This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
Make Your Mark with Humor: Put a Comedic Stamp On Your Work, with John Cleese, Actor, Screenwriter and Producer
Copy What You Like
It is so difficult at the beginning, particularly as a writer, to do good written comedy that I suggest at the start that you steal or borrow or as the artist would say are influenced by anything that you think that is really good and really funny which appeals to you. And if you study that and try to reproduce it in someway then it will have your own stamp on it, but you have a chance of getting off the ground with something like that. But if you sit down one day never having written before with a pencil or a computer, but I write with a pencil, and you say I’m going to write something completely new and original and very funny, you can’t do it. It’s like trying to fly a plane without having any lessons. You’ve got to start somewhere and the best way to start is by copying something that is really good.
A wonderful lesson my friend William Goldman a wonderful screenwriter and I both teach the same thing we discovered independently and that is we say to someone find an actor or a scene that you absolutely love and just watch that actor in a movie say or watch that scene again and again and again so that it no longer has an emotional impact on you; you know longer find it dramatic or funny you just watch it. And in a sense emotionally speaking you’re bored with it. At that the point when you’re not affected emotionally anymore you can begin to see how it’s done and how it’s constructed. So that’s the advice I would give at the beginning: model yourself on someone you really like.
Find Your Funny
When we got together at the beginning of Monty Python where we had no idea what we are going to do, what was funny was what made us laugh. People brought material in that they’d written over the previous six or seven days. We sat around a big table at Terry Jones’s place and if people laughed it was in the show and if they didn’t laugh it wasn’t. And if they laughed at bits of it we say well can we use the funny bit and get rid of the rest, which is why we started cutting the ends of sketches and all that kind of thing. So that was the best criteria is does it make you laugh?
People have very subjective senses of humor. And when I’m onstage doing my one man show I show clips from stuff I’ve done in the past. And because I don’t have to speak or do anything while the clips are being played I sit and watch the audience because I can see the first three or four rows in the light that’s coming from the screen. And the extraordinary thing is how varied their reactions are. He’ll be roaring with laughter. She’ll be roaring with laughter. He’ll be looking pleasantly amused. Nothing there at all. Maybe they don’t get it. Maybe they don’t think it’s funny. And someone they’re laughing a little bit here and there. Then there’s a big laugh. But he doesn’t laugh. And then a minute later he roars with laughter at something that nobody else is laughing at. So it’s much more subjective than you think. But when you’re in a large group of people you don’t notice it so much because laughter has an infectious effect on people.
So the first thing is you can’t say it’s funny or it’s not funny because it could be funny for one person and not funny for another. What you can say is I think it’s funny and then you extrapolate from that. I think enough people will find it funny for it to be worth us putting this show on.