Date Night

Date Night is a so-so comedy thriller. For those wishing to master the screenwriting craft that’s a good thing, because you can often learn the most from a movie that isn’t too good or too bad. Its strengths and its flaws are easier to see.

With stars Steve Carrel and Tina Fey it’s hard to avoid comparing the film to The Office and 30 Rock. That just gives us another instance of the truism that the best writing in comedy is in television, not film. But the brilliance of those shows is actually more difficult to explain. With Date Night, techniques and choices, successes and failures, are clear.

The biggest challenge when you write a comedy screenplay is setting up the comic structure, what I call the “clothesline,” on which you will hang the jokes. This clothesline is essential in sitcoms too, but it is much harder to create in a movie because it has to stretch for at least 90 minutes, not 22.

You create the clothesline using two major structural elements, the comedy sub-genre and your hero’s desire line. This is where most comedy writers go wrong. They don’t realize that there are seven major comedy sub-genres, including romantic comedy and farce, and each has a completely different set of story beats you have to hit to tell the story well (see the Comedy Class for the beats in all 7 sub-genres).

In Date Night, writer Josh Klausner uses the comedy thriller form (a kind of action comedy), which goes back at least to the early Hitchcock films. Here we have the innocent couple on the run, forced to battle criminals or spies. This form is not used much nowadays because combining comedy with thriller creates real problems of tone. If the opponent is too deadly the jokes aren’t funny. There’s also a number of contrivances you have to explain away, most notably how two average shmos could possibly compete with, much less defeat, hardened criminals, and why don’t they just go to the police.

The Date Night script gets barely passing grades in these basic areas of storytelling. The unbelievability of Steve and Tina going up against professional killers is always present. But this isn’t a fatal problem because the audience just falls back on the fact that this is a comedy.

The advantage of using the comedy thriller sub-genre is that it gives the script a strong desire line that extends to the end of the story. Much like the detective line in The Hangover, this couple’s desire to escape attack and find the incriminating flash drive creates a strong narrative drive on which the writer can hang any number of funny but episodic scenes. It also allows him to save the funniest scene for last, which is one of the gold standards in a comedy movie and almost never happens.

As a comedy writer, your goal is always to make the comedy build. The laughs should stand on the waves of the laughs that come before until the audience is gasping for breath. That rarely happens in a movie comedy because you have to extend the story for 90+ minutes and because you have to tie up all the story business as you get to the end of the line.

Klausner solves this problem in Date Night, first by setting up the thriller line and second by keeping the final battle simple. Without a last complex action scene to divert the audience from the jokes, Klausner can keep the focus on two top comic performers doing an incompetent pole dancing routine that brings the house down.

With the strong if hokey clothesline, the strength of the movie can come through, which are the funny bits that pop up throughout the story. Lines like “He turned the gun sideways; it’s a kill shot,” gags like the painfully slow motor boat and scenes like the marital spat between the Tripplehorns are laugh-out-loud funny. In Hollywood, the rule is if you have three laugh-out-loud moments in the film you have a hit. That’s a low bar for movies as opposed to television, but the important thing for writers to focus on is how you get those laughs. And that comes from the comic structure that supports the gags.

If setting up the clothesline is one of the big strengths of Date Night, the attempt to make the comedy come from character is one of the big weaknesses. Most writers have heard how valuable it is for the comedy to come from character, but few really know what it means, or how to do it. I discuss this a lot in the Comedy Class, because if you can master this set of techniques you immediately become one of the top comedy writers in the business. Let me focus on one technique in this area.

You must begin the story by establishing a deep weakness/need in the main character – in this case a couple – which then will be solved by the story line. In other words, the hero’s weakness must be embedded and solved all the way back at the premise line. The premise is your story stated in a single sentence. The Date Night premise might be described like this: a couple whose marriage has become predictable defeats criminals and renews their love.

The premise is like the hypothesis in a science experiment. It’s the fundamental truth about the world you are trying to establish. In an experiment you may determine that your hypothesis is wrong. But in a story you have to prove the premise. The sequence of story events must display in detail the truth about life you describe in one line. This is also called fulfilling the “promise of the premise,” the promise you make to the audience when they agree to come to the theater to see this story.

Klausner clearly wants to tell a story that proves the premise because he spends a great deal of time at the beginning showing that this couple’s marriage has grown stale from the demands of work and children. Even their date night hits the same old routine. The thriller structure is supposed to be the vehicle of renewal. It’s the same technique used, correctly, in Rear Window, where the Jimmy Stewart character learns to respect and commit to the Grace Kelly character by solving a crime with her.

But while this process is given lip service here, it never actually happens. Sure, escaping killers and bringing them to justice makes for an exciting night and a fun makeout session on the lawn the next morning. But it has nothing to do with changing what’s wrong between these two and how they will act differently toward one another for a 1001 nights in the future.

Klausner is definitely doing some things right here that most comedy screenwriters, even those with films under their belts, are not doing. He’s not reaching the level of the sitcoms in which these stars normally appear, but those sitcoms don’t have to tell a funny story over 90 minutes. Still, I can’t help feeling disappointed with this film. When a writer knows how to create comedy from character, you get great thematic comedies like Groundhog Day that express recognizable truths at the same time they make you laugh. Date Night is simply not in that league.

Dan in Real Life

Romantic comedy is one of the most contrived of all genres. It's literally a complex mating dance with prescribed story beats designed to allow the audience to feel the love the characters share. Which is why it is essential that you execute the form well enough so you don't let the contrivance, the mechanics, show.

Another word for story beats is plot. And lack of plot is the biggest problem writers of love stories have. Plot is what creates the magic in a story. It's the slight of hand, and mind, that delights the audience. It's also the structure that everything else hangs on. So when it is missing or obvious, especially in a romantic comedy, the story collapses and the audience realizes the magic is fake.

Dan in Real Life is the story of an advice columnist who falls in love with his brother's girlfriend at a family get-together. But this is not real life. Dan's parents live in a rustic little mansion by the shore. And his extended family has apparently won the Happiest Family on Earth Award. These people love each other so much that they spend their entire vacation in one uproarious communal activity after another.

The audience may well wish they lived in a family like this. But it is so far removed from reality that it becomes mechanical. The love between the characters is obviously being manufactured by the actors, because it has never been earned in the writing. And that makes the supposed love between the two leads seem manufactured as well.

But the biggest problem with this sequence of communal love scenes is that it kills the plot. The big reveal - that Dan has fallen for his brother's girlfriend - is in the opening set up. The rest of the movie repeats the same beat of yet another family get-together where everyone is having incredible fun but Dan. On those few occasions when the entire family isn't having fun, they are all gathered around in a kind of intervention/group therapy session helping Dan get his emotions and morals right.

Little Miss Sunshine

This comedy has one of the best scripts to come along in a few years. It's a small indie film, so it's not going to make blockbuster money. But don't let that fool you. You can learn a lot from studying this script.

Comedies are almost always underestimated because they're all about making people laugh. How hard can that be? Very. If you can make people laugh on the page, Hollywood will pay you huge sums of money. Most writers think comedy comes from good jokes. That may be true in a stand-up routine, but it's not true in the movies. In the movies, you have to tell a comic story that lasts about two hours. If you start from the gag or the joke, you have no chance of writing a funny script.

The key is to find the right comic structure by which you can tell your two-hour story and on which you can hang the jokes. One of the reasons movie comedies are so hard to write is that there are so many comic story structures, all of which sequence in a different way. If you don't pick the right comic structure for your idea, or if you don't know the story beats of your form, you're in big trouble. And no amount of jokes is going to make any difference. Without the right comic structure, even the best jokes won't be funny.

Little Miss Sunshine uses one of the oldest comic structures, the comic journey. This form goes all the way back to Don Quixote and is really a combination of the comic and myth forms. Part of the success of this combination is that these two genres are in many ways opposites. The myth form, using the journey as its main technique, wants to be big, heroic and inspiring. Comedy is about cutting things down to size, finding the falsely big and poking a hole in it. So in a comic journey story, the myth sets up the laughs (puffing up the characters), while the comedy provides the punchline.

The downside of combining these two genres is that it causes you all kinds of structural problems. The biggest has to do with the episodic quality of the story. Characters on a journey encounter a number of unique opponents who are usually strangers. This means that every time your hero goes up against a new opponent, that's an episode. In effect, a mini-story. String too many of these together and you get a very bored and tired audience.

Comedy exacerbates this episodic quality. With rare exception, whenever you do a joke or a gag, you are stopping the narrative drive so the audience can see the character knocked off his pedestal. String too many of these together and your story stops dead in its tracks.

Obviously one of the keys to a successful comic journey story is finding techniques that can give you a strong narrative line. Little Miss Sunshine uses two techniques that are especially valuable: the endpoint and the family.

Near the beginning of this script, writer Michael Arndt tells the audience the endpoint of the comic journey. What's more, the characters will be going on a single-line journey. This apparently simple technique is crucial because it gives the audience a line, literally, on which to hang the events and the gags. Instead of becoming impatient with what happens next, the audience can sit back and enjoy the ride - and the jokes. You have already promised them where they are going to go. In effect, you are letting them laugh.

In journey stories with a single hero, all the opponents in the story must be new and they must be strangers. But in Little Miss Sunshine the writer sends an entire family of six on the road. That means that the main opposition is among people the audience knows and it is an ongoing opposition. Instead of a succession of unconnected events, the story has a steadily building conflict. That makes the jokes funnier and it lets the writer build to the funniest gag of all when the family gets to the beauty pageant at the end of the journey.

If you're interested in how to write any of the various comic story structures, take a look at the Comedy Class or the Comedy Software.