Tue, July 29, 2008
Trusting Your Actors
Writing dialogue is hard, and comedy dialogue is harder still. You're working without inflection and timing, but you've still got to make your joke clear enough that a reader will be forced to get it. It may sound great in your head, but if it can be misinterpreted as a straight line, or read in a way that makes the point of your joke unclear, you're sunk. And if you put "(sarcastically)" after every dialogue tag, someone will come to your house and beat you up.
Where it gets easier is when you're working with talented comic actors, and you can trust them to do justice to the material. Here's a snippet from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, the supervillain grunge match musical that's taking the net by storm.
- Dr. Horrible
- Didn't you go on a date last night? Conflict Diamond told me you were doubling with Bait and Switch.
- Moist
- Yeah. It was all right. I kinda thought I was supposed to end up with Bait, but...
- Dr. Horrible
- I hear ya.
On the page, that joke dies. It couldn't be cornier and it feels obvious as all hell. Shameful. But in the hands of NPH and Simon Helberg, it's gold. Their hesitation, inflection, and cadence manage to sell it as a very real moment - which is the key to letting it sneak up on the viewer, making it a chuckle rather than a groan. (Rob McElhenney, for example, could never pull this off.)
I don't know what the take-away is here: I guess, "If you can get someone as good as Neil Patrick Harris attached to your script before you start writing, by all means do so." So, write that down somewhere important, I guess.
Frogurt Still Cursed Dept. 11.21.08
Awesomeness Later! 11.18.08
Why They Hate Us 11.17.08
The Evils of E-mail 11.17.08
Role Models (Movie)
How I Met Your Mother 11.10.08
© onebee · all rights reserved
Joe Mulder — Tue, 7/29/08 12:48pm
Yes he could, goddammit! He'd pull that line off, then he'd pull off your mom!
(looks like FJM isn't the only site that deals in "Joe bait...")
I noticed that line specifically in Dr. Horrible, and yeah, it was played so well; like they didn't even acknowledge the joke. Like most of what everybody involved did, it was pitch perfect. I can't stop watching that damn thing, especially Nathan Fillion's "Everyone's a Hero in Their Own Way" song.
I've also been reflecting on what fantastic pieces of entertainment you end up getting when the geeky genius finds his man-muse... Lucas and Spielberg found Harrison Ford, for instance; Joss Whedon found Nathan Fillion. God bless him.
Bee Boy — Tue, 7/29/08 1:22pm
I can't stop watching either, although it's his singing atop a speeding van that gets me going. That and his clarifying line about what "the hammer" is, of course.
Thinking about it yesterday, I almost felt bad for those years when I watched Fillion on Two Guys and a Girl and didn't fully appreciate him. I liked him, and I laughed at him, but I never thought of fawning over him or putting him on a T-shirt – which, knowing what I now know, I would not have regretted doing.
Joe Mulder — Tue, 7/29/08 7:37pm
Well, it's sort of hard when Ryan Reynolds is onscreen (and I mean that in every possible way); it's like, yeah, a Klieg light is awfully bright, remarkably so even, brighter than most anything else you'd encounter... but if you're staring directly into the sun you might not notice it.
Bee Boy — Wed, 7/30/08 10:04am
RyRen... (sigh). Where has he been? A talent like his could survive Van Wilder (as he proved with the very excellent Just Friends). Why is his awesomeness cooling on the shelf while the rest of him shows up in stuff like Definitely, Maybe? I hope it's not his way of saying, "Look, you're going to hear a lot of Alanis Morissette songs implying some stuff about me (or, 'me'), so let me demonstrate for the record that I'm actually a sensitive guy, sensitive enough to appear opposite a cute little girl in a modern-day fable about romance and true love."