LA ORGANIZACIÓN DEL TIEMPO. TIPOLOGÍA Y VARIABLES QUE INTERVIENEN

“People at their best I don’t really want to watch in entertainment. I don’t really want to watch mature people or smart people or people who do the right thing. I like to meet them in life, but I don’t find them entertaining. And certainly not funny.”

— Judd Apatow

Writers are always afraid that their characters are one-dimensional or are simply clichés. Actors are always afraid that someone is trying to make their character look and act stupid. The refrain I’ve often heard is, “But my character isn’t stupid.” It’s what I call the “gravity of actors.” They want to look good

(don’t we all?) Even if the character is stupid they don’t want to look stupid. Their desire to look good stops some actors from sharing how stupid the characters are.

No one likes to think of themselves as stupid. Raise your hand if you’re a smart, talented artist. If your hand isn’t up right now, it’s just because you’re being humble — another great quality. But we all know that we all screw up. As my friend Mickey Haddick put it, “We trip while we walk, we drop things we mean to carry, and we spill sticky things on ourselves when it is least convenient. We have hair that grows where it wants to grow in spite of our aspirations of beauty.” You’re not stupid, but you’ve done stupid things. Your characters aren’t idiots, but they’ve done idiotic things. Comedy demands that you show a person at, if not his worst, then at least his not so good.

It takes a pretty smart cookie to play dumb.

Take this scene from There’s Something About Mary. Dom (Chris Elliott) is helping his pal Ted (Ben Stiller) prep for a date. One of the things I love about Ben Stiller is that in many ways, he’s a very smart cookie. At a tender age of 25, he had his own sketch show on Fox. He’s a writer. He’s a director. Tropic Thunder is one of my favorite movies of the last decade. Brilliant. He got an unbelievable performance out of Tom Cruise. And one of the things I like about him is even though he’s really smart, he allows his character in the scene to “not know.” Part of what happens when people write scripts is they think, “Well, I’m smart, I’m writing the script, and this character I’m writing is kind of like me, like, you know . . . smart.” And they allow the character to be smart about everything. It makes the character very verbal. But my question is, why should your character be smart about everything?

INT. HOTEL ROOM - NIGHT

Dom is mixing a drink while Ted paces nervously.

TED

I don’t know, Dom. I don’t feel good, I feel nervous. I really feel nervous.

DOM

Oh come on, relax. Been to the cash machine?

TED

(pats his back pocket) Yeah

DOM Car clean? Plenty of gas?

TED Uh huh.

DOM

Breath, how’s your breath?

TED

It’s fine. I took some Altoids.

Dom nods, satisfied.

DOM

Okay, sounds like you’re all set. Just clean the pipes and it’s a go.

TED Hmm?

DOM

You know, clean the pipes.

Between the two of them, Ted, Ben Stiller’s character, is the one who “doesn’t-know.” Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who wrote the script, are smart guys, and Ben Stiller is a smart guy, and obviously the character he’s playing isn’t stupid, but he’s allowing his character to simply not know — a Non-Hero. On the other hand, Chris Elliott’s Dom appears to have all the information. But all of Dom’s information is idiotic, likely to screw up Ted’s chances with Mary. Dom is also a Non-Hero — he’s a self-serving idiot who lacks loyalty.

In many sitcoms, the characters who are the most verbal, who seem the most sure of themselves, who seem to have all the information turn out, like Kramer in Seinfeld, to be idiots. And they don’t know they’re idiots. The characters who are most like us, like Jerry, are often confused or at the very least are

Wrong. It’s because you ain’t got the baby batter in your brain any more. Jesus that stuff will fuck your head up.

TED

(starting to believe) Huh.

DOM

Um look, the most honest moment in a man’s life are the few minutes after he’s blown a load. That’s a medical fact. And the reason for it — you’re no longer trying to get laid. You’re actually thinking like a girl. And girls love that.

TED

(shakes his head)

Holy shit, I’ve been going out with a loaded gun!

DOM People get hurt that way.

In reading this scene, you might not have noticed that something’s missing. Specifically, the Farrellys have not given Ben Stiller’s character a lot of funny rejoinders or jokes. There are many people in Hollywood who still believe that the person who says the jokes is the funny person. But look at all the comebacks, the witticisms, the witty repartee that Ted does not have. There’s no banter, no badinage, no back and forth. The Farrelly brothers simply allow Ted to “not know.”

Having been given this bad advice, Ted proceeds to act on it, resulting in one of the classic “gross-out”

comedy sequences in modern comedy:

INT. TED’S HOTEL BATHROOM - SAME

Ted has a newspaper splayed out on the counter (open to the bra ads) as he furiously FLOGS THE DOLPHIN (chest-high side view.) We see some balled-up tissue nearby.

EXT. HOTEL — EVENING

A cab arrives and Mary gets out. She walks in.

INT. TED’S HOTEL BATHROOM — SAME Ted is still on his mission.

After several frantic strokes, he takes a deep breath and slowly and loudly EXHALES, clearly having COMPLETED HIS MISSION.

He draws a few more breaths, picks up a face cloth, and goes to clean up.

But something’s missing: The Load. Ted looks down, checks his hands, pants, shoes, looks in the sink, finally glances at the ceiling, with no luck.

The Load IS MISSING!

TED Where the hell did it go?

That’s when there is a KNOCK at the door. Ted looks HORRIFIED.

TED Hang on. Wait a second

As he buckles his pants, he makes a last, panicky reconnaissance of the area. Ted reluctantly goes to answer the door.

“Think slow, act fast.”

— Buster Keaton

If Ted had all the time in the world to look for The Load, would it be as comic? If he had a lot of time, eventually he could look in the mirror and see something was awry — not very funny. So the fact that Ted has very little time in order to find it — and answer the door and have his date — creates more of a comic moment than if he had a leisurely 45 minutes to search the premises. By adding the element of a time factor (ticking clock, someone at the door) it gives Ted just not enough time to accomplish his

activities.

INT. TED’S HOTEL ROOM - SAME

Ted opens the door and Mary is standing there looking as lovely as ever.

TED Hel — lo. How are you?

MARY Good. Good.

TED You look very beautiful.

MARY Thank you.

She notices something.

MARY (CONT’D) What’s that?

TED Hmm?

MARY

On your ear, you’ve got something.

TED My ear?

MARY No, your left ear.

Mary leans forward for a closer look. Ted is terrified.

MARY (CONT’D) (making face)

Is that . . . hair gel?

MARY’S POV - a HUGE LOAD is hanging off of Ted’s earlobe like a drop earring.

BEAT.

TED Yeah.

MARY Great, I could use some.

TED No. No.

MARY I just ran out.

Before Ted can stop her, Mary grabs The Load off his ear and WIPES IT IN HER BANGS.

Ted goes to the door thinking The Load is somewhere he can’t find it, so it’s on with the date! Mary then sees it, and says, “What is that?” If Ted were smart, he would immediately realize his mistake and

wipe it off, right? But why should he be so quick? Why should he know which ear? Why should he be so quick to solve the problem? His paralyzed silence gives Mary the opportunity to then play a reversal. “Is that. . .” and you think, “Oh, she knows what it is,” but Mary’s a Non-Hero too, and the reversal is

“ . . . hair gel?” Ted hesitates for a second, he has to think about it, he’s not sure what to do, paralyzed and

ANGLE ON MARY - The light, puffy bangs that Mary started the night with are gone, replaced by a glazed, ACE VENTURA-STYLE WAVE up front.

MARY

Like he’s a murderer, yeah.

Ted can’t take his eyes off Mary’s stiff upright lock of hair.

A side note about this last scene from There’s Something About Mary. Here’s the thing — you don’t just sit down and write a splooge joke. How the Farrellys came up with this particular physical bit is very instructive. As Peter Farrelly himself explained on an episode of NPR’s Fresh Air:

People ask us who writes the jokes, but that’s not how it works. Somebody has an idea, and someone pushes it further. And that’s like a great example of how we write. I had actually thought at some point what would happen if you were masturbating and you lost the product and you couldn’t find it? But I thought, well, you can’t really do that. But I ran it by Bob and I said, “Could this go in a movie, something like that?” And he said, “Yeah you could, but then what happens?” I said, Jeez, I don’t know.” He said, “Well think about it! That’s what’s interesting! Where is it?” And he said, “I mean like, what if it was on the guy’s ear and he doesn’t know it?” And now we’re laughing and thinking that’s funny — it’s on his ear!

If Winning asks the question, “What do your characters want?” then Non-Hero asks why do your characters know so much? The more the characters know, the less comic it is, because that gives them more skills. Rather than worrying about the next clever thing your character says, the primary thing is that your characters are always navigating the confounding gap between expectations and reality.