Authors

Difference Between Being Funny And Writing Funny – Steve Kaplan

Filmcourage

Published

December 25, 2022

Film Courage: What’s the difference between being funny and writing something that’s funny?

Steve Kaplan, Author/Instructor/Script Consultant: What’s the difference between being funny and writing something that’s funny? Being funny is you’re sitting around a table and you make a comment and in the context of what’s happening around the table a bunch of people laugh but writing funny is about creating a truth for a character who is saying something inexpertly in a way that the character is not realizing he or she is being funny but the result is a comic moment that the audience can appreciate. Again it comes from sharing your own life and then being truthful in imaginary circumstances but being truthful in a way that lets us see the flaws. When being truthful in imaginary circumstances is something that actors have heard from Stanislavski and Meisner (dramatic actors) but if you think about what drama does it’s like when people have past lives they’re never janitors, they’re always queens or emperors or they were viziers, they’re never the garbage collector. They’re never a guy who worked as a chef in a diner in a past life. When a dramatic actor is being truthful in imaginary circumstances they’re being great, they’re being serious, they’re accruing all types of positive virtues to themselves. The comic actor tells the truth. The comic actor allows themselves to be less than stupid because the point is that if we just tell the truth about ourselves we’re not perfect, we make mistakes, we screw up all the time. There’s a wonderful moment in Judd Apatow’s This Is 40 where they’re having a party and they’re these cupcakes and the wife just throws the cupcakes away because yeah we don’t need all these cupcakes. The next scene you see Judd Apatow eating the cupcake from the garbage. I laughed …(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).

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BIO:

Steve Kaplan is the author of The Hidden Tools of Comedy and The Comic Hero’s Journey, best-sellers in their field. He’s working on a third book about writing comedy for television. In addition to having taught at UCLA, NYU, Yale and other universities, Steve created the HBO Workspace, the HBO New Writers Program and was co-founder and Artistic Director of Manhattan Punch Line Theatre. In addition to development projects for HBO, he has taught workshops online and around the globe and at companies such as DreamWorks, Disney Animation, Aardman Animation, and NBC’s Writers on the Verge. Steve has worked as a script consultant and script editor for productions companies, studios, directors and individual writers.

UPCOMING COMEDY INTENSIVE ONLINE CLASS WITH STEVE KAPLAN

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MORE VIDEOS WITH STEVE KAPLAN

https://bit.ly/3P8FoUj