A REVIEW OF "HOW TO WRITE FUNNY" IN HET PAROOL—ONE OF HOLLAND'S LEADING PAPERS.
Anyone Can Learn Comedy…Except Jan-Peter Balkenende.
By Brechje de Koning in Het Parool, January 2004. Translated by Ron De Klerk
"Dying is easy but comedy is hard," says Peter O'Toole in the film My Favorite Year. But you can learn how to be funny. That's what roughly thirty students found out in the two-day English-language workshop, "Knock-Knock: How to Write Funny" at the American Book Center Tree House.
"Let's get started with the second day of the workshop," shouts Rob AndristPlourde, comedy writer and actor at Boom Chicago. He jumps onto the table, points a plastic gun at a rubber chicken's head. Everyone—including copywriters, journalists, a psychotherapist and co-instructor Lisa Friedman—bursts out laughing. Right, this is comedy.
Part of today's program includes watching sketches and film clips—and analyzing what makes them funny. Take the scene from There's Something about Mary: Ben Stiller inimitably manages to get his wanker stuck in his zipper on prom night. His date's dad comes to the rescue, then Mary, then her mother...a policeman and a fireman ultimately get involved with Ben's predicament. "What makes this scene is the choice of the impossible task as the premise: something as simple as zipping up your pants becomes an impossible thing to do," Lisa explains. "Then there's the technique of heightening the humor: the more people get involved, the bigger Ben's problem gets." Playing with taboos, making faces Jim-Carey style, puns, malapropisms—all are available techniques for the comedy writer to use.
Still, "Sometimes you have to let go of everything you have learned and start a scene from scratch," Friedman says and immediately puts this lesson to the test. The students are handed a blank sheet of paper and given the sentence, "The chicken crossed the road." They have five minutes to turn this into a humor piece. The results are thirty completely different—though equally hilarious—scenes about chickens. In screenwriter Simon's story, a chicken crosses the road, then another, and another—it's a union-style protest march against the unjust farmer. "This is a technique we've used before," says Simon. "We" refers to The Groen Brothers: Simon, David, and Joris, a family-style comedy trio. The brothers signed up for the workshop to get, well, inspiration. Their reason for choosing a course in English is simple, Simon says, "We don't think much of Dutch comedy. Arjan Ederveen is sometimes funny, and so is Hans Teeuwen, but most comedy doesn't rise above the level of an open-mike night. Comedy in this country doesn't hold a candle to American films and TV. But we're going to change all that."
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