Research

As I woke up this morning, I thought to myself,

"Y'know, to quiet these reservations you're having about your comedy screenplay not being funny enough on paper, why don't you just read a bunch of comedy screenplays... duh!"

And then I realized: I just have!

See, to kill time until summer break (when I really have time to read what I want to read and write fiction, as opposed to papers for professors) I read a bunch of screenplays for my favorite movies (old and new).

Some of them were:

Freaky, by Michael Kennedy & Christopher Landon (screenplay)

Dead Man on Campus, by Mike White (screenplay)

Cool As Ice, by David Stenn (screenplay)

Shadow in the Cloud, by Max Landis (screenplay)

Son-In-Law, by Fax Bahr, Adam Small & Shawn Schepps (screenplay)

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, by Cassandra Peterson, Sam Egan & John Paragon (screenplay)

Showgirls, by Joe Eszterhas (screenplay)

Krampus, by Todd Casey, Michael Dougherty & Zack Shields (screenplay)

Batman, by Julie Hickson (film treatment)

The Muppet Movie, by Jack Burns & Jerry Juhl (screenplay)

Now, the only script here that made me laugh out loud was The Muppet Movie, and I'm not sure if this was due to nostalgia, or because it was genuinely hilarious (I'm going to guess the later).

But, bottom line: a lot of movies that I find endlessly hilarious (no matter how many times I watch them) have screenplays that don't read very funny. In fact, if I hadn't seen (many times!) and love the movies that they were made into, I don't even know that I would see the comedic potential for a lot of these scripts.

Mind you, a lot of these scripts were intended as vehicles for characters that already had a following (Elvira, the Muppets, Pauly Shore, etc.), and therefore their fan base would love & laugh at these movies regardless, but still...

At any rate, this makes me feel a bit better about how my comedy script is shaping up.

If nothing else, I need to remind myself that I am out of my wheelhouse (I've only ever written horror... and one drama) and that most of the time I can't even be sure what I'm looking at... if that makes sense.