Writing Comedy in the New Dark Age

In these deeply troubled times, what’s the point of writing comedy?

As far as our global reality is concerned, 2016 has pretty much sucked the Big One. Lips locked around the exhaust pipe of a Ford Pinto Chariot of Fire and chugging down belching bursts of bellicose bloatage until we are — collectively — about to explode.

• Record high temperatures suggesting an inevitable ecological meltdown and bye-bye polar bears.
• Increasingly polarized societies where the Right is right… the Left has left… and the Center has decentralized.
• Drone wars, military wars, civil wars, endless wars… and “The Bachelor”.

And good God, the deaths of cultural icons: Actors Alan Rickman and Garry Shandling, authors Pat Conroy and Jim Harrison, but nothing compared to the musicians who have passed away this year including David Bowie, Prince, Glenn Frey, Paul Kantner, Keith Emerson, Leon Russell, Merle Haggard, and Guy Clark among many others.

Hey, God, enough with the 2016 All Star Heavenly Band. And don’t you DARE think about touching Bob Dylan!

Yep, as 2016 draws toward its necrophilious terminus point, it feels like a sullen shadow is enshrouding us all in a skanky Slanket.

As it happens, I’m in the midst of slogging my way through a comedy screenplay. And along with the typical trials and tribulations that go along with multiple script rewrites — Screw you, Act Two!!! — I’ve been hounded by a question every step of the way:

What’s the point of writing a comedy when the world is seemingly going to shit?

Sure, I get the whole ‘entertaining’ thing. Comedy can provide a diversion for people, a welcome respite from troubles and turmoil for a couple of hours. But somehow in today’s world, scripting characters-slipping-on-banana-peels-and-falling-on-their-ass-laughs…

I mean, really? Somehow Nero / Fiddle / Rome / Conflagration keeps creeping to mind.

I suppose comedians like John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, and Seth Meyers may get a pass as their comedy is actually about SOMETHING relative to Our World Gone Mad. However since a vast majority of people don’t appear to be listening to them, even their best and brightest comic rants seem hollow.

You’re missing the point, Scott. Comedy writers are just supposed to BE FUNNY. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.

But how to BE FUNNY amidst this cloud-covered cacophony of events best described as either “what the fuck” or “get the fuck outta here”?

Then I’m reminded of two of my favorite movies: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, and Peter George) and Network (written by Paddy Chayefsky). Those writers managed to find humor in dire circumstances and created a pair of the finest movies ever produced.

With Strangelove, Kubrick had planned to do a Cold War drama, however that all changed when he ran smack dab into the actual political strategy of the era: M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction). That theory proposed that as long as both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. kept building up nuclear arsenals with the knowledge that if one struck, the other would retaliate in full, and everyone would get wiped out, neither side would initiate an attack.

To Kubrick, M.A.D. seemed more like MADNESS, so he switched gears and created one of the greatest cinematic satires of all time.

Likewise Chayefsky who assayed TV’s growing profit-mongering obsession with ratings and correctly predicted news divisions falling under the control of network entertainment divisions. Hence the meteoric rise in fame and influence of the movie’s news anchor character Howard Beale: The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves. And just as meteoric fall, described in the movie’s last lines:

“This was the story of Howard Beale: The first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.”

So I circle back to my current comedy script. On the surface, it seems like a dumb R-rated, low-budget comedy, the quixotic antics of four college students during one chaotic night to obtain a singularly stupid object in order to achieve a cherished goal. Four puds on a Hero’s Journey.

Or is it Anti-Hero’s Journey…

Then I realize: I’m not just writing a laugh-a-minute comedy. I’ve got a satire of my own in the works. Each of my four lead characters is driven by their own individual want and each of those wants represents a vapid and misdirected goal, highly esteemed and lauded by our debased and debauched reality TV show culture obsessed with fame, fortune, and prestige, but ultimately, as it turns out in my story, meaningless bull shit.

All that energy… all their plans… all those dreams… a crazed maze of misfit adventures amounting to Nothingness. Ha! Irony!

Okay, yeah, I ain’t writing Strangelove or Network, and nobody gets whacked in my story, however there is an hysterical scene involving duct tape, a definite trailer moment to go along with dozens of other what I believe are noteworthy — and funny — scenes.

And as it turns out, my story is about something.

Still the original question remains: How to write comedy in our new Dark Age where humor feels like an uninvited guest to our Doom Party.

How about you, comedy writer? How do YOU motivate yourself to write and find the funny on the front edge of where we appear to be headed:

Head to comments and hit me up with some Gallows Humor!