once the premise is understood, it doesn’t need to be over-explained. Comedy – and especially laughter in a comedy – require a solid footing. If you have to explain too much, the laugh usually dies.
Also, comedies that have strong premises are easier to tell. A strong premise leads to a strong plot line, and the playwright doesn’t need to try to invent comic interplay that is incidental to the action. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, there isn’t a single moment of the play that isn’t related to one of the four plot-lines. The action is the comedy, and the action and comedy stroll along together arm-in-arm without a stutter. This is true in all of Shakespeare’s greatest comedies. For readers and audiences who aren’t used to Shakespeare’s language, it can sound like the poetry is unduly complex. In fact, Shakespeare never uses fancy language to embellish his stories. He simply has a lot to say, then expresses his story exquisitely, with a tremendous amount of gravity and nuance. Having thought deeply about his story in all its remarkable detail, he simply tells it.
How can you tell if a premise is strong? Generally because you can tell it in a few clear sentences as I’ve done above with La Cage aux Folles and Private Lives. That level of clarity in the story doesn’t mean that the ultimate play won’t contain layer after layer of subtlety and tone. See Twelfth Night, As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing. But a strong story simply makes for a good comedy.
One more example that might be helpful: an international celebrity named Sheridan Whiteside is visiting a Midwestern town on a speaking tour, and he slips on the doorstep of the house of an ordinary, small-town family. He breaks his leg and has to spend several weeks with the family – and drives them crazy with his self-centered demands and international guests. To make things juicier, his otherwise-sophisticated secretary falls in love with a good-natured local newspaper editor, and Whiteside – in a desperate effort to keep her working for him – does everything he can think of to break off the relationship. This is the premise of Kaufman and Hart’s The Man Who Came to Dinner, perhaps the funniest of all the great Kaufman and Hart comedies. Girl meets boy (Maggie the secretary meets Bert Jefferson, the small-town editor). Girl loses boy (Whiteside, Maggie’s boss, brings a sexy actress into the picture to distract Bert). Girl gets boy back (Whiteside, in a fervor of remorse for ruining his secretary’s life, gets rid of the actress by having her shipped out of town in an Egyptian sarcophagus). Because of its strong premise (to say nothing of its clever lines and strong characters) The Man Who Came To Dinner has become an American classic.
If I were teaching a course in playwriting, I think the first thing I’d do (in addition to assigning loads of reading and play-going) is ask each of my students to write a strong premise that could be turned into a stage comedy. The word playwright contains the root wright. A wright is a builder, a tradesman who does practical things with his hands to create something. Rolling up your sleeves and writing a good premise seems to me exactly what this elusive profession requires as a starting point.