Category: Blogs about Writing

The sequel to ‘Cafaurant’, and other portmanwoes

Published on by loreleimathiasLeave a comment

A previous post on the delectable or detestable (delete as applicable) use of the word Cafaurant in a quaint village of Lynton sparked up a healthy debate.

We thought that was the last word on the matter, until this.

 

Clearly, we live in hybrid times, where no word is safe from being surgically merged with another.

Another controversial one  is the word ‘Spork’. It makes my friend Mark really, really angry.

I spotted a bunch of the blighters for sale in Broadway Market the other day – and I was struck by the fact that a Spork is not only a fusion of a fork and a spoon, but now one edge of it is actually serrated. Thus making it ALSO A KNIFE. How does this even make sense? A) You can’t do all three tasks at once with only one device – rendering it pointless. B) Nothing in the name implies the ability to cut or slice. So it’s a failure both practically and semantically.

And that completes today’s angry linguistic rant. *takes pedant hat off*. Except to say that the other day in Birmingham’s German Christmas market, I purchased a lovely woolly pair off GLITTENS. Yes, that is, mittens that handily metamorphose into gloves when you need your fingers to be functional yet warm. Perfect for typing in the Tea Building then.

 

“Comedy is medicine. Not coloured sweeties to rot their teeth with”

Published on by loreleimathiasLeave a comment

A while ago I (lol) went to see the Trevor Griffiths’ “The Comedians” at the Hammersmith Lyric Theatre. It’s about a group of aspiring stand-ups in a comedy class in 1970’s Lancashire.

Sounds like a laugh a minute, but it’s really not. It’s actually more of a serious meditation on the philosophy of comedy. It’s full of little gems to make you think.

‘A comedian draws pictures of the world. The closer you look, the better you’ll draw…’ And:

‘It’s not the jokes. it’s not the jokes. it’s what lies behind ’em. it’s the attitude… ‘

Again, there are parallels with advertising.

Good comedy is all about finding a truth about the world, and dramatising it. ‘Most comics feed prejudice and fear… but the best ones illuminate them, make them easier to deal with… We’ve got to make people laugh til they cry.’

Bad comedy is glib and superficial, and concerned with rehashing stereotypes for cheap entertainment. Good comedy really challenges the world, tries to change something.

‘I want to be rich and famous,’ says one of the budding comics.

‘And good,’ says Mr Waters, their tutor. ‘You’ve got to be good first. You can’t do that later.’

Watching the play made me remember Luke Sullivan’s scorn of the successful but infuriating Mr Whipple ad campaign. As he puts it, ‘As an idea, Whipple isn’t good…’ and (quoting Bernbach), ‘a commercial needn’t sacrifice wit, grace, or intelligence in order to increase sales.’ (in ‘Hey Whipple, Squeeze this’, if you’ve not read it)

Anyway, I’m not sure if ‘The Comedians’ has finished its run or not, but I’d really recommend it – failing that, the play is worth reading. Its analysis of comedy still rings true today, even though it was written a while ago.

As a case in point, we went to see Dylan Moran recently and he was definitely on the side of this idea of ‘laughing until you cry’.  His deadpan delivery was hilarious, but so much of his show was frighteningly real. It was honest, scathing, whiney… almost to the point of nihilism. He talks about how you suddenly wake up and realise your life is over, or that you’re with the wrong person.. And there’s his account of a man attempting to pull in a night club, and after failing over and over again, he goes to the fast food van, ‘For a slice of deep fried never.’ (probably the best line in the whole set).

The whole thing was hilarious, but also therapeutic, as it was so depressingly true. Laughing at the little absurdities of modern life, it could take you one of two ways. One, you feel better about how ridiculous things are. Or two, you think sod it, and book a one-way ticket to Beachyhead.

Brevity is the soul of wit

Published on by loreleimathiasLeave a comment

We’ve been going to an amazing sketch-writing course on weekends. It involves watching classic sketches from Smack the Pony and Monty Python, laughing a lot, and then analysing why.

So it’s basically heaven. Oh and then we have to improvise on the spot in front of the whole class. Not so heavenly.

Wanted to share a few things from it, as – inevitably – there were many moments which crossed over into advertising. 

So this week, class, we’ll look at how the “craft” of sketch writing overlaps into crafting good ads. (forgive the use of the word ‘craft’, it is pretentious but necessary).

The classic sketch structure consists of:

The setup. The twist. Escalation. Pay-off.

The interesting bit is escalation. There are many different ways in which a comic can escalate the joke in a sketch…

Repetition – think of Lauren in Catherine Tate who is relentlessly ‘bovvered’. Or Cleese and his million ways to describe how the parrot is in fact dead.

Revelation – where a new layer of unexpectedness  is revealed. Or something new about the character which adds to the humour. e.g. the Constable Savage sketch in Not the 9 o’ clock News. In this, the constable is being disciplined for a bunch of absurd arrests. Then we find out that it’s the same man he’s been arresting. Then we find out why – because he’s black. and then we find out the script actually has a strong political polemic. Worth watching if you’ve not seen it (can’t find it on youtube though)

Variation – a new version of the same twist. For example, in this god-like Fry & Laurie sketch, a man insists his surname IS the sound of a lighter being dropped onto a counter. the variation on this joke comes when he insists his address IS a tap dancing sequence.

I was struck by how similar this is to writing an ad campaign. The joke is the central thought, or strategy. And the variations are simply different executions of the same thought – just as three posters in an ad campaign are basically escalating the same concept in different ways.

Our homework this week was to write a 3 minute sketch. I’m writing about call-centre ineptitude. Nat’s writing about delusional estate agents. Should be lots of fun. Any fun horror stories on either, please feel free to share – we may use it as script fodder – thanks.