One Class, One Day: Situation Comedy

Laughs and structure both matter, Paul Schneider tells students in his situation comedy class: Jayne Lee (COM’16) (clockwise from left), Nandini Srinivasan, Schneider, Mary Conroy (GRS’17), and Connor Santoro (COM’15). Photos by Michael D. Spencer

Class by class, lecture by lecture, question asked by question answered, an education is built. This is one of a series of visits to one class, on one day, in search of those building blocks at BU.

Lindsay Bluth Fünke is supposed to meet her husband, Tobias Fünke, for their first marriage counseling session in therapist Tabitha Peppercorn’s office. When Tabitha turns out to be Tobias in a dress and wig, what bothers Lindsay the most isn’t the pathetic attempt to deceive her. It’s what Tobias is wearing.

LINDSAY
Is that my dress? (genuinely upset)

TOBIAS (FEMALE VOICE)
No, it’s Maeby’s. I mean—where I got
the dress is not important. We’re
here to talk about what’s really
bothering you.

Welcome to the demented world of the situation comedy Arrested Development, in this case written by Nandini Srinivasan, a nondegree student in Paul Schneider’s class Writing Situation Comedy, also known as COM FT 522.

“It’s easy to think of funny scenes,” says Srinivasan. “But you need an actual story.”

Schneider, a College of Communication professor of the practice of film and television and department chair, says he’s encouraged by this particular group’s ability to craft an evolving narrative. “One of the hardest things for students is good old-fashioned storytelling,” says Schneider, who has directed and produced many episodes of L.A. Law and Beverly Hills 90210.

Sitting around a conference table like in a real TV writer’s room, five students and Schneider take on character roles to read the short one-to-four-page scripts aloud.

While Tabitha Peppercorn is the highlight of the student submissions, there are plenty of other things to laugh about, including Tobias’ obliviousness to just about everything. This from a scene by Jayne Lee (COM’16):

LINDSAY
I just can’t be with a man who is so unsure of himself.

TOBIAS
Lindsay Bluth, if there is anything I am most certainly
positive about, it’s that I, Tobias Fünke, have a man 
inside me.

Advertising student Robert Norman (COM’16) has long dreamed of writing for TV. He says he has found out that making a funny script for an episode is a lot harder than one would imagine. “I’ve learned that the two things that are essential when writing a comedy are conflict and characters,” he says. “Without good characters and lots of conflict, you’ve got nothing.”

There are characters aplenty in the marriage counseling scenes, including this exchange from Norman’s script, about Lucille and her verrry overly dependent son, Buster.

TOBIAS
(whispering to Lindsay)
Where did you find this marriage counselor?
This room looks and smells like Greenwich
Village in the ’60s.

LINDSAY
(whispering to Tobias)
Buster recommended her. He said she really
helped him and Lucille through some tough times.

TOBIAS
Are they back together?

Writing a complete episode of an existing sitcom is 45 percent of the students’ final grade. In the first hour of the class, they each pitch three ideas for this “spec script,” one that is written on speculation—without a paying assignment.

In class, Schneider eschews the shorthand term “sitcom,” because, he says, it makes people think of the old-school, multicamera shows, with characters standing around cracking jokes in standard setup/punch line rhythm, often to the accompaniment of a laugh track. Big Bang Theory is the most popular current example of this type.

With that formula, “you know where everything is going. And the actors are almost like puppets to the writers,” Schneider says. Now shows like Broad City and Curb Your Enthusiasm take a very different, character-based approach that feels looser, more lifelike and improvisational. “But all those shows, the ones that work, actually do have a structure,” he says. “They just make it feel spontaneous.”

Lee’s spec-script ideas are for another show that exemplifies the trend, FX’s Louie, starring the acerbic stand-up comedian Louie C. K. as a comedian and single dad. In Lee’s first pitch, Louie’s efforts to end his daughter’s problem with a bully are complicated when he falls for the bully’s mom. Another finds Louie’s sleep-cycle problems taking over his life to the point that he gets a rooster to wake him up.

Schneider and some of the other students say they like the bullying story best. “It feels more like a Louie episode to me,” the professor says. “It’s like, you can’t always get what you want. It’s sort of a melancholy show.”

Everyone in the class knows that in the sitcom game, the odds of success are long. The Writers Guild of America West, the union for screenwriters, reports that 46 percent of its members didn’t work in 2010. And there are thousands of hopefuls who never earn the writing credits necessary to join the Writers Guild in the first place.

But the students tend to be upbeat about their prospects. “If I were going to school to be a neurosurgeon, would you ask what fuels my optimism?” asks Mary Conroy (GRS’17), who is studying for a master’s degree in playwriting. “It’s not about optimism. It’s about passion for something I believe I can do very well. At the end of the day, I am strengthening my craft and becoming the best writer I can be.”

In the end, of course, being funny is job one. Conroy pitches ideas for episodes of ABC’s The Goldbergs, including a Groundhog Day episode where the town’s furry mascot dies on the sitcom family’s watch. As often happens, the cover-up is worse than the original crime.

Connor Santoro (COM’15) pitches spec ideas for Comedy Central’s Workaholics, whose main characters are hard-partying slackers barely working at a telemarketing firm. The idea that makes everyone laugh the most: “They rent Wolf of Wall Street, find it motivational, and finally put some effort into their work.” Comic complications ensue as the characters follow the lead of the stock scammers in the movie, unaware, because they didn’t bother to finish watching it, of the devastating consequences to come.

Writing Situation Comedy is taught during the Summer 1 semester, and Schneider teaches Writing the Television Pilot, COM FT 514, in Summer 2. That requires the students not only to write structured, funny scripts, but also to create their own shows and characters from scratch. Writing Situation Comedy is also taught in the fall, by Michael Loman, a COM professor of film and television, Schneider says.

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