A lot of comedy script drafting is about writing dialogue writing. You are going to be writing a lot of words that your characters are going to say. Tone is important. Comedy writers talk about tone a lot in the writers’ room. What is the tone of your script? Your characters? It is always a good idea to have heart. The tone is a spectrum from artificiality to naturalism. Tastemakers draw a lot of inspiration from The Larry Sanders Show. Watching the Larry Sanders Show is a great way to learn about comedy if you are analytical. Find comedy from the behavior over banter.

Now it is time to turn the outline into a script. Brent uses the Final Draft software to write the first draft of the script. He shows us the process live with one of the outlines from another writer in the class. This is indeed the fun part of scriptwriting.

Start by taking your outline and breaking the chunks down further. The dialogue will be interleaved. A script starts with the cold open. The biggest insight that Brent discovered through teaching this course is to have the cold open introduce a character, their core comedic contradiction, and create a scene that provokes the core comedic contraction into comic behavior. and put them in a scene that provokes them. The cold open does not have to tie into the story. The cold open is a comedy scene. Write dialogue as an improv actor, get into character, and try to say something. Improvise the lines and throw them down. Overcome resistance to get started. I couldn’t believe how hard it was to start writing dialogue. As soon as I started, I got stuck, but then when I got the first line out, I was fine. Give your punchline to the main character. There’s a unit of joke. The shorter it is the punchier it is. When writing a character think about polar opposites. Big words and grammar vs. short sentences. Put everything you are thinking up on the screen.

If you worked at it full-time, expect to take 40 hours to write a half-hour comedy script from the outline. Use the V+2 approach: vomit plus two. Vomit is about speed and quantity, not quality. Try to get from FADE IN to FADE OUT as soon as possible, then make two more passes. Break writing down into writing sessions of two hours at a time. You can get two scenes done in a session.

Endings are critical. They help you write towards a goal. Sitcoms work when there is a fun, family dynamic. The endings help the audience realize that the journey was worth it. So, spend some time thinking about endings before you dive right in. There are common ending types for TV: the heart scene (ahem Full House), the heart scene obscured (low stakes, natural, and unspoken), the device ending (the A and B story resolve together), the voice-over ending (all of Modern Family episodes, common-denominator lessons), the “failed but won” scene (Ted Lasso used it for a season-ending), and a surprise ending (Fleabag did this very effectively for the pilot and the season).

Outlining is transcribing the cards (and their order) to an outline script. The top of the card becomes the slugline.

Brent also tells us to watch the pilot of Brooklyn Nine-Nine for some inspiration. As you watch TV, get in the habit of dissecting the scenes and figuring it out.

I have always been fascinated by using cards for TV show and movie scripts. I follow Thomas Schnauz, writer/producer for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, on Twitter and he occasionally posts the cards for his episodes. This process seems to scale to any level of complexity.

Here’s an outline of Brent Forrester’s TV Comedy Course:

• Class One: Brainstorming
• Class Two: Pitching
• Class Three: Cards
• Class Four: Outline
• Class Five: Draft
• Class Six: Rewrite

What sold me?

I happened to upon Brent Forrester’s talk from the WGFestival 2021: Fundamentals of the Comedy Pilot. It was a motivating session and compelled me to look closer at Brent Forrester’s method for TV comedy.

About Brent Forrester

Brent Forrester won his first Comedy Writing Emmy at age 25 for his work on “The Ben Stiller Show.”  He went on to write for “The Simpsons,” helped launch “King of The Hill,” and was a writer, producer, and director at NBC’s “The Office” for seven seasons.  He’s written for “Late Night with Conan,”  HBO’s “Mr. Show,” and “The Larry Sanders Show,” and continues to work as a Head Writer on Netflix shows like Judd Apatow’s “Love” and Steve Carrell’s “Space Force,” along with Amazon shows like Greg Daniel’s “Upload” and “People of Earth.” 

When Brent was running the Writers Room at “The Office,” he began developing a system to get a script from “concept” to “shooting draft” in three weeks.

Part of my journey

I will share my journey as I take the comedy writing class. I am not sure if I will write a TV comedy pilot, but I am furthering my commitment to write every day. I identified as a writer for about 10 years and realized that I wasn’t writing very much. About three years ago, I changed that. I started writing every day no matter what. Sometimes I wrote jokes or philosophical musings, but I wrote something. I also committed to blogging here every week. I am not writing for an audience, I am just making writing a habit.

Writing is hard.