A Running Tally of Topics I Make Jokes About In My Script

Things churning forward again with my script. Basically, it seems like all you have to do is say “Okay. Let’s move forward” and things start magically happening in response. I don’t know. It’s been a weird couple of weeks filled with coincidences and movement. I’m busy with another enormous project, but I had to take an hour or so out of that to deal with the script and add in some changes and futz around with the Final Draft settings so that when the script is sent out it looks FINAL and not still in process. I re-read it. I don’t do that often. I’ve moved on, except for the determination to get this thing up on its feet. In LA, New York, or Chicago, I don’t care. But it was kind of fun to re-read it.

I decided to write down a list of things I make jokes about in the script. These are things that got huge laughs when we did it in LA, Chicago and New York. You know, I want the whole script to “work,” the sucker-punch at the end, the tragic stuff, it’s extremely heavy, but I think I was most nervous about the jokes. If a joke didn’t get a laugh, I cut it. Writing something you think is funny that then goes over like a lead balloon is the ultimate in Yukky.

Humorous side note though:

There’s a joke in the script about the Peloponnesian War. When we had the first reading in New York, it didn’t get a laugh. I winced in agony from my seat in the back. I thought it was so funny though, so I kept it in. Then we did it in LA. Again, no laugh. White-hot shame filled my soul as I watched from the back. After the reading in LA, I thought, “I love that joke, but fuck that joke. I’m cutting it.” A couple of days after the reading in LA, I was staying with Alex and her wife Chrisanne. Chrisanne (a theatre director) hadn’t been able to make the reading in LA, so Alex and I read the script to her, Alex taking the part of Jack and I played the part of Neve (the script is a two-hander, no other characters). Chrisanne, who is an extremely literate and feisty and intelligent woman, lay on the floor, with a pillow over her head, so she could hear the text better. This wasn’t a performance, I wanted her feedback on the actual script. It takes about an hour and a half to get through the script. We just read it, Alex and I, seated on their couches. And when we came to the lead-balloon Peloponnesian War joke, suddenly there came a gigantic hearty GUFFAW from underneath the pillow.

I KNEW THAT JOKE WAS FUNNY. And maybe only one person out of 10 will get it. But that’s the person I wrote it for. I wrote it for Chrisanne.

And a humorous coda to that: I had told Kerry that story, about how Chrisanne was the only person (so far) who laughed at the Peloponnesian War joke. When we came to do the reading here in New York, Kerry (who played Neve) said to me, “I am determined to get a laugh on that line for Chrisanne.”

And she did!

I will never cut that joke now.

The script ends on such a sad note, I put in as many jokes as I could, and also the play is supposed to be (partly) about how Humor is so essential to love, to the best kind of love.

But boy, this is a strange list.

List of Joke Topics

Pringles
Hippies
The present perfect tense
The Warren Commission/The Kennedy assassination
The Ukrainian famine
The Black Plague
Kulaks
Asperger’s
The Peloponnesian War
The electoral college
Semi-colons
Frankenstein
Baby on board signs
Snoop Dogg
Nancy Kerrigan
The name “Amy”
Cruise ships
Dueling
Short Circuit (the movie)
Cantaloupes
Chippendale’s dancers
The Hobbit
Third wave feminists

There’s even a “Your Momma” joke.

Shameless. I have to say, that’s a pretty sick list, written out in cold blood like that. Like, what the hell is this play about? It’s a play about love. Why are these people joking about genocide and assassinations? That’s what we do, I guess.