Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for Page, Stage, Screen

4) Incongruity: To build a joke, the relationship between setup and punch must strike a spark of incongruity; two things that don’t belong together suddenly collide. The underlying incongruity in the FRASIER scene pits civilized adults against their feral childhood selves. Psychiatrists who should be able to see their obsessions do not, and so cannot control them. In fact, they do the opposite; they let them loose. The steps they take to achieve their desires become the very things they must do to make sure they never achieve them. As a result, they act out the very book they cannot write.

1) Clarity: Not only does empathy kill laughs, but so does ambiguity, perplexity, and all forms of confusion. To keep the laughs rolling, everything must be clear, starting in the subtext. If a character is up to no good, the audience or reader may not know exactly what that no good is, but it should be crystal that what he’s up to is no good.

Language, too. Piles of blurry, verbose dialogue suffocate laughter. If you wish to write comedy, go back and review the principles of style covered in Chapters Five, Six, and Seven. Their every point applies absolutely to comedy writing. Focus in particular on the fundamentals of economy and clarity. The best jokes always use the fewest and clearest possible words.

2) Exaggeration: Comic dialogue thrives in the gap between cause and effect. The two most common techniques of exaggeration either bloat a minor cause into a major overstatement—“You stole my mommy!”—or shrink a major cause into a minor understatement—“The Harry Potter Theme Park is a hit with both anglophiles and pedophiles.” Comic exaggerations come in a variety of modes: dialects, non sequiturs, malapropisms, impersonations, pretense, sarcasm—all the way down the line to babble and nonsense.

3) Timing: As I noted above, jokes pivot around a two-part design: setup and payoff, a.k.a. punch. The setup arouses aggressive, defensive, and/or sexual emotions in the reader/audience; the punch explodes that energy into laughter. The punch, therefore, must arrive at the exact moment the setup’s emotional charge peaks. Too soon and you get a weak laugh; too late and you get a groan. Moreover, nothing must follow the punch that would stifle the laughter.

COMEDY DIALOGUE TECHNIQUE

For this reason, comic protagonists, almost without exception, have fewer dimensions than their dramatic counterparts and virtually none at the subconscious level of conflicted inner selves. Instead, comic dimensions pit appearance against reality, the man the character thinks he is versus the fool we know him in fact to be.

Bit parts in comedy—geek, diva, jock, valley girl, fop, braggart, nag, nerd, etc.—chase their blind obsession with glaring clarity because monomania is their only trait. As you might imagine, writing fresh, innovative dialogue for these nondimensional roles can break your brain. Indeed, many comedies fail at this. Too often, when supporting characters speak, their blind obsession funnels what they say into trite lingo and clichéd reactions.

In my comedy lectures, I call Jonson’s “one peculiar quality” the blind obsession. As noted in Chapter Eleven, desire intensifies in the comic character to the point of obsession. This fixation holds the character so tightly in its grip he cannot deviate from it. All aspects of his identity are bound to it; without it, he is no longer comic. What’s more, this obsession blinds him. He is driven to pursue it but cannot see the mania in himself. To us, he’s a crazed neurotic; to him, his obsession is normalcy.

Consider, for example, Inspector Jacques Clouseau (Peter Sellers and others), the protagonist of no less than eleven Pink Panther films. Deaf, dumb, and blind to his incompetence, Clouseau obsesses on perfection. He devotes every compulsive waking hour to becoming the world’s ultimate detective.

COMIC CONFLICT
All characters pursue secondary desires per scene (scene intention) in pursuit of a primary, overall desire per story (super-intention). If, however, we were to place all stories ever told along a spectrum ranging from tragedy to farce, we would see that dramatic characters and comic characters go about these pursuits with distinctively different dialogue styles.

The reason is simple: These two basic character types possess two fundamentally different mentalities. They do not think the same, and so they do not speak the same. Writing dialogue for one versus the other, therefore, demands two decidedly different techniques.

The dramatic character pursues what life demands with some degree of awareness. He has a mental flexibility that lets him step back from the fray and think the thought, “Wow, this could get me killed.” This realization doesn’t necessarily stop his quest, but he’s aware of its irony and risk. Tony Soprano, for instance, in the midst of rage, has enough mindfulness not to commit murder in public.

What makes a comic character comic is mental rigidity. He pursues his all-absorbing desire as if myopic to any choice beyond it. In the scene I’ll analyze below, for example, two psychiatrists (e.g., professionals who ought to know better) are so consumed by sibling rivalry they regress to infanticide.

In centuries past, the monomania of the comic character was known as his “humor.” In 1612, playwright Ben Jonson wrote a verse prologue to his comedy Every Man out of His Humour. In it, he drew upon theories from medieval physiology that allege that every person’s body has a unique balance of four humors (fluids)—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile—and their one-of-a-kind concoction determines each person’s specific temperament. (Why the ancients didn’t add sexual fluids to their list of humors, I cannot say, but they sure seem influential to me.)

1. Desire: The moment a character’s life is thrown out of balance (inciting incident), he, in reaction, conceives of (or at least senses) what he must achieve in order to restore life’s balance (object of desire). His overarching purpose to reach the object of desire (super-intention) motivates his active pursuit (spine of action). As he moves along the story’s spine, at each specific moment (scene) he must satisfy an immediate want (scene intention) in order to progress toward his object of desire. The foreground desire of scene intention and underlying pull of the super-intention influence each choice of action he makes and takes. But his background desires limit his choices because they influence what he cannot or will not do.

2. Sense of Antagonism: Before the character can act, however, he must sense or recognize the immediate forces of antagonism that block his way. How much of his understanding is conscious or subconscious, realistic or mistaken, depends on the psychology of the character, the nature of his situation, and the story the author is telling.

3. Choice of Action: The character then chooses to take a specific action in an effort to cause a reaction from his world that will move him toward his scene intention. Again, how deliberate or instantaneous this choice may be is relative to the nature of the character and his situation.

4. Action: The activity the character chooses to carry out his action may be physical or verbal or both. Desire is the source of action, and action is the source of dialogue.

5. Expression: To the extent that the character’s action needs words to carry it out, the writer composes dialogue.

FIVE STEPS OF BEHAVIOR

THE BEAT
Like the physical objects governed by Newton’s third law of motion, every verbal action causes a reaction. The beat is a unit of scene design that contains both an action and a reaction from someone or something somewhere in the setting. Generally, the response comes from another character, but it could come from within the acting character himself.

Suppose Character A were to insult Character B. Character B could react in myriad ways, perhaps with an insult of his own or by laughing at Character A. Or Character A could react to his own action and apologize. Or Character A could regret what he said, feel remorse, but say nothing. Or Character B, who doesn’t speak English, greets the insult with a smile. These moment-to-moment exchanges of action/reaction build a scene. Ideally, each beat tops the previous beat and leads to the next. This continuous surpassing of previous beats within a scene generates dialogue progression, shaping the scene’s beats to and around its turning point.11

Beats are best identified by gerunds. A gerund is a noun that names an action by adding “-ing” to a verb. The four possible beats above, for example, could be labeled insulting/ridiculing, insulting/apologizing, insulting/regretting, insulting/greeting. The use of gerunds to name the actions beneath exchanges of dialogue is the best way I know to stop yourself from writing on-the-nose.

TURNING POINTS
Ideally, every scene contains a turning point. A turning point pivots the instant the value at stake in the scene dynamically changes from positive to negative or negative to positive. This change moves the character either farther from (negative) or closer to (positive) his object of desire than the previous scene’s turning point. Turning points progress the story along its spine of action toward the final satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the protagonist’s desire at story climax.

A turning point can be created in only one of two ways: by action or revelation. An event turns either by an immediate, direct action, or by the disclosure or discovery of a secret or previously unknown fact. Because dialogue can express both deeds (“I’m leaving for good”) and information (“I married you for your money”), it can turn a scene’s value charge by action, revelation, or both at once. If a scene has no turning point, if the value charge does not change in any kind or degree, then the scene is merely an exposition-filled nonevent. Too many nonevents in a row and a story collapses into tedium.9