Episode 203 - He Knows His Onions

Welcome to Sick Combe Geeks, I'm Dave Cohen and I am James Carey. On today's episode we have a very special guest, the very comedy writer who has written four excellent books about comedy writing, how to write funny, how to write funny ear, and how to write funny yes and how to write funny characters. Oh, and he also only happens to have been founding editor of the greatest comedy websites of the internet ever, the onion. A big welcome to Scott Diggas.

Hi Scott. Hi, thank you gentlemen. Thank you very much for that. Dave, appreciate it.

We are genuinely so thrilled when your friend Noah reached out to us. I was like, we got to get, he's like, would you like this guy to be on your podcast? I'm like, what's the catch here? What?

Podcasting is weird. Like, you know, some people want to be on a podcast and then people are trying to get other people for a podcast. And there's all these weird dynamics. Some people have like assistance that you have to go through and other people are very accessible.

And you can never predict who's who's going to be what? Yeah. And then some people are like, you've never heard of and they're like, oh, I charge $2,000 for every podcast guest stint. So yeah, am I standing?

I'm not going to get invoice for this, are we? No, no, no, I'm not one of those people. Yeah. I'm delighted to be here.

Yeah. Oh, man, it's such a thrill. Yeah, because I mean, it just feels like the, the onion has such a huge footprint on, on comedy and internet comedy, but kind of all the comedy that comes after it. And but before we get to the onion, the first question we was kind of talk about is, I can, I can picture Scott sitting cross-legged on the floor, a bit like the guy in Dream On on HBO.

Do you remember that place in Barbra TV? I do. That's me. Yeah.

And you know, maybe watching a ton of television, I don't know, maybe you are brought up Amish. But what were you, what was the young Scott watching growing up and what kind of made you want to become a comedy writer? Yeah, some of the earliest TV that I watched, I was a pretty critical TV viewer from the start. And I really liked Sesame Street, because it was very fast moving.

And each little segment was like a skit and there were gags and they really worked hard to be funny. And they even had Amish to like, Borsfeld comedy where they were doing that, that, that, that type of stuff. So I think that really did teach me kind of the basics of the comedy language. Yeah.

And I was going to the grouch was the standout for me. Wonderful. Yeah. What a great grump character.

And that's where I started learning about character archetypes and, you know, house humor is structured. And I rejected a lot of other shows that were more geared toward me, like Mr. Rogers, I never really got into because it wasn't funny. It was like boring.

And then I started watching reruns of Gilligan's Island, I Dream of Jeannie, and shows like that, which I think had a big impact on me. Gilligan's Island is so silly. Just like completely goofy and non-sizable. What's up, Dennis?

Because we hear about it a lot in the UK, but it never made it. We got our dream of Jeannie and various other things. But is it like kids stranded on a desert island? It's adults.

And so again, it's character archetypes. They picked like the seven wonderful archetypes, scientists, ship captain, millionaire, movie starlet, farm girl, you know, so they had like the naf, they had the the leader, you know, and it was it was a wonderful little ensemble. And but the jokes were so stupid and silly. And and just like, it was different than a lot of Americans sitcoms and just how silly it was.

It was almost like a Mel Brooks level of silly. So that had a big impact on me. And then I started doing my own stuff. And it didn't really like consume a lot of comedy on TV.

I started writing books and making little jokes, I write jokes and write little stories. And I would make things like calendars for people and that I would give them out his gifts, but they were be jokes on them. You know, I'm like four or five years old at this point. And so I finally figured out like kind of just I was a really shy, awkward kid and I didn't really have a lot of friends and kind of a loner's like in my room all the time performing in front of the mirror.

And this is a way to connect with people. I could give them this thing. And they would laugh and they would like it. And so that was like my one avenue for connecting with other humans.

And so I really like went all in on that. I've always been doing it. Was the written word then that's to be read and enjoyed as a written word was that always a thing for you. I'm just thinking about I've never talked about on this podcast like comedy annuals and all of those, you know, I remember in the UK there was a show called Not the Night in the Clock News and they had there was a book called Not 1982, which is like a fake calendar.

And that just made me laugh to the point of crying, you know. And these sort of funny, it feels like that's kind of gone away. And then I guess it came back onto the internet. But it feels like things are kind of moved on a bit.

But those books are really formative, aren't they? Because beforehand you couldn't tape stuff off the TV because who had a VCR? Right. Yeah, I didn't have a VCR until I was in high school.

So you just like you happened to catch or whatever. Yeah, I love the format of things. Like I love the format of a calendar because it was a parameter that everyone understood and a format that everyone understood. So you could drop jokes in it.

You could draw cartoons on it and it gave you a structure. And I love that. So I would use ABC books and I would use calendars as formats for my work. And then I could give somebody, you know, an ABC book, but every letter would be like, Hey, it's for our barcode or whatever.

There'd be some joke or some gag cartoon, you know. So I was doing that pretty young. So the Sesame Street templates, really? Totally.

Totally. Yeah. Yeah, because that's true, James. We've never really talked about that.

But they were so influential, weren't they really those books? And you know, obviously the onion is basically, I know you've brought out loads of onion, annuals and things. But as soon as it started on the internet, you know, we got it straight away. It's a newspaper on the internet.

And so what were the kind of steps then that went from that point of sending these cards to your friends and doing calendars to the onion? Yeah, so I graduated to being like a class clown in school and continuing to write. And then I started recording like radio skits, radio plays, you know, discovered Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and all time radio. And that had a big impact on me, started making movies.

And so when I got out of high school, I didn't really have any other plan or goal. I knew I had to figure out a way to make money doing comedy somehow. I had to make that into my job. And so the first thing I did was was draw cartoons because it's really cheap.

I don't come from money. And I lived in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin, small town in Wisconsin. So not like I could go, you know, to New York or Hollywood. And there was no internet to look up how to do things, you know, how to get started.

So I just drew cartoons and I sent them away to the syndicates, like universal press and United features and stuff. And I just got rejected time and time again. I kept sending more cartoon ideas. I would keep getting rejected.

And you know, that dumb confidence of you with where it's like, I'm just gonna keep going. So that's what I did. Because again, I had no other options. And eventually I got a cartoon published in a college newspaper in Wisconsin.

And it was a pretty high circulation college newspaper. And by some miracle, the comics kept caught on. And they ran it for free at first kind of on a trial basis. But then they started paying me.

And then I was able to self syndicate it to other college newspapers. I was able to make t-shirts with characters on them. I published a book, you know, drove the paste that boards to the printer myself had to drop $5,000 to print these books. Whoa, it was a big, you know, Amazon had to figure out how to get a UPC symbol.

It was very complicated. But that book, even though I hand delivered it to bookstores and sold it on consignment, it made the New York Times bestseller list. It ended up at number nine on the college market list. So I was a pretty successful cartoonist and I was making a living doing that.

I also had another job that sort of comedy related. I did voice work for commercials locally in Madison, Wisconsin, which was pretty decent living as well. I would do impressions and character voices for commercials and video games and cartoons and stuff like that. And so when the onion came along, that was, I was already like a full time humor writer, basically.

And I was maybe 23, 24 or something like that. And these two guys in Madison had this idea to start a humor publication. And they found me and wanted me involved. And they were two of the most impressive and charismatic people I'd ever met, just like really impressive people.

I was used to hanging out with misfits and weirdos, if anyone. And so I was kind of, you know, charmed and thrilled to be even approached. And I just jumped in with two feet. And, you know, we came up with this name, the onion, and the cheapest way to print a publication then was on newsprint.

I wanted to be like a magazine like mad or national anthem spy magazine was the big magazine then in the mid to late 80s. And it was so good. When we decided that we couldn't afford anything but newsprint, that was just depressing to me. Like it was no color, you know, it was just awful.

But because it was newsprint, it's got to be a newspaper parody. So we're going to put like big, you know, sensational tabloid headlines on the front page. And we're going to do fake, you know, editorials and fake articles on the inside. And, you know, we were pretty, you know, pretty raw at first and over weaning.

When was this roughly? This is about, well, it founded the onion was founded in 1988. Wow. As a weekly newspaper.

And so that's every week we put out this newspaper and we sold ads to cover the printing costs and nobody made any money. And then a year later, a year after the founding, those two guys left and sold it to me because they were done. It was too much work for them. So I had a business partner, but I was responsible for filling the pages.

And so spent the, oh, my apologies. I was responsible for filling the pages. And I spent the next few years gathering a writing staff and kind of figuring out what the onions voice was really honing that news parody voice, which took a long time took a few years. And then by 1995, 96, the internet was a thing that you could put a website on.

And I didn't know anything about that. But one of our tech guys helped us take everything we were doing and print just put it on the computer. And there was the onion website. And I think you know, most of the rest from there.

Well, I was just looking at the, because I've got for the benefit of the listener, I'm holding up our front pages of the onion from 1988 to 2000, which is actually a gift to me from Milton Jones, a comedian, who I helped write his radio show for radio. And he got me that, because he knew how much I love the onion. But there's a visible difference between the sort of May 1995, and then suddenly the onion that we kind of recognize in August 1995, you just go, ah, that's the onion. Right before we went on the internet, I had this grand plan to kind of jump to onion 2.0.

So the onion before then was black and white, there's no color on the front page. And we kind of did a lot of silly humor. We had a lot of cartoons and a lot of like silly contests and a lot of material that wouldn't really fit under the umbrella of like a newspaper parody. And I wanted to really sharpen that.

So I wanted to make it look like a newspaper. I wanted to have a weather map and stock report on the front page, when I have an editorial page and a comics page and there wouldn't be anything that would kind of violate that format of newspaper parody. And it would feel like a whole complete thing. And we had already created this back half of the newspaper called the AV Club, which was legitimate reviews of movies and TV shows and stuff like that, which actually really helped readers realize the onion was not completely fake because it had real reviews in it.

And that helped us because sometimes people wouldn't, they thought the ads were fake. And so they wouldn't patronize our advertisers. We thought we were making up everything. So by making it seem a little more real figured that might help as well.

So, and then also the voice, like the articles would all be very rigorously edited to always be that straight AP news style parody. And we've never wavered from that. We've never great character. And that was kind of a night and day shift.

I think it was the fall of 1995 when we did that big switch. Yeah, yeah. And I guess the lesson here is, you know, because we're always thinking about our listeners, we're all writing sitcoms and writing comedy and improve our craft and also trying out lots of different other types of comedy and different formats and genres and things. But it's so interesting how long it took you to find out what the show was and what, you know, what it was and what it wasn't, you know, your initial take was dictated by the fact that it was printed on newsprint.

So I guess we're a spoof newspaper and you leaned into that limitation and made the most of it. And then you did it for years before you then said, okay, now with this. And then it moved on again. And I guess the internet, the problem is now the internet gives us the illusion of instant success.

And unfortunately, what people don't see is the years and years and years of honing the craft and just doing it time and time again before you're kind of ready. And it takes it takes such a long time, doesn't it? It can. It can.

And it's the same with any kind of comedy. Yeah. In standup, you have to go up there and perform for years before you figure out who the hell you are and what people expect to hear from you and what kind of jokes work from you. And it's the same process.

And so I teach comedy to people and I have been doing that for many years. And one of the things I've always noticed is the people who don't really have a strong passion for it will give up early because they'll try it and they'll think, well, I'm no good at it. Well, of course, you haven't put in the time and you're going to suck at first. And only those people who really love it are going to stick with it through that sucking period.

So we suck. The onion sucked. If you saw the first few issues, it was pretty lame, you know, but we all were having a great time and we wouldn't have changed it for the world. You have to get through that phase.

So writing sitcoms, you got to write a few sitcoms before you're any good at it. And a lot of people think they're going to hit it out of the park with the first script. It's not going to happen. Yeah.

I mean, I was really not mindful of that process and craft I only recently read Born Standing Up, the such a great book. Yeah. And it's because, you know, it's really, because his, you know, when he was rockstar famous, it was so goofy and weird. And like, it just felt like it arrived fully formed.

But actually it was years of really sucking and rears of audience going, we don't know what you're doing. But here's the beautiful part about the Steve Martin story to me. This is the beautiful part. The act that filled stadiums and delighted people and was heralded as the big new thing in comedy was the exact same act that he would do in a nightclub to two people who weren't laughing.

Yeah. Same act. Same act. So it was literally just a process of educating the audience to, okay, here's the new thing.

I definitely feel like we went through a little bit of that with the onionware at first people like, what is this? They'd never heard of a humor newspaper before, like a newspaper parody. Humor publications always came the same way. They always came like as a magazine as kind of an open format where you could do whatever you wanted within that magazine.

And it was all called humor. It was never packaged as a serious newspaper. And the humor is like, oh, you have to get past that format. So I love that aspect of it, like educating the audience, introducing them to you and your work and just knowing that's part of the process, at first they're going to be dumbfounded a lot of the times or they'll say it sucks, you know, they'll reject it and you just got to keep going.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's interesting that what you described there was a timeline of about seven, seven years where you started with you you kind of thought you knew what you wanted, which was this glossy magazine. They said, no, we can't afford it. Okay.

It's a crushing newspaper, but it's still your vision and you're getting there. And then the internet happens, which you wouldn't have known that in 1988, but here it comes. And then you've got that seven years of doing what you've done. And now it's not, you know that it's not the thing that you thought you wanted, that glossy magazine, but it's sort of halfway between those.

It's like quite like a classy broadsheet really. It's perfectly, you know, it just looks like a classy broadsheet on the internet. And so in that sense, I guess it took you several years to kind of get to that. And as soon as it got there, I mean, it was again, that was it.

Yeah, this is it. Seven years on. I like, I love that process that you mentioned, James, about the leaning in, because that's what it's all about. It's like, you have to find what your character is, what your idea is, what your show is, what your comedy project is, and lean into it to create the most outrageous version of that, like the really sharpened that.

And that's kind of what that process is. Because if you look at somebody like, you know, Steve Martin, or any kind of comedy, look at it early, and you can see hints of what's to come, but it's just not sharpened. It's just not honed. It's kind of all over the place, or it's not confident or something else.

And it's yeah, that's like a process of sharpening an axe over several years. It has to happen. Interestingly, just a sort of quick anecdote, because I want to talk a little bit about something you said before. In 1985, I was a stand-up comedian and the English stand-up comedians, we were a shoddy bunch, really.

And then somebody got hold of a VHS of Steve Martin's big, you know, the big show, the study side of the street, I think. And you couldn't get it in Britain because the formats of the H.S.P.L. Yeah. And so there was this one video of Steve Martin, and it just went around all the comics.

And we went overnight from being this sort of bunch of shoddy, you know, kind of vaguely political blokes in shirts, talking in nightclubs about stuff. And then suddenly we saw, my god, you can do this with stand-up comedy. Here's a man in Drest of the suit, who looks at it, looks almost like a bank manager. And just juggling cats or pretending to juggle cats and picking up a glass of water like a kid, and all these things.

And just, you know, 40,000 people there are in the audience screaming and yelling, you know, just like, oh my god. And it changed stand-up in Britain completely. The reason I mention that partly is because I noticed, you mentioned earlier, your love of Hitchhiker's Guide. And I keep coming across this, about the sort of American people in comedy and, you know, internet people as well.

They cite so many people cite Monty Python, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, UK office as they're big comedy influences. And I think, you know, America has so much comedy. And yet, I'm really curious to know what is it about the English comedy that attracts Americans so much? I'm interested.

Yeah, I was definitely attracted to it. I discovered Money Python on public television here when I was about 15. They would run the repeats. And so it was about 10 years after its original run.

And it's so interesting we're talking about Steve Martin, because he was doing this goofy comedy almost as a response to the more political comedy of like George Carlin or the 60s, anti-Vietnam, baby boomer comedy, national ampoon, etc, etc. He was doing like, let's go back to the basics, let's do simple goofy stuff. And he was doing that around the same time as Money Python. It was kind of in the the transom, I guess, that it's time for something completely different.

It's time for something silly. And that, so both of those things, Steve Martin and Money Python were a big influence on me because they seem so fresh and interesting and original. And Money Python was very much like Sesame Street with the fast cutting and the moving from one thing to another and just seeming so freeform and unfettered. It's just wonderful.

For me, I think there's something a little deeper about Americans inferiority complex. The British are seen as our betters. We hear any kind of English accent as being fancier and more educated and more interesting than any American accent. So that's our bias.

We think of the British. It's 100% real. I'm sorry, with a friend of mine who just studied for four years at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and American professors of theology would allow him to interrupt them. This paper, my called name, is just some goofy, lanky idiot from the UK because he was British.

That's OK. And you see it really comes through in Frazier as well, doesn't it? Anything that's British is brilliant. It's some kind of miraculous subliminal thing in our in Americans heads.

When they hear the British accent, they immediately put it on a higher level. And nobody who's my age, I would say. So I was one in 1975. So if you were brought up in the 80s in the UK, the 80s was not a particularly happy decade.

I mean, it was it was OK in the UK. It was sort of getting a bit better, although Dave might disagree with that. But it just felt like America was one giant John Hughes movie. So you know, it was it was the country of Ferris Bueller's Day off and E.T.

Spielberg. You got every movie six months before we did everything was cheaper. Portions were bigger. Reagan was optimistic.

You know, your president was a movie star. You know, how that you know what? No, I totally hear what you're saying. But it's like, it's the field that the the faint remaining fumes of the greatness and the power of the Empire are all were attracted to.

It's not anything real or current. So it's true. Like there's a lot of comedy that came out of America that is good or maybe just as good as Monty Python, like Mr. Show in the 90s is equally as good as Monty Python.

Can I use this chair? That one? Can I use this chair sketch, which is in audition piece? No, that's why I just got your welcome.

No, I sure. I look at those shows like percentage of hits, like what's their hit ratio on the show. And Monty Python was like a 50% hit ratio. Just the other day I watched episode four and it was like there wasn't a single laugh in the whole episode.

But I worshiped Monty Python. I worshiped them. And I learned so much about comedy. They to me were like the comedy Rosetta Stone, because they used all different types of comedy.

They use all 11 of the funny filters. The world's most dangerous joke is a sketch that uses every 11, all 11 of the funny filters. And it's really fun to analyze them and they're just they were the flower of mid 20th century comedy, in my opinion. So yeah, I mean, we don't have time to talk about all 11 filters, but there's just feel like a good time because I've just been reading about them in your first book, How to Be Funny.

And you're talking sort of quite a lot of detail about the filters. But actually before we get to the filters, there's the very first thing in that book, How to Be Funny, which you're mantra, I think, as far as I can tell, which is something that James and I also feel very strongly. It starts with subtext. So could you explain how you mean that in the context of your filters and other things?

Sure. And just to be clear, I know it's easy to get confused, but my books are how to write funny. I had to write funny. Whether you're funny or not, it's not my problem.

But I can teach you how to write fun. So yeah, subtext, a lot of people call it a point of view, but I don't like point of view because it's too vague. And it's like, yeah, I come from this point of view. So this is how I see things.

That's not really very actionable. But subtext is a statement, like noun verb object that states a judgment or an opinion or something like that you have that you are going to communicate through humor. And it's not inherently funny. It's just an opinion.

The Catholic Church is corrupt. You know, relationships are too hard and not worth it. You know, simple statements of opinion or value judgment. And then by routing that through any one of the 11 funny filters or more, it comes out the other end of joke.

And so you can do a joke, you can do a sketch, you can do a whole novel or screenplay or movie, you know, whatever you want. But yeah, that's how I see it. You have to have something to say. You have to have an opinion, you have to have a value judgment.

Otherwise, why are you writing? You literally have nothing to say. Yeah, that's so helpful. Because in a sitcom situation, the subtext, the very idea of subtext implies there are already two things going on.

There's already a conflict happening. And you only need one character to have subtext. Because we're the audience, we could be the second character. So a character who is trying to do X, but we know he's trying to do Y.

That's your subtext. And that's why Rohan Atkinson can do a one man show. Mr Bean can be super funny because it's all subtext. So it's not just clowning.

And going back to Charlie Chaplin, you know, it looks so simple. But you know, subtext really is that kind of secret source, isn't it? Yeah, because you see a lot of comedy where there's no subtext, but they're doing the same kind of either physical humor or pants, mind humor, like Rohan Atkinson, for example. And it doesn't work.

It's just stupid because there's nothing going on underneath that people don't have anything to say. You know, you have pie in the face humor or they used to try to get away with that a lot in America. And sometimes it would work, you know, on primetime TV or whatever. But I could tell, like I could tell the difference between Monty Python and, you know, a sketch on the Donnie and Marie Osman variety hour.

It's just this night and day, you know, they didn't have anything to say. Yeah, I guess they were very earnest, don't they? Are they moments or something? They are moments.

Yeah. So they're still entertaining people. Everything is so wholesome that they can't do because that would be deceptive in some way or something. Yeah, and they can't have any subtext that's interesting or astute or subversive.

Like that's the most interesting subtext, something that's going to like tear down an authority or an established structure of society. Like that's the really interesting stuff, you know. Yeah, I mean, I'm not that kind of shine through a lot, obviously, in the onion. But I mean, let's take, for instance, something you just said there about, let's say, you know, it's impossible.

Relationships suck. Maybe it's impossible for monogamous relationships to work. So could you give a couple of examples, say, of how you might use your filters to make some comedy out of, you know, that that opinion, basically really isn't it? Yeah, so yeah, you would start with that opinion.

And then you would just the way I write jokes. And I kind of broke this down from my book by deconstructing how I think naturally, because I think most comedians, comedy writers get to a certain point where they're not thinking it consciously. They're just doing this subconsciously. And I was trying to like break down and apply terminology and articulate the process of what happens when you try to think up a joke.

You start with that opinion, and then you start going through the 11 funny filters, which are the language of humor. That's how you make an idea into something funny by either delaying certain information, creating some kind of surprise for the audience, making it absurd, et cetera, et cetera. So I would just start, like with the easiest funny filter is irony, just say the opposite of what you mean. So you would start with something like, relationships are wonderful and fun and easy and fulfilling, and I never have any problems in my relationship.

So then if you move to character with that one of the other funny filters, you might apply that trait, that idea to a character. And pretty soon, you have a character archetype. You have the nape. You have somebody like the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or Mary Ann on Gilling's Island, since we're talking about killing his island, someone who believes in things.

And then you extrapolate from that. Suddenly you've got a character who has a voice now and you can write for that. They believe in everything. They've never had their heart broken.

Society has not destroyed their will to live yet. And once you have that writing a sitcom, you need to know who your characters are before you can write. Otherwise, that's the worst kind of sitcom script is when you're reading it, you can't tell who's talking because the characters aren't distinct. I think a bigger bit of setting scene I'm finding now is it's all story.

So it's mainly one person doing a thing, then a thing, then a thing, then a thing. Which affects the next thing. Then it's a cliffhanger to tune in next week. Can you go, that's not a sitcom.

That's a series of events. There's no, and actually there are plenty of shows that are like that, but they're dramas or they're procedural or anything like that. I mean, they're not very good ones, but sorry, I interrupt you there. No, no, that's quite all right.

The combination of really good, funny character archetypes and a story that you can really latch on to and really get roped into is that's the winning formula right there for a sitcom. Then it's just a matter of finding the right archetypes that play off each other well, because then you use the filters again there, where you want to use contrast between characters. So you have a nafe and then you have a know it all. So you have contrast and then you have arguments and those things help you round out whatever your story is.

You can view it from different angles. Obviously, the character is going to try to solve some story problem and make it worse. And then there's going to have to be some come up in or some come to Jesus moment at the climax. And that's basically it doesn't have to be anything.

In a movie, it has to be a huge spectacle of a story, but in a sitcom, it just has to be a little thing. I have to find something to wear for the gala tonight. That's it. That's your story.

Just to take a slight variation of what you said there and say relationships are complicated, say. And then if you look at, say, Phrasia and Niles and Martin, and you have a kind of Phrasia who is supposed to help people in their relationships, completely incapable of holding down a relationship and sell Niles who is married and doesn't know that everyone else knows that he so obviously is in love with Daphne. He's almost in denial about himself and then you've got Martin, who has held up as the perfect relationship. And then he has seasons down the line we find out that he had an affair and it wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

So that's kind of, and each of those is applying those kind of filters, isn't it? Yeah, the filters are so handy to use just initially coming up with a concept, coming up with every single gag line. You can go through the filters and come up with gags. And then they work as plot points.

You described some irony things going on, some character things going on, some misplaced focus, it's another one of the filters where you focus on one thing like this perfect relationship and then it's a misdirect because there was an affair. So they're usable at every stage of every aspect of writing a story. I hope you're enjoying this interview with Scott Stikis. We'll be back to it in a moment.

But if you've joined us on Patreon, you would have had access to this interview for actually quite a few weeks and you get early access to lots of our episodes and also extended episodes as well, although we're just going to throw it all in into this episode. And also you could join us on the Masterclass level and come to one of our Masterclass'. In fact, we are running one a month for our Masterclass members. And the next one is on the 26th of October at 7pm UK time.

It's all on Zoom and it is what we're calling open-heart script surgery where we're going to actually read each other's scripts and critique them and so there'll be like a script room and we'll be sending around script. So if you think that you might want to do that, then join us on Patreon on the Masterclass level where you'll also get access to the previous ones we've done. We just did one on how to pitch a show in and out of the room and how to make the most of those opportunities to pitch your show briefly and brilliantly. That sounds of interest going over to Patreon.

You can Google Sitcom Geeks Patreon and you'll find it. Okay, back to the interview. You mentioned archetypes earlier and that's the latest thing that you've been writing about. Is that right?

It's how to make funny characters as the latest book. So you've got 40 archetypes and I don't know how you feel with like the seven basic plots and all that kind of stuff. And I'm reading seven basic plots going, this is all one plot, this is all here. It's like, it's all one plot.

Yeah, in one sense. But how did you get to 40? It's a good number. I like 40.

It's a bit of a concept. I don't start with the number. I usually start, like with the 11 funny filters, I just added up, okay, what are the professional trails of humor? How do they make things funny?

And I came up with a, there seem to be 11 of them. And same with the characters. So I could have done more, but then the more you add, the less popular those characters have been historically. So I wanted to do the 40 most bankable characters, archetypes keep coming back that we always see in comedy.

And I rank them. So the number one character, every person is the most popular character in comedy. And some of my favorites, like the bumbling authority is pretty high up on the list as well. And these are characters that just come come back and come back.

And then I put in there how to make them original, because you can't just bring them back the same way they've been brought back before. We'll all think it's a cliche and adds, hacky character, whatever. It's simple, simple little tricks that you can do to make them seem entirely new and fresh that the best writers know how to do that. And it's really fun to see a new show like from a master.

Greg Daniels in the US is one of those people produced so many great shows. He did the American version of the office and he did Parks and Rec. Man, I love Parks and Rec. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, nine nine. And before that he was he had done so many shows.

So he's a guy who really knows how to write a sitcom. Yeah. And it's fun to see how he makes characters original by doing hybrids, you know, combining two different character archetypes into one or sometimes three different archetypes into one. It can get a little complicated, you do more than that.

And then a great creation on that, as you're saying, a really surprising one is I think Captain Holt in Brooklyn nine nine nine has got to be such an interesting character in terms of like, but you would imagine, you know, being black and being gay, suddenly he is a very political figure in terms of the culture. But the fact that he has no sense of humor and he is completely fine with that. And he kind of knows that he doesn't, you know, the fact that he doesn't see that once rhymes with lunch, you know, there's this whole riffing about it's like, so, you know, that is such a brilliant, you know, we know that character, but to make that character a surprising character that keeps coming back and then becomes this, you know, wish father figure for Peralta, who just wishes Holt was his dad. The way that relationship emerges is just incredible, isn't it?

Yeah. And you see the mastery of how that works. So he's using one of the most popular character comedy, character archetypes. There is that of the robot.

That is the person who does not use any emotion or humor, they're just flat. So, and then, but he makes it unique by making it black person, making a gay person, making a cop. We've made, we've never seen a robot who had all those traits. So it seems totally fresh to us, even though it's the same archetype we've seen a hundred times before, the blues brothers are robots.

You know, they don't speak with any emotion, they're very flat. And it's kind of drive. How's it smashed up in that? In that movie?

Although this is kind of word of warning to add to that is that I've heard Michael Schur being interviewed, I think, by Tim Ferriss. And he talked about when he first started to get meetings with producers, and he met loads of people. He was quite a successful writer. He met loads of producers.

And the only person that he kind of met and they had a connection was was Greg Daniels. And he said, they then spent a year just talking about these characters that would become the American version of the office. So, you know, these characters don't sort of come out of thin air in the first meeting. And so everything you've said there, James, for instance, about the about Holt and then Scott used to mention as well about that kind of the robot and things.

They kind of, you know, it takes a lot of work. It would be lovely to just, I mean, it's great looking through your list of 40 and going, oh yeah, oh yeah, it's a lovely kind of thing when I've done it a few times when I've been kind of struggling with the character thing. I'll just have a quick look at Scott's list of 40 just. I'm glad to hear the direction.

That's what it's for. Yeah, I use it too. I use it too because it's hard to hold all that in your brain at once. And I was so surprised that no one had ever written that book before because we all know these archetypes.

And I had seen this book of the eight characters of comedy and I'm thinking there's more than eight. So I felt like it had to be written. Yeah, I mean, there's either one or there's a family, but there's no eight. There's this one dramaturge John Truby who has a theory that it's all three characters and they are the child, the animal and the machine.

And that's a pretty good theory. Like you can almost break down every character into one of those three. They're either acting a child, that's over emoting, or they're acting like an animal, which is, you know, just like basic bodily functions and no intellect or they're acting like a machine, which is totally straight. And I like that.

But there are some nuance, you know, yeah, it's a it's a handy intellectual exercise. But as far as practicality, I feel like the 40 archetypes that I listed, you know, are pretty bankable. And I give examples of like where they've been used and how they've been used successfully. So you can see how they made them unique each time and what their traits are, how to use each one.

So helpful. You know, that's true. One that you mentioned, I think I've got his books on my it feels a little bit overly prescriptive in terms of his plot stuff like 22 steps of like, yeah, okay, but that movie's a different and I wouldn't know how to start really on. Yeah, he made a movie a few years ago using his steps and it totally flopped and he immediately like erased it from existence.

The movie or the theory? Yeah, he did like an independent film that he kind of heralded as here is the perfect movie. And it, of course, was not the first movie you can't do that. That's got me.

Poor guy. But you know, he I love his work and I'm a big fan of his his stuff. Yeah, but the filter but the just the so I remember hearing in a sermon, amazingly, I preached, I mentioned an article he read in the Atlantic where he said there are three types of people. And it was how three how three types of people react to a threat.

One says, run away. Another one says, get it before it gets you. And the other one says, there is no threat. And you just you just described flight, flight or freeze?

Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, yeah. So in a way, it's just worth knowing, you know, I'm occasionally I've talked about how just give your characters which love language are they into the love language yet? And also the, what is that?

Myris Briggs is another one people use the great effect. And you know, they're doing more like comedy characters used to be simpler, but in some of the more recent sitcoms of the last 10, 20 years, the characters have been a lot more nuanced. They've had more dramatic elements. And you know, I used to say that and I still think this basically, I think I don't think it helps to complicate humor ever.

I think it's always good to be to simplify it. But I used to say a comedy character is two dimensional. They should have no more than three traits, any more than three traits. They're too complicated.

They're dramatic characters. But that we're kind of blunt, we're fusing drama and comedy a little bit more in some of these long lasting sitcoms. But I think that's kind of a master skill that I wouldn't recommend anyone try right on the gate. So hard.

Yeah, because when somebody explains a character when I'm reading a character right, I'm that someone written. The longer the explanation is, the less I know the character. So I don't want to ever see a character explanation. I want to see them doing things.

So I know who they are. But if you want to give me, yeah, but a three word description of this and this, but this, okay, fine. Perfect. The moment it's like, but sometimes and then but they also do this, it's like, stop talking, stop it.

You know, yeah. And that's another no no is like telling the audience something that they wouldn't be able to figure out watching the show. Yeah, you can't do that. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think it's sort of comes and goes in cycles. We've had a cycle and you know when the whole Netflix and streaming started up and it's like suddenly we need more narrative in our comedy. You know, we need we need an arc and then people said, yeah, but that means that the characters have to learn from their mistakes.

Therefore, it's no longer comedy. And so I've noticed actually a little bit of a kind of raining that in certainly the BBC now when they talk about commissioning shows, they say we are definitely now we're looking for sitcoms. We're looking for standalone episodes with but at the same time, they are also they've got a drama. They kind of it's more the drama people are looking for the comedy drama rather than the comedy people which I think interesting.

Hopefully it's a good thing. That is interesting. I feel like Brooklyn Nine-Nine is an example of that Pendulum swinging back to just being a little more two-dimensional with the characters. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Big Bang Theory, you know, that's not as wrapped up, hasn't it? But I mean, that still has a pretty big you know, kids can't really get enough of these shows. So the idea that people that want these shows is just kind of idiotic.

I mean, people are still watching Frasier for the eighth time. You know, it's just one of the main UK channels puts three episodes on every morning and it just goes round and round and round. Yeah, here we watch the office and reruns. People watch it every day.

It's like going to work. It's like going to work. Yeah. Just before we leave the character thing, I mean, I mentioned Big Bang Theory and I was noticed.

So you had one of your characters is called The Nerd. I thought, oh, Big Bang Theory. So that's the Nerd and the Nerd. But then I looked at some of your other characters and you've got the loser.

So there's the loser nerd and you've got the knowy-toll and the knowy-toll. How it's the loser nerd, isn't he? Is that right? Yeah, the guy from the one who was the kid in Roseanne.

He's a loser. Oh, no, I don't know if he's a loser. Sorry. I watched the first series, Big Bang Theory, like 12 years ago.

Yeah, I'm not too familiar with the show. I watched a few episodes, but I don't know if characters do well. And I know there's the girl. The girl is like a damsel, nafe nerd.

So yeah, they all use different hybrids with The Nerd. Yeah. So you can take two of them, but anything more than two, I think is like, say, you're going to start. They can get a little complicated.

Yeah. Well, then I think I always think of James Bond, who is know it all, Fighter, Trickster. He's got like five or six. And he's one of the most popular characters in entertainment in the last 50 years.

But I guess the different actors who played him have leaned more towards one or other of those. Yeah. Yeah. With Ario, he's got so many.

He's like, you take all the best traits, you put them into one person. And so he's just like the Superman superhero. Superman, Sex Past. Yeah.

I just wanted to talk as well. You mentioned that you've been, you teach comedy writing. And I'm interested to know, first of all, what you teach, but also, I'm curious to know for someone who's starting out, and I guess it's different in the States to the UK. But I'd be curious to know if you're starting out in comedy, what's the kind of, what is the path of all that sort of many paths in the US?

Yeah, right now the path is pretty consistent. And that is, it's very similar to what it used to be in the past, but the way it's manifested is slightly different. So in the past, the way I succeeded was by putting myself out there. I would draw a cartoon, I'd write an article, I would send it away.

I would start my own newspaper. I would start my own comic strip. I would try to, you know, perform on the street. I would just try to put myself out there.

Same thing now, but there are so many more tools now. You can put yourself on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube. And that allows you to actually get seen in a way that you couldn't get seen before. So typically the people who succeed in comedy now are people who created a really funny Twitter account that got passed around and shared and someone of some experience saw it and was like, oh my god, that person really can write well.

Let's snatch him up and give him a writing job. It's, and then, so that's one way, another way would be to be in person in New York or LA and be going to the clubs and doing stand up and doing improv and just being part of the scene. And so if somebody, if somebody, like an agent or producer happens to go to a show and see somebody, you have a connection there and you can like submit some jokes or submit a spec script or whatever. So it's easier to get an agent.

It's easier to meet people. And that's new too. Like, there wasn't that kind of, you know, connection between the industry and performers back in the day before, before, sorry, stand up comedians became such a farm team for professional TV writing shows. Yeah.

Yeah. Just, it's in a way. Sitcom is probably not even the best place to start anyway. So you kind of want to, because otherwise you're just going to write stuff that's kind of derivative.

And these days people want voices. They want, you know, a member reading a bit of advice written to, I think it's Penn and Teller were involved in this at some point. And someone just said, oh, I saw you do your magic show and I was just disappointed that now I can't do that because it was so perfect. And that's what I want to do.

And they just say, well, you need to be interested in something else. And then think, and you want to be a magician. Okay, well, get into Picasso and then think to yourself, how would Picasso do magic? And that kind of gives you that thing.

So, you know, you want to create a cartoon strip or a tea or a stage show or this weird Twitter handle account. And although Chip, my dad says, didn't turn into a successful sitcom, it probably could have done, you know what I mean? They could have just rolled a dice and it, you know, that guy, yeah, that guy probably has a career now and he certainly made a splash. Yeah.

So the other commodity is the what's new, what's fresh. So when Onion came along, it was the first human newspaper. So it was new, it was different. People are all wowed.

That's kind of a trick. You know, if you can come up with something that nobody's ever done before, like you were just saying, do what's your voice? Is it totally fresh and different from all the other voices it came before? That's a real commodity.

But the perseverance is the key as well, isn't it? So if you've got it, if you have a funny Twitter handle and a screenwriter who can change your life, finds it funny, they might retweet you. Once they've retweeted you five or six times, over the course of six months, nine months, two years, they might go, I'm staffing for my show and hey, actually, there's that dude girl doing this thing. I don't even know who they are, you know, because it's some weird alter ego.

It's a loaf of bread that's tweeting, you know. Yeah. And that consistency is much like a PhD is in the academic world. Basically, all it demonstrates is that that you have the staying power to continue doing the work.

And so they want to know that before they hire you on your writing stuff, you're not just a one hit wonder. So putting yourself out there and being kind of relentless with putting out stuff is really important. Like before somebody plucks somebody and hires them like that, they're going to Google them and they're going to see do they have a website where they do like a humor blog or do they have a YouTube channel where they're doing stand up? Are they writing articles for all of the like McSweeney's and other like publications that print humor articles?

If they see that that person is really serious about doing comedy and they're kind of got their fingers and all these pies, that's who they're going to pluck. And that's exactly what we do for many years. We did this at the onion where we would hire fellows or interns. And those are the people who always end up on the writing staff in a few years.

You want to look at their what are they doing? Are they out there producing humor every day? Well, that's who we want. You know, there's a myth that so many people cling to that they're going to write one thing and it's going to be so brilliant that everyone's going to give them every opportunity they dream of.

And it simply doesn't work that way. Well, that's in fact what I was going to ask was do you think the days of you know kind of even if you've got a more professional attitude and say, well, I've got I've written five scripts and you know, I've got a script for kids, I've got a family show, I've got a something race a bit race here. Do you think that it's I mean, we know that that's unless stuff is being made. But do you think that that way in now is that kind of just it's just so much harder or you know, I mean, I do recommend it much at all.

It can happen. But I don't hear about that happening nearly as much as the way I describe where you're out there already doing the work, you produce your own show on YouTube and somebody finds it or it builds a platform builds an audience to the point where it's on the radar. You know, then they know that you have the staying power to continue doing that work. And then they come to you often like you don't even have to go and submit scripts like they're coming to you and saying, what do you got?

And that's our ideal because the entertainment business is really like high school with money. So they there's power dynamics involved and you don't want to be the beta, you don't want to be coming to someone saying, please help me. You want to be the person in the alpha position where, Hey, I've got this great comedy product and I got a big audience. What can you do for me?

You know, that's that's a much more appealing person for someone in the entertainment business to want to work with. Yeah, because also you're helping them because they need, you know, you're solving their problem. You know, there's a there's a an endless bottomless pit. There's a maw that must be fed content and strips and material.

They're dying for people who are relentlessly producing comedy and can build that maw. You know, yeah, yeah. And I always say we're not wasting our time here because people are watching TV and they like laughing. So this is not a minority interest, you know, so stick at it.

I think we should probably wrap things up there. You've been very generous with your time. Dave's got probably details of your book that we can tell. You're many, many books a day.

What are people? So yeah, so the books are, yeah, it's great how to how to write funny, how to write funnier and how to write funnier. Can you possibly top a book called how to write funny? Yes.

Well, you can. You know, how to write funny characters. I'm looking forward to how to write funnier characters and how to write funnier characters as well. But can you tell us a little bit about what you're teaching as well?

Do you, where people can find you if they want to work with you? Yeah, so everything is on my website howtowritefunny.com and there's tons of free resources there, like free ebooks, explain the funny filters and other things. And my How to Write Funny podcast is there where I interview people in the comedy business both in front of and behind the camera just to figure out how they do what they do. And then anybody who wants to go deeper with me can buy my books.

They're pretty inexpensive on Amazon or wherever you buy books. And then if you want to go deeper still, I do have courses. I have a How to Write Funny course and the Comedy Business School course, which walks you through how to succeed in the comedy business. And with both of those courses, we do monthly, like three times monthly meetings where I attend and we go over material and it's like an ongoing class.

So I taught at the Second City in Chicago for a few years back in the mid-20s. And I kind of took what I learned from there and wanted to create something that was more actionable for students to actually take and turn into a career. Because sometimes somebody would take my course for eight weeks and then they would get a job writing professional comedy and having no experience prior to that. So it is a system and sometimes you need a little help, you need a little hand holding through that to really figure it out.

So I love doing that and I love mentoring people. I also do that like one on one mentoring and so on and so forth. So yeah, I'm heavily into that. I love it.

It was one of my favorite jobs at the onion was you'd always hire people with no experience and we would train them. And then it was so rewarding to see them go off, leave the onion and get jobs on sitcoms or write movies. They make more money than you. What?

They can't borrow money. Yeah. No, it's you start to be like a parent at some point. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's very, very important. Great.

That's brilliant. We'll put links to that in the show notes as well so people can engage either there. It's got something so brilliant and such an honor to have you on the podcast. Thanks very much.

It has been my pleasure. Yeah. Thanks for having me. It's a lot of fun.

Thanks very much for listening, everyone. And the usual patreon things apply. We won't talk about that now. But thanks very much for listening and I'll speak to you next time.

Cheerio. Thank you very much.