Hello and welcome to SickConGeeks, your essential guide to writing a SickCon for TV or radio. Those who can do, those who can't teach and those who can't do either of those may podcast. Hello, my name is James Carey with me is my co-host Dave Cohen. Hello, we do the podcast under the watchful gaze of our producer KG Story and we also have a guest with us who's going to chip into this podcast now and then and future podcast as we go through because we're obviously recording a bunch of podcasts at the same time.
Please welcome TV and comedy critic for the times Alex Hade. Hello. Welcome to you Alex. In a moment we're going to be talking, sorry, next podcast we'll be talking about critics and comedy but for now we're going to talk about the first 10 pages and then after that we're going to talk about jokes which is a good thing to talk about on a SickCon podcast and then just go to these talks on that too.
Well yes I mean it's amazing how often writers forget to put jokes into their sitcoms. It's very easily done. It is easily done because there's so many things that you're doing you're trying to get right and along the way there's only rewrites of your script. You spend so much time establishing a character that's trying to get your stories going and then it goes through all the various processes and then by the time the final draft that's being shot gets made suddenly there's this horrible realisation that actually this is as David Turrell said in our last podcast, people talking.
So we'll forget to put jokes in. Or if we're being kind this is efficient. So we'll come to that in a moment but first we're going to look at our first 10 pages. So we did a podcast on the subject of the first 10 pages of your script a few months ago, weeks ago or episodes ago depending on how you are downloading this podcast and we opened this up to our listeners and our inbox has been, I mean, bulging would be overstating it slightly but pleasantly pinging.
Pinging with people's first 10 pages and so we fished one of the two out of the inbox and we're going to talk about them, talk about one in a moment. If you want to read the scripts as we're talking about them you can do that you need to go to our Facebook page and like us and have look for a link to the first 10 pages secret page which you can download at PDF which our willing volunteers have cheerfully agreed to. Just a couple of things I should say ahead of this as well thank you very much all of those of you who have sent the scripts the rest of you keep sending them. Obviously these are our opinions as a change of my opinion and it's not constituting their advice but also I think we're not necessarily absolutely 100% right all the time in fact we may end up disagreeing with each other.
Well yeah we're mostly right most of the time they don't come on let's not understand ourselves. No no no no no, this is just um frippering nonsense in my opinion and what we can do is talk about the things that technically might be a problem and our first reactions with it because as we keep saying I think and as I bled it on about in my book your script is your calling card and you really want your script to work as hard for you as possible and get you work because it is extremely unlikely that the script that you have written will finally make it onto TV, sheer law of averages and statistical attrition means that your script actually is as much according to anything else. So we're going to talk about a show called Ivy View which is by I've certainly had a blank on who it's by those three girls. Those three girls.
Carly, Lucy and Susie. That's fantastic thank you for writing this. Thank you. And just to describe roughly the the story of it is that there is a run down Gothic mansion a little of nowhere and it's called Ivy View no vacancies and Sarah and Liam are checking in to this place and they are met by a lady called Mae who is a this being country pumpkin enthusiastic with Galival and then there are a couple of relatives of hers we see later or people who also work there Austin, Michael who's a child who you don't get to see and Vivian and then we go back to Sarah and Liam in this room that they're ushered into which is extremely unpleasant and then we cut back to the kitchen for breakfast.
Yes so this is obviously the first time that they have spent a night together and so but they have to be able to consummate the relationship I don't say but of course this being sitcom it's not going to happen and so I mean I'd just like to start by saying I think this point and again it's only the first time pages that we've seen I didn't get the sense that this was actually a sitcom it felt more like something more like a dramatic story I mean there were good jokes in there and things but I'm not aware really that I didn't feel that the characters were the sort of people who we would see week in week out possibly the first the people who run the place but the show starts with these couple. One of the first things also I noticed that the first the description of the each the characters a little bit over described with introduced to Sarah 30 to a girl next door able to find positive in any situation of over achieving former hip-hop yeah okay there's another two sentences it's just it's nice to sort of find out about the characters when we hear what they have to say yes you do need to show it rather than just tell us everything I think that's right I think the reason I think that you're finding it hard to work out what this is David's because we are struggling to know who this script is about because what is what is being set up here firstly when you get a gothic mansion you're thinking this is going to be some kind of horror parody that would say to me that there's going to be some kind of you know a young couple checking into a nasty looking rundown gothic mansion implies that someone's going to be horribly killed but once it actually gets going it doesn't it feels like it's more of a place which is incompetent and weird rather than horror but then you hit but here is the big problem I think if it's called the ivy view and therefore I'm led to believe that this show is about this place but almost all of your dialogue is from your guests now your two guests are in Liam I presume aren't going to stay there forever I mean maybe they are but it seems odd that most of the dialogue in the first ten pages is the guests who presumably were not going to see again next week so whereas actually the people who run the place we're not really getting much evidence of and we get sort of hints of it so part of my um my my Simon Cal test is off to ten pages do I want to read more I do want to read more but only so I can work out who the show is I'm not curious just to know who I'm meant to be following because I had the same problem and I think that kind of got in the way of for me was just I kept thinking hang on it's about so I mean no suddenly we're getting this family and and it does make sense from that point of view it's just like a sort of updating of of the Adam's family or the monsters or something then fair enough but it's it starts so kind of dramatically with this couple and the couple's own from much seem to be the kind of central the central characters of the show and I had this before when I've read lots of first ten pages and I've said to people I don't really get what their characters and they say oh well this is just the this is just the opening scene and they're not in it much for the rest of the show but as don't imagine before when you're doing your first ten pages you need we need to really see all the main characters as soon as possible we need to know what the story is going to be as soon as possible we need to know where but it's set as soon as possible and as James said we we we get there in about page six whether we've got oh it's already viewed oh it's this mad family that run it and then I guess as you say that's probably what it's going to be I mean I wonder also I think the League of Gentle I've got a lot to answer for um because they did leave some people would say that the event was a sitcom that I don't think it is like it's very funny but it's not a sitcom and then they sort of do psychovale and they do inside number nine and they set up this idea that you could sort of do these I think once you leave gentlemen you can do those things but I think I wonder if it's like I was going to be different couple every week and it's going to be you think well that's fine but you're focusing on the wrong area um so for me I thought I thought there was some nice jokes here and actually it was it was very readable and that is hard to do so please don't go thinking that you know that this will be too down on this it is very readable and I know that that is no small thing in itself but overall I just think there's a setup problem here and we're setting up something that feels like it's going to be horrible then isn't unless there's something to come in pages 11 to 32 or that there is a mystery here or I don't really know what I'm looking at that's that's one problem if I have another little thing that we can learn from that that is worth just wanting out is there are a few bits of dialogue here that people only have a say on television um there's a line where someone says must I think of everything you really stretch my patience at times no human beings ever said that apart from me just then um people don't talk about that even it's it comes so um unless you're being really arched and and apparently which I don't think you are then you just need to sort of look at those lines and sometimes when you just read it out loud you realize something feels very written or like we've heard that line before or that it's a place on the line so actually there were I thought in places it was actually very nicely written there's a odd little lines of dialogue that sort of jump out like the first line of this horrendous house made may what do we have here then dripping all over my porch in the middle of the night I thought it's a very nice yeah there's this horrible vision of the figure and it's just dripping all over my porch because it's obviously rain but I mean it really evokes a very very powerful atmosphere and I think I'm back on that's pretty good but I can be a shadow farmer which I think is a funny yeah funny comeback and I thought also Sarah the main seems to be the main character in the 10 pages I do like her chirpy uppiness and finding the positive situation I thought that's very good um so that was really clear so I think the characters that you've set up are clear I just don't know which of the characters we're meant to be um following um and I'm wondering if uh the very last thing is whether does this place really exist do I believe it when they're shown the room the room sounds awful and part of me is thinking I don't think you'd stay there I think you would go somewhere else if you got there by car you just get in your car and go somewhere else um so there was sort of logical problems also there's she somehow booked it by the internet and yet the person who works there's never really heard of the internet and you sort of think they're stretching plausibility sort of too often really so I just think you need to look at those sort of plausibility issues because they just sort of get in the way and get in the way of the good dialogue and the jokes and characters and stuff so um yeah but yes excellent thank you for sending it thank you for sending it it is no it is a big deal to do that I'm very grateful that you have and I hope that also our podcast can help you to um maybe improve it or try something else or just just push you further on because you know there is evidence of good writing here so there's lots to be careful of that okay excellent lots of jokes in fact there are jokes talking of jokes um there it has been thinking deeply about jokes um but before we turn to the Alex hello hello how do you feel about jokes um I sometimes sense that critics find jokes rather vulgar oh I definitely love a good joke um I suppose um what I say is that you get the verbal jokes the visual jokes you can get jokes in character or catch rays or there are all kinds of different ways jokes can be delivered I suppose more and more sometimes it's through tone or atmosphere we're seeing a lot more comedy dramas where perhaps the gag rate isn't as high but they're finding the funny and or the strange in other kind of ways so um it is interesting I think to see how that ratio is tipped and recently and there are I suppose you've got some of the really gag heavy sitcoms and then you've got those that trade more on atmosphere and strangeness and there's one for both different people like different things but um but um it did tell me frustrating when they're just aren't enough jokes it's I do remember some uh this was picked up by a lot of comedy writers on Facebook that's uh there was a review of a TV program uh it said something along the lines of uh like all great comedy it doesn't need jokes or something something like that and obviously everybody went absolutely crazy about this but I mean there is a sense that um that the verity of the sort of normal audience show has kind of allowed people to sometimes allow people to get away without being as funny as we would want them to be do you get that much of it? I think so and I think there is as I think there is one for both sort of tones but but at the end of the day we're all sort of matter of comedy fans you do want a deeply satisfying joke don't you say well that's interesting you say that and we'll come on to this in future podcast but um we are comedy fans and yet a lot of people watch comedy are not comedy fans and after a long day's work they just won't have a laugh and so I think you've got sort of the vintage boutique comedy which probably does slightly turn its nose up jokey jokes and then you've got the more broad mainstream jokes that people who just like laughing will watch and the mainstream hits which actually um because it's in the industry and various people can be a little bit snobby about but actually you know this is this is just comedy for everyone rather than comedy for people who like comedy if that makes sense but anyway we are probably drifting too far away into the um into the theoretical jokes but yes I mentioned at the start of show how um we do kind of occasionally overlook the fact that we need to have more jokes and obviously there are there are jokes as panel shows there's the standard comedians but I mean in terms of sitcom of James I mean when you're looking for jokes you're looking mainly for sort of character jokes generally yeah you're looking for it was interesting it's um how when we were trying to put clips together for for Bluestone 4 2 how few lines we have that kind of work well in a trailer and that's kind of that was an interesting experience um there were very few jokes that you could just clip out other than had explosions and people sort of swearing because I have people swearing in trailers unfortunately um there was one joke where he says do you know why they so afghanistan bomb disposal um do you know why they call booby traps because they get trodden on by tits like you it kind of works as a joke you know especially then my mils just says really it's like that truth because I know it's not true um so we had we had the occasional joke like that which kind of in one sense they're sort of a bit black anorist or something where they kind of have those your brain the same mind neither of a hungry cannibal crack or head open or move the other side to cover a small water biscuit kind of joke um I think if you're using too many of those you've probably got a bit of trouble um you've just got people saying funny things and actually what people being funny without realizing it ideally and sort of clashing against each other in ways that we find funny um in a sense the people in the sitcom shouldn't really find themselves funny um you should be setting things up that we the viewer find funny which is you know obviously a bit of a strange relationship I think one of the problems is as well when you're writing jokes um you don't always know whether a joke is funny and this is true of whatever level of writing you are you don't know if a joke is funny until you try it out that's partly why people write so much in pairs isn't it really because of you because the first person if you can't actually persuade the person who's sitting in the room with you that what you've written is funny uh then you're gonna struggle to get beyond that and so um that's that's a good reason to write with another person you've written on your own and you've written with another partner how how do you find it on your kind of coming up with jokes for us or you're the only writer for instance how i think i've actually when when i'm writing um with someone else um normally with Richard Hurst i'm usually fairly confident that the script that we produce between us is probably funnier than the script i've written on my own um and when i've written script on my own i'm probably more reliant on the producer when i was writing my own i worked a lot with one particular radio producer who was sort of almost like a writing partner but was also a very good person for just saying there aren't any jokes on this page and it'd be a bit brutal but i would say well um if you uh yes okay don't you say that line on the funny voice we take it um so i think it does help because it is just it is so brutal this process and that's why in either case we've tried to have read through to the script um for the last series of this don't we have at least two read through to every script before we got to the big read through before we went off to the different students so that we were just hearing it and that's partly because we didn't film in front of an audience and so we probably had to commit to what we thought was funny and then film it um because a studio audience does actually help you find what's funny so um i think anything you can do to um to give a joke to an airing to give it a hearing i think really does really does help and just reading it with someone else to see which you thought was hilarious in the cold i'd say when you read it out loud can sometimes be very embarrassing yes yes yes i was always being in those situations and the tumbleweeds roll through the ring of well the great cream of british comedy is reading your words and it turns into dusting well then sometimes something turns out to be completely break up the room and you thought well i didn't even think that was a joke that was just a set up you know and then the actual joke comes and they were near as good as it said but these things do happen can you think very joking about to leave out of bluestone forces um well we we had a no joke left behind policy so we were quite good at keeping jokes um sort of on bits of paper and in files that we had to delete but we thought well we might be able to update him somewhere else so um i'm sure we i'm sure they were some spare jokes by the end i would love to have got in somewhere else but sometimes you just have to lose a whole scene partly for time or partly because the able scene doesn't work and you can't salvage a couple of good jokes and normally i find about i have to luxury be able to write um twenty one episode of this thing normally the chance to use that joke will come back and if you forget the joke then it wouldn't be good and so um so these things tend to have a way you know almost that viruses really they sort of creep back in you know you've got rid of them and then they come back again yeah one of the things i wrote a couple of articles about um jokes um for the british comedy guy the year ago so and uh one of the things i was trying to find out was to find people who had worked out what what uh you know what was the joke and i couldn't find anyone anywhere actually defining jokes there's hardly anything i mean there are there are these books like a book Jimmy Cardi that sort of talks about certain types of humor um but but they came to the mikey jake which i read and it's very good and it's helped by having lots of really funny jokes yeah it's first read out um but actually you know what is a joke and uh kind of go back to the very basics of from a writing point of view a joke is kind of like uh any sort of um three act drama of course the three act drama which is sort of arrist stottle was the first person to basically sit down and say every story has a beginning a middle and an end and that's that's that's what the three act drama cups are from there's a starting point and so you know um a bloke walks into a bar so that's your act one of your joke because that's that's sort of reality that's sort of normal place that we're at and then um but he's got a sandwich on his head that's act so act two it starts as a complication there's man walks into a bar which familiar but he has a sandwich on his head all right so if something complicates out we're in the middle of the story we've got to resolve that story uh and then the barman says we're banned and um so we come to the end of act two this guy's gonna say why why why why why don't we don't serve sandwiches uh yes i'm sorry terrible terrible joke really old joke but just purely for the purposes of illustration so your act three is your punchline and that's really what how how you write jokes um and that's kind of i don't know if there's much more to say in terms of actually writing it but then then i started to try and look up uh different types of jokes and again there's not much not much kind of academic research gone into this uh Freuder and a book about jokes currently which uh yes haven't quite managed to get through um well there's a but also um i'm never i'm never tired of quoting kendorveny talks about Freud because uh kendor's along the lines of you know Freud's theories about comedy all very well but he's never played the second-handest class ever empire on a Friday night you seem find out what a joke is in no situation well just what i what i did was i kind of made a very very rough list of the types of jokes uh that there are and it's it's you know it's not a definitive list and things kind of uh go into other lists at different times uh the first the first the subject that's um most common is where reality is turned on its head uh so that's the joke of surprise um and obviously when we talk about sitcom when you're writing tv as much as radio then you're obviously looking for visual gags and uh of course i mean the obvious one we think of the only films of course is the Chandelier gag uh that's that's a surprise isn't it i mean when uh battle bachelors his car with a with a bunch that's a visual we're not expecting that no no it's really nice how you because the shot it just sticks onto the car and he runs off and he's the first time he said you do you think one oh he's he's abandoned the car he's running for it and then he runs back in with a bra to stop speaking to the hell as well so it's always something that so in terms of writing sitcom i get you're looking at um you're looking to use these jokes for your characters and for your stories i mean the early you go spring to mind for you guys just telling reality on its head any you think of your favorite examples of that tony spring to mind oh goodness i mean one says all jokes are reality turned on their head and that's why i find categories really hard because every joke is to some extent a surprise but then the moment you say that cash rages aren't a surprise and yet they are effectively jokes and we we're laughing at we're laughing and the what actually this is your next category is recognition recognition i feel is a much you can distinguish uh surprise from recognition because although it's although it's a surprise when you watch say someone like michael michael michael doing stand-up uh it's also something that is is in a very familiar world to you and so i'm not this is again i always recommend people should watch there's a three-minute routine that michael michael michael's idea is about somebody running to get onto the tube and um whatever you think about this guy he's mostly he gets so many laughs packed into three minutes which is a long time property just describing a man getting into a running into the tube as well as closing and obviously for those of us in London and stuff that's everything about that is familiar everything about his description is familiar but the way that he manages to build that story uh is fantastic and there is no the only surprise in it is that we're just it's not surprising as much as enjoyment of his interpretation of the thing that we that over the every day really so that's that's slightly different from surprise i would say yeah no it's no no i agree i think in one sense what he what the surprise is the thing that he does is like all of us rachael coedience it makes something of a thing that you thought that only you'd notice it's very skilled at just sort of noticing something that you had noticed but i haven't even noticed that you've noticed um and i think that can happen to rachael coedience but it can also happen in sitcoms when you do have a particular character that feels fresh and original and yeah it feels like you know someone like that i mean that's the skill of david brent is you you just feel that you know someone like david brent um and you know a boss who thinks he is the best boss in the world and is the worst boss in the world it really is quite simple um and you know a boss who thinks he's nothing you're basically a chilled out entertainer you know it's just like oh it's sort of tokirling and yeah there is that recognition now i think characters do have this recognition factor about them more conventional sitcoms though sickens like friends i would say and and uh my family um you know these are these are sitcoms about sort of regular ordinary people yeah and they're not really even those sort of monster type characters but there that i think there's a there's a record a lot of recognition in in the sort of the sort of the sort of the comedy of manners of simphel but you know how how how do you react in certain situations and become dissecting of that sorry for me that's very funny so far again so but that's the observational thing it sort of sick turns it into a sitcom with the like oh he's a re-gifter he's they give a name to something like giving a gift and then give to someone else that makes a re-giver and they sort of turn it into a phenomenon where you just think oh i thought that i was the only person that spotted that and they're very clever doing that then the next one i really i'm gonna turn intellectual on you now this is uh this is a quote from emmanuel kant the 17th century philosopher which talks about jokes as a strained tension into nothing uh which is i don't sound so like emmanuel kant that's so so kant yes but i like that because that does describe perfectly the sort of uh jokes about like you have a sort of pompous character and and you prick the bubble of that the the compostercy of that character and i think of some people like like frazier for instance you know who is a very pompous sort of person and someone more kind of nylos will undercut something he says and it is it's it's a it's bursting the bubble of of what they think about themselves it's also i mean sharden froy they're coming there as well which uh people getting there come up um strange tension into nothing they make me think of the very much as i mentioned earlier the modern thing of characters who are already broken um strange tension to nothing just makes me think of the detectives um i don't know if that's how it's meant to be but the into nothing you know i mean that's just this kind of there's this sort of i don't know if you mean i like see what's a lot of comedy to what extent do you find this i mean kant was a sort of existentialist uh an existentialist but not sort of source i managed to avoid reading some of his stuff and my theology degree actually yes but do you thought i mean are you really meant that about emmanuel kant? yeah yeah yeah i think i think almost know what i'm talking about um but i don't know i just find that's but people seem to find that funny don't they the the existentialism and nothing this of it it's sort of left hanging in the air they're still presented with a funny situation but there aren't necessarily those kind of lines or things that really sort of underpin what the funny is but it's sort of just hanging there and some people have that kind of humor and some people aren't such big fans i quite like seriously i mean i really loved him and her which i think has a obviously a different tone to the terrorists in that it's really no longer and grubbier but um has that similar kind of the atmosphere is a lot of the humor i suppose um yeah i think but i think there's also that there's uh the going to show off the two words that i know that aren't english um both awesome, both awesome, both awesome, that sounds like a really bad double act doesn't it yeah the both awesome is anti-climax and so i mean that's not just something that you see in kind of awful shows you see that i'm very conventional shows uh but the horrible version of it being um the end of the scene and uh what's the bicycle uh phrase you won't you won't see me getting on that bicycle bicycle perhaps you they're one of i can't believe you got me to do this um and then but then paythos which is much harder to do and that's where i think that's where some of them good sitcoms become great sitcoms they have moments of real sadness and you know something like only fours and fours has got to that point about six or seven series in but to then they then would undercut it with a joke and and the relief of the audience that string string tension is nothing there that feels like i'm thinking of the um i must have mentioned on this podcast before even after any few episodes have been done it's the porridge one where he has to tell god that he go down in the fifth round and god you know and to god says i can't go in the fifth round and i'm already going down the second round whatever it is for somebody else yeah and it's such they really do make the most of it they really draw it out and it's absolutely beautiful because then one's don't say completely have their cake and eat it they have the emotion of the situation that they really suck you in and then they just do this huge very well through your face it's wonderful so and again as i said there are also these distinctions between these various types but um i suppose what you mentioned there i would say more the next category really is kind of unpredictable uh jokes that are unpredictable and that tends to be something like uh word play you know puns knock knock jokes whatever in your endo stuff that's the first of language but also the kind of surrealist humour and again that's something that that uh there's i'd say there's been quite an increase in um i don't know if you can bop kind of often cited as the sort of the kind of the grandfathers of the surrealist comedy um but i notice from you know somebody else you're quite a fan of the surreal kind of thing because i think that um you're talking about surprises just now and i think that um my favourite kind of humor is the stuff that really does not keep sideways and then you know recognisable situations all very well but you know something something that takes you into a world you never would have expected so but mortimer sitting in house of fools with a wicker what sits on his head to me is hilarious and it's something you'd never imagine so and that's sort of that's the sort of comedy that really makes my heart sing is that kind of thing where you just apply inside of something that you never would have expected but i recognize that there's a more limited market for that kind of thing than it's not what it's covered please what what works for me for Vick and Bob and for the mighty buchis that there is a very conventional double act at the heart of it and so that for me is the sort of the act of one normality is that i i kind of let them i i can appreciate that humor because i'm already enjoying that sort of the best mates relationship that i've grew up with with more reminds or whatever so but it's when it for me i find it hard when the sort of thing just comes from out of nowhere really and i think there's a few few shows i've seen where that seems to be so um so very quickly we'll just go up two more two more types of joke again we've got um we've got um about satire which is probably the oldest joke form and satire satire does not mean jokes about the prime minister okay satire is uh jokes addressing the folly of power through uh usually through song or rhyming form so the oldest joke that's from Aristophanes by the way two thousand more than two thousand years old though definitely the old ones are the best yes i've never read any Aristophanes i have to admit but i'm sure there's some very funny jokes about the current uh leader of the Freud Kant Aristophanes good to me what i'm telling you are we don't we don't spoil you on this show um but i mean i think the one day we're actually reading some of the stuff that we're talking about but um i mean i think of satire not as shows like i've got needs to be right it's like it's like a peep show to me it's a great uh has great sort of satire elements to it i mean anyone i think of other examples what we would think well that's quite a satirical show it's taking you know it's a tucking power um well i guess the obvious one is the principle one which would be the yes by minister which is my favorite second-party there's a sense in which it's what what i find so good about it is it's so you can still watch it now and it's still really funny because it's it's about it's about power and how to use it and how to use it and how to make compromises and what politics actually is as a sense in which it's um i mean satire is sort of quite a crude form really in some ways like um thinking oh let's go clever again let's go swift with his modest proposal for um that's that the irish should eat their children in the family and it's sort of it's sort of a long drawn out one single point that's crudely made to make an overall big point and that's that's fine but actually i think the reason i like it's my mind is that it is so broad in its scope and is about human condition it is about how to make things better and how impossible it is to do that because the very political system by which you're trying to do it isn't itself going to master you and make you cause compromises the point where it you might just want to bother trying um so yeah that would be don't be my obvious one okay well then the last uh form jokes that i'm going to um talk about just because of this this mind list and it's not the difference of this i so if you've got any more if you think of any more uh tell us write to us sitcomgeeks at gmail.com uh with your ideas of types of joke cruelty is the last one and we think of cruelty we tend to think of you know Jimmy Carr or Frankie Boyle or whatever but actually cruelty is uh it's because a long history of cruelty really in comedy or comedy uh Shakespeare had it uh Laurent Hardy's you know they kind of uh he's a funny fat man falling on his back side and his little wimpy man next to him and as soon as he gets told he's that's crying you know mochamom wise you know eric mochamom is if he took the laughter track away from what he does this is you know it's the most horrible bullying he slaps it physically slaps his face he's always just being rude to him to his face about him uh insulting but you know we kind of we it's cruel it is cruelty and you know there is a lot of cruelty in comedy and i'm just trying to think of a sitcom that how kind of cruelty works in the sitcom but i think um i mean in most characters you know well but i think but i've been underlying those relationships between Laurent Hardy or amalcon wise there is that bedrock of friendship that they have and that's why i'm talking about my own work but with with bluestone their soldiers and soldiers are horrible to each other but there is but the underlying affection is unspoken and taken for granted and you know they're not speaking it's name really so i think i don't know i i think cruelty is it feels like there's a very special situation in which it can work and it tends to be a relationship that may be taken for granted but is there nonetheless i don't know i find categories really hard just because you sort of immediately think of it's like when they people say that there are only seven stories and then somebody says i know but there's there's actually only three stories and then all those three stories are only basically one story there's only one word in the entire English language here it's everything goodbye from that well yeah i mean that's that's true but anyway if anyone listening to the show comes across a um an alternative set of criteria we'd love to hear them because Dave and so far not found and would be a knight and if anyone's actually read Freud or Swift or uh our stuff needs again i mean i think i mean the point is just to show i mean it's obviously depending on the sort of sitcom you're writing and what you're after really but but but be aware there are there are many ways many different uh even if you're doing something that seems like it's a topic uh a satirical show it doesn't have to just be topical comedy there are all these other other ways of making jokes but do please make them make them and it's very easy so just going back to the very last sort really is we encourage what's the end of this podcast which is i think 40 minutes already um is that anything which makes you think about jokes in your scenes in a different way in a new way just to think how can i turn the situation on its head how can i add jokes to this scene quite often the scene isn't set up correctly that's the main problem and there are ways of of sprinkling jokes over things to make it look as if everything's okay well actually possibly it isn't sometimes there is a deep-rooted problem that you need to get the bottom off but if you can think of turning around on its head recognition and spring tension or nothing um any of these categories will help you in your scenes because you really do need to be thinking every three four lines is there a joke is this is this going to make a room for people laugh and if it isn't i would say you probably need to fix that but we've already said that there are quite a lot of sitcoms which don't seem to want to make quite so many jokes and we will talk to Alex about those next time can i just add as well though some sitcoms that have sort of some kind of structural element that means you can build or jokes and so people show you've got the running narrative of you know the point view stuff and car share where you have the um you know it's essentially a sketch show as well because they have the radio adverts and so on so there are sometimes the structural ways you can organize your sitcom to make sure that you're feeling all the blank space so it's really good point Miranda just talking directly to the audience i mean if you can find a way in your sitcom of cheating i very advise you to do that because there are no points for not cheating so on that cheating note um let's wrap this up thank you very much Alex and see you next time thank you to the Soko theatre who have kindly given us a corner of their offices in their small room to recall this podcast we're very grateful to say in theatre please support this show we don't ask you for money at least we haven't yet but please like us on facebook uh leave us a review on iTunes that would be a nice thing to do or introduce a friend to the podcast you can buy my book called writing that sitcom it wouldn't make a very christmas present because it's an ebook i don't know how you give an ebook for christmas but so you can physically get my book you can physically get saved but of course has me averagely successful at comedy and that's all that we have for now so tune in next time say goodbye day bye bye Alex bye bye bye bye bye