Scriptwriting for TV Lecturer: Caroline Mbuthia

WRITING COMEDY

SITCOM
Sitcom is about characters who do not change or grow. They are trapped with people they
hate, in jobs they despise, in circumstances which annoy them. This means that they are in
constant conflict, without which there would be no comedy.

It is also always a half-hour show. There are sometimes longer specials, but these rarely work as
effectively and tend to be the Christmas editions. Half an hour is a comfortable time slot in
which to introduce a plot, develop complications and resolve the story, leaving your characters
back where they started. The cast is a small one, usually a set of friends, relatives or
workmates. Everyone knows everyone else intimately; their foibles, their likes and dislikes,
and more importantly how to press their buttons.

Types of sitcom
The most common forms of sitcom are set in the workplace and in the domestic arena. E.g The
Office. The workplace has clear demarcations; boss and employee, colleagues or rivals. The
domestic sitcom has a long and illustrious history. Broadly speaking, all sitcoms fall into either
one of these camps. Variants include the ‘gang show’ sitcom (e.g. Friends), ‘one man against the
world’ (e.g. One Foot in the Grave), ‘fish out of water’ (The Fresh Prince of Bel Air) and ‘chalk
and cheese’ (e.g. Perfect Strangers).

Creating characters
Sitcom characters are not just a bunch of crazies who fire zingers at one another. They are
believable people trapped in lives of desperation. Often there is one who rises above the pack
to become the memorable focus for the show and this we call the monster character. At the
heart of many sitcoms there is a tyrant or whingeing fool, a cruel boss or incompetent husband,
a gullible moron or a pontificating bore. These are people who either do not recognise
boundaries or who trample them in their search for power.

Try thinking about some people, celebrities, for instance, who you actively dislike. What traits
do they share? List ten of them. Chances are they will be similar to those of the sitcom monster.
Now focus on people in your life who have got your goat. What was their relationship to you?
Ex-boss, workmate, school bully, ex-partner? Sibling or parent? What traits do they have that
push your buttons? We have a love/hate relationship with sitcom monsters because they are
contained. We know that they are a creation and this acts as a safety measure which allows us
to distance ourselves from them.

If the embarrassments they suffer or create were to happen in real life, it would most likely be
unbearable. We get characters from our lives. You cannot crib from TV. If you have not
anchored the character in any kind of real, living presence, then you run the risk of writing a
stereotype. Readers are heartily sick of ‘feisty’ women, ‘duckers and divers’ and other
generic types – so why give them the ammo to destroy your project before you’ve started?

Writing a sitcom is a big project and character must be at its core. Yours might be an
amalgamation of people you have known, or exaggerations of some of them; the closer the
better. Think about your family. Who else do we know so intimately? Pick someone and write
some notes about how they deal with trouble and the pressure points which drive you insane
about them. Do they have a sense of humour? A fatal flaw? A saving grace? What does he or
she want out of life? Could they become a sitcom monster character if they were put in the
right circumstances?

It’s a good idea with characters to create a CV for them. It doesn’t have to be 100 per cent
based on their inspiration: it only has to feel real. Pick someone you know and write down the
following:
When and where were they born?
Who were their siblings? What was the relationship between them?
What events helped to form their character?
Where were they schooled and to what degree?
What were their first and subsequent jobs?
Who is their current partner? If none, list failed conquests.
What did they attempt and fail at?
What car do they drive? What kind of pets do they have?

Relationships
Sitcoms are also about the conflict between small groups of people. Before you decide on this
emotional arena, it’s worth taking a few minutes to jot down all the relationships we have in
life. Most of these involve family, friends, neighbours or professional relationships.

You will probably find that the family relationships take up the lion’s share, and this is reflected
in the fact that domestic sitcoms are the most popular. Even if we live in broken or extended
families, we all have, or have had, experience of parents, siblings and grandparents. If you have
put boyfriend and girlfriend on your list, note that this is a prototype man and wife relationship.
What about the master/ slave relationship that you have with your boss, a teacher, even your
doctor? Whatever characters you write, it is best to conceive of them as a family.

The boss is a tyrannical father. There is often a passive or harried moderating mother figure in
sitcoms and the other characters often fall neatly into warring sibling roles (Tim and Gareth in
The Office). (check out the British version). Base your sitcom on the family model and all its
intrigue, petty disputes and in-fighting and you can’t go far wrong.

The trap
In real life, once we fly the nest, we make our own choices, ideally learning from our mistakes
and growing to become well-rounded people. Not so in sitcom. The veneer is there, but the
characters remain immature, selfish and self-important – essentially children. Friends is a
wonderful example of this: these are adults with adult problems, but instead of facing them
they retain their adolescent angst and kowtow to peer group pressure that says ‘We are the
centre of our lives’. Try listing all the things which can trap a person; things which put us in
stasis and lock us into our behaviour patterns. Think of Frasier, who is bound by duty to his
father. These characters may have any number of traps in their lives, but one might be
predominant.
Plotting
Plotting is problems. Sitcom plots rarely concern an alien invasion or a messy divorce, but are
more likely to be about school grades or an impending driving test. You must face the character
with his or her fears. The best way to identify this is to refer back to what your character
wanted out of life. If it was safety, then introduce risk. If it was power, then threaten this. If it
was comfort then remove it; if it was love, then deny him it. Our characters are in limbo and
any problem that cuts to the core of them ought to be one that destabilises this.

This initial problem is called the inciting incident. A simple piece of information arrives, upon
which he or she must act. The comedy then arises firstly in his reaction to the event and then in
his subsequent actions. His behaviour will then be consistent to his character. What sitcom
characters often do is to make an obviously bad decision. This is comic irony. We the audience
cover our mouths in gleeful anticipation of where this is going to lead. Sitcom at its best has
plenty of these ‘Oh no’ moments. We cringe at these characters because to them their actions
are rational; to us they are ludicrous and embarrassing.

Where do we get plots from? Try making a list of real-life incidents that might affect your
characters in any one day. It’s endless, isn’t it? If you are struggling, you might be inspired by
news events, but don’t stick too closely to the facts. Use only the inciting incident – the
headline – and see where your characters can take this story. Watch sitcoms and note the
plot’s inciting incident. If your characters are strong enough you ought to be able to use any of
these plot ideas and make them your own. The story should deepen in complexity as a result of
bad decisions, before finally resolving itself. This resolve must come from within the story and
be true to the nature of the character. No deus ex machina allowed. (Find out what this means
in writing).

Writing a sitcom
A sitcom can be one of the most rigorous and rewarding kinds of comedy writing and most of
your energy ought to be expended in getting the above right. A sitcom can be set anywhere –
on an oil rig, in a judge’s chambers or on the moon – but it is not this that will keep the viewers
glued. It must be the characters and how they interact with one another. They are slightly
larger than life and ideally there is one monstrous character who lacks the embarrassment
gene.

Once you lock all this down, the process of writing a script is a fairly quick one. Ten days to a
month is about all you need to spend on a first draft. This is called the pilot episode, because it
introduces all the characters to a new audience. It is a good idea to then put this aside and
write another.

The reason for this is that the first script will have been too clunky to sell; full of exposition and
too much about the situation rather than the characters inhabiting it. The second script, based
on a second plot, must feel like a well-organised party. You are introduced to everyone without
being confused by numbers. They are interesting people. You laugh, enjoying them for the
moment and leaving early before it all turns pear-shaped. This might be a slightly tortuous
analogy, but remember, the script editor has never set eyes on your work before. It must grab
his attention. Check that each character is coming alive. Get into each scene or piece of story as
late as you can (this is why there are so many entrances and exits in sitcoms) and get out early.

Don’t write jokes. Let your characters live and breathe and let the comedy flow from this.

Summary pts to note: