E1 Blog: Sausage 2

This post is going to be on the completely written episodes, the scripted episodes, the movie episodes, whatever. All non-Inutaro stuff, that's it's own thing. I’ll start from the beginning. How do we choose what to write about?

This is usually the place for long-term brain worms or ideas that can’t be improvised. Saints of Soulard came out of a dm with Rylan where we dramatically talked about drinking and smoking. Charles came up with Air Dad because of his oppositional defiance disorder. I came up with Crown of Mist because I liked Walt Tremblay too much and wrote it because I was suggesting that he be in way too many episodes and it was annoying the guys.

Let’s look at Pixar’s Sodas. The first thing I ask is – what’s the joke? If you can’t tell me what the joke is, it isn’t a good idea. With Sodas, these were the main jokes to me, the sort of comedy throughline that runs through the whole thing.

-          The first joke we came up with was two sodas have a dramatic, emotionally filled conversation. They always got those in Pixar movies where the problem is the Toy doesn’t have enough self confidence or something. There’s nothing funny about it in the logic of the movie, but if you imagine walking in on the scene with no context, it’s hilarious.

-          Pixar stuff is kind of cheap and formulaic, so much so that we think we can imitate pretty easily. It’s also funny to pretend that it is real. If we got sued, I think it could have been huge for the podcast.

-          It’s funny to straddle the line between branding and character. It’s funny to play with the ambiguity of how these Sodas are actually real, sort of like the arbitrary rules they made for the toys in Toy Story

-          I hate puns and wordplay, man. I think that everyone that does them tries to be self-aware about it in a way like “it’s okay, I know it sucks too!” It’s the lowest stuff man. It’s the jokes that people who can’t think of jokes struggle to tell when they want to tell a joke. Let’s lean into that and do 1000000 puns, all based on Soda.

After that, we need characters. We usually start with four characters that we make up, all filling a sort of role needed in the script. We researched every soda and obviously the two most iconic sodas are Coke and Pepsi. One had to be a boy and one had to be a girl. I don’t know why, but Pepsi is a girl. We figured we could do a Romeo and Juliet thing. Okay, so Coke needed a plucky sidekick, a cool guy, a best friend. Diet Mountain Dew (we needed soda representation, not just for flavors and colors, but for utility sodas as well.) What’s another big soda to round out the 4? We decided on Dr. Pepper, because we respect women and Doctors are women. At this point, we get started.

We don’t save our initial notes I’ve realized because of the writing process. When we first sit down to write, we plot. We do about a page of cause and effect, describing the overall plot in very broad strokes. If we think of a good line, we write it verbatim and plug it in as we’re going later. Usually, the notes are about a page of plot beats, vague suggestions and a few already completely written out lines. The plot beats are usually as simple as “Lightnail has a flashback about his family” or “Inutaro gets distracted by a crayon drawing”. We usually spend about two hours going over the general plot, then we start writing. As we take the vague notes and turn them into something real, we delete the notes to show we already did it. That’s why I can’t show you none of them. Whoops.

The more episodes we wrote, the better we got at it. I think one thing I always hated with writers is when they write one or two scripts and then try to pitch it for something and when no one buys it they don’t use it for nothing. And they just sit there thinking they wrote this great thing, but oh well no one gets to see it now. I get it, a little bit. If you go off the numbers, it might not make sense to invest that much time and effort into a scripted ep, but I think it also makes us better writers. And hey, if it makes me a better writer to write more, then it doesn’t matter if what we write is good now, because as long as we keep writing we’ll be good eventually. Unless I get a traumatic brain injury or something.

When we do scripts now, we got one rule. Jokes per page. We want scripts to be dense, quick and there’s no reason to say a single line that isn’t funny. Often, as a comedy writer, you are tempted to say something normal in order to get to a really funny line for another character to say. I think that’s cowardly. I think everything should be funny all the time.

That’s it for now! We’re still figuring out what to do here, but stay tuned, we’re going to keep this up on Tuesdays.