Comedy Writing: The Misses

I have spent a lot of time writing comedy over the years, mostly in a series of spiral notebooks that I frequently lose. During the holidays, I looked around and found a lot of these old notebooks and it was fun to see the origins of a lot of the funnier ideas I’ve had. But along with seeing the good stuff, I also had to read some of my other ideas, the terrible ones. You see out of twenty ideas I write down, maybe 1 or 2 are actually funny and have potential. Here are some examples of those 18 to 19 not-so-funny ideas that I had completely forgotten about.

Here are some ideas that were forgotten almost as quickly as they were written down:

• Ghostbusters, the musical.
• Where are they now: The Noid (rejected only because of the difficulty in creating/finding a proper Noid costume)
  
• Going to the DMV and Having an Absolutely Wonderful Time (I had a similar idea witb Who’s On First where both people clearly understand that the names of the players on base are “Who” “What” and “I Don’t Know” without any confusion whatsoever)
• The Rotten Urban Core of the North Pole (Ha ha! Thug Elves!)
• The world’s first bar (What would the tip be? Whooaaah! I bet it would be something wacky!)
• Dan Po-wacky, in-home clownery (I might still use this one)
• Dildo Warehouse, factory-direct dildos.
  
• Nudist Colony Secedes From Nudist Empire
• Blackwater Home Security, the Brand America Trusts! (Basically a Brinks ad but anytime there was a break-in, they would come and cause huge amounts of collateral damage. Not a terrible skit idea but would cost way too much to do on my budget of $6.12)
• People who reenact Civil War Battles reenacting Battle of the Network Stars.
• Allergic to Dinosaurs (What does that even mean?)

Somehow this idea sounded funny to me for at least 5 seconds.

Beyond the one-sentence concepts , there were several ideas that I spent more time working on and actually fleshed out into scripts.

Tailgating for a play.

• Casey and I came up with the ideas of decidated fans tailgate outside of Death of a Salesman like they are tailgating outside of a major sporting event. In line, they mock the ‘opposing fans’ i.e. people going to see Our Town. I actually still really like this skit idea.
  
• Selected Excerpt: “Thorton Wilder, more like Thorton MILD-er!”

311 was an inside job.

• You know 9/11 Conspiracies, that same thing, except for the band 311.
• Selected Excerpt: “Come Original skyrocketed up the charts through the path of most resistence. No guitar rock becomes a hit like that naturally.”

Increased Risk Assassin

• The premise of this skit is that the assassin would do his dirty work by raising different health risks for the people he was hired to kill. I.E. changing the target’s milk from 1% to 2%, inserting cigarette ads into the target’s copy of People magazine, lobbying Congress to raise the speed limit in the target’s neighborhood. I think this skit eventually become Freelance Assassin, one of the worst Public Drunkards videos. In retrospect, this original idea was a lot funnier than the finished video skit.

Cellie the Cell Phone gets PTSD after being the cell phone that recorded Saddam Hussein’s assassination.

• Jon, Casey and I came very close to making this one, where our giant cardboard cellphone would have gone all Deer Hunter and almost killed himself. The only reason we didn’t make it is that the costume got thrown away and the Saddam-hanging reference would have been way too dated by the time we made it (and by ‘we,’ I mean, by the time Jon made it while Casey and I sat around and played Wii).

Wii Bulemia

• After Wii Fit, a Wii game that would give you an eating disorder. I was going to make little graphics of a stickfigure putting a Wii Remote down a throat.
• Selected Excerpt:Mario: (on tv screen) Oh, look at you, you flabby sack of fat. What’s that Pikachu? (holds up Pikachu doll to his ear) Pikachu says he’s disgusted by all of your rolls of lard.
  

Ron Paul 2014

• When the ‘Ron Paul Revolution’ was tearing up the internet, I wrote a script about what American would be like if Ron Paul got elected. It was mostly a long rant about how I hate libertarians.
• Selected Excerpt:Future Guy and Ron Paul Fan appear in 2014.
  Future Guy: Welcome to 2014, buddy.
  Ron Paul Fan: I’m so cold.
  Future Guy: Yeah, here in the future, Americans have learned to be energy independent.
  Ron Paul Fan: Finally, free from foreign oil. But why is it so cold?
  Future Guy: You don’t understand me. Now that oil, natural gas and other stuff is all controlled solely by the free market with some fairly rampant deregulated price gouging, average Americans have learned to be independent of needing energy.
  Ron Paul Fan: Wait, you’ve still got my clothes. Give me those back, I’m cold.
  Future Guy: Sorry, man, you fell for the clothes-not-surviving-the-time-stream scam. That’s the oldest time travel grift in the book. These are my clothes now.
  Ron Paul Fan: You stole them from me, give them back or else I’m calling the cops.
  Future Guy: Okay, police department has been privatized so you better be prepared to pay up.
  Ron Paul Fan: Of course, limited government. Without high federal taxes, we should be able to afford private alternatives, yes, I’ll pay to have the cops come. (whips out some cash)
  Future Guy: Heh, that money’s not really going to help you. When Ron Paul banned the IRS, that kinda took out the treasury and federal bank that backed the dollar making your old currency worthless. Do you want some crack though? (lifts up some crack) No war on drugs, so we’ve got plenty of crack. No government interference to stop you there.
  Ron Paul Fan: We’ve got to get out there, make some change. We’ve got to get a leader elected who will fix these problems.
  Future Guy: Dude, it’s 2014, we already had another election in 2012 and Paul was reelected.
  Ron Paul Fan: Why the Hell did people reelect Ron Paul?
  Future Guy: Well, any candidate who wanted to restore the government needed at least some form of tax in order to pay for bringing back basic order and who is going to vote for a candidate who wants to raise taxes?