[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: What are the steps in The Comic Hero’s Journey?
Steve Kaplan, Author/Instructor/Script Consultant: There are seven steps. I recently read a paper that referenced The Comic Hero’s Journey and they talked about how I Shoehorned the 12 steps of The Hero’s Journey into seven steps of The Comic Hero’s Journey and I did that just to save space and make it a little more economical basically.
Film Courage: Can we see the cover of your book?
Steve: In The Hero’s Journey we have the normal world which we talked about and WTF, that’s the comic premise and then you have reaction. In reaction you have your character in this transformed state or this transformed circumstance but they don’t want to be there. It’s Dorothy wanting to go home. It’s Phil Connors in Groundhog Day trying to figure out How do I get out of this? First denial and then the reaction is Okay, this is happening, how do I not make it happen? How do I go back? How do I fix this? In some cases it’s unfixable. In Big he goes to sleep as a 13-year old boy, he wakes up he’s a 30-year old man but it doesn’t need to be impossible, it could be improbable. In Enough Said the film with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the late, great James Gandolfini, Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a massage therapist and she finds out that her new boyfriend is the ex-husband of her new best friend, both of whom she now is giving massages to. When she gives massages to her new best friend who tells terrible things about her ex-husband she then reacts to it when she’s on a date with James Gandolfini, who’s the ex-husband. As she’s trying to figure out what to do about it she’s carrying on just a mild deception, she’s simply not telling either one about the other, but in the beginning she’s trying to make believe this is not an impossible situation to be in and of course in that movie when it blows up it destroys her relationship which is what happens in a movie at the all is lost moment. But you have the reaction then you have connections. In connections your characters are forming a nucleus around themselves, family and friends that they hadn’t had before, and what you have in that section is things are starting to slow down. You have characters who up until then had not even had a conversation with each other and now they’re kind of opening up to each other in in some comedies the opening up is a little bit ridiculous but in many comedies it’s where the characters for the first time are relating to other characters in a way that they hadn’t before…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BUY THE BOOK – THE HIDDEN TOOLS OF COMEDY:
The Serious Business Of Being Funny
BUY THE BOOK – THE COMIC HERO’S JOURNEY:
Serious Story Structure For Fabulously Funny Films
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
Kaplancomedy.com/product/the-comedy-intensive-online-2023-spring
MORE VIDEOS WITH STEVE KAPLAN
CONNECT WITH STEVE KAPLAN
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