John Truby's Comedy Writing

Comedy is hard. Movie comedy writing is very hard, and is done well by relatively few writers. That's good news. But why is movie comedy more difficult than it appears.

Most writers come to comedy from the joke. The gag. The small. So they write scripts that have some funny jokes up front, and then the script hits "the wall." It's not funny anymore.

Movie comedy isn't small, it's big. Two hours long. Think of writing movie comedy as building an extension bridge. You've got to extend a line over a huge distance. That story line is what you hang your jokes on. Without a strong comic storyline, even the best jokes will fall flat.

Movie comedy is about comedy structures. Comedy in general differs from serious drama in how the story is told. But even more so, comedy has at least seven different structures, each with very different story beats from the others.

Typically, the most popular movie comedies are combinations of genres or structures. For example, "Tootsie" was a combination of romantic comedy and farce. Men in Black was a combination of comedy and science fiction.

This 6-hour COMEDY WRITING COURSE is among the most popular at Truby's Writers Studio because it gives you all the techniques. We guarantee you won't find a third of them anywhere else. This is a monster course, covering comic characters, movie comedy structures, all the beats of the major comedy sub-genres, comedy dialogue and much, much more. If you are serious about your comedy writing, you owe it to yourself to take this course.

# FEATURES: Structure steps for the 7 major comedy stories
# 3 essential comedy forms
# Great comic characters and how to create them
# The comic gap and how to create it
# How a 4-point opposition makes a script funnier
# Creating an opponent who is both funny and menacing
# 10 Keys to great comedy
# Visual gags and line gags
# Writing great comedic dialogue
# Selling your script

Table of Contents:

1. How Comedy Works
2. Comedy
Premise
3. The 11 Key Story Beats
4. The 9 Best Character Types
5. Boor, Trickster & Traveling Angel
6. How to Create the Comic Nightmare
7. Setting up the 4-Point Opposition
8. Scams, Disguises & Mistaken Identity
9. The 4 Big Comic Themes
10. Action Comedy Beats
11. Buddy Picture Beats
12. Traveling Angel Beats
13. Romantic Comedy Beats
14. Farce Beats
15. Black Comedy
Beats
16. Satire Beats
17. Comic Lines & Openings
18. Predicament & Nightmare Sequence
19. Comic Battle & Communion
20. 10 Keys to Comedy