"Specificity"

Conventional wisdom suggests that I probably should have flipped them, writing today’s post yesterday, and yesterday’s post today.  But I didn’t feel like it, so I didn’t.  That’s the kind of power you have when you answer to nobody.

In contrast to yesterday’s post, which I have never read anywhere else, today’s post is more traditional in nature, relegating today’s post to a somewhat of an anti-climactic position.      

Are you trying to drive us away?

I am simply being truthful, in the hopes that your respect for my honesty will outweigh your disappointment at my strategic faux pas.       

Fine.

I appreciate your support.  Now…

Specificity:   The Short Version

“I dropped a heavy object on my foot.”

                                         

“I dropped an anvil on my pinkie.”

From the “specificity” standpoint, the second example is superior.  Also – hearkening back to yesterday’s post – from a “mellifluity ” standpoint, the second example also “flows” better.  (I was hoping that, maybe if I “called back” yesterday’s post, recalling how sparklingly illuminating it was, you might cut this one a little qualitative slack.)

As a rule, “specificity” makes jokes funnier.  But there are limits.  Sometimes, for example…wait.  I’m getting ahead of myself.  I’ll come back to that later.  Just remind me, or I’ll forget. 

How are we supposed to do that?

Retroactive telepathy.   Never mind.  I’ll remind myself.

Oh, man!  We are never hearing that example.

Okay… two things brought the “specificity” issue to mind.  One was my mentioning that, during my rewriting process, I look to infuse my earlier drafts with more evocative descriptives, a significant element of that process involving replacing the “general” with….everybody?

(THE BORED STUDENT, SECRETLY TEXTING DURING CLASS)  The “specific.”

Thank you.  Which brings me back to my example.  No, sorry.  It’s still too soon.  But at least I remembered.

Now, the second thing that brought “specificity” to mind was this commercial I saw recently.  I cannot quote it verbatim, since it is not yet on YouTube and, because I’ve been desperately looking for it – of course – I can no longer find it on TV. 

It is utterly ridiculous.  Here’s a guy who tries his best to avoid commercials, and all I’ve been doing the past two days is jump from channel to channel, trying to track down this suddenly unavailable commercial. 

They used the run the thing a couple of times an hour!  Sometimes, twice in the same commercial block!  Now – because I want to – I cannot find it anywhere!

The ends a man goes to in the service his readership.

Anyway, it’s one of those series of commercials promoting DirecTV, all of which hew to the same structural template: 

Something leads to something, which leads to something, which leads to something, which leads to something, which leads to something, which finally leads to something unfortunate that you don’t want to happen; so, if you don’t want that unfortunate thing to happen, you should switch to DirecTV. 

That’s what they’re offering, on the premise that a humorous commercial will impel me to alter my television-viewing delivery system.

The commercial in question goes something like this:

When you look at your cable bill, you feel down.

And when you feel down, you stay in bed.

And when you stay in bed, they give your job to somebody new.

And when they give your job to somebody new, he has a lot to learn.

And when he has a lot to learn, mistakes are made.

And when mistakes are made {since the guy’s a zoo employee and the “New Guy” allows him to escape}

You get body-slammed by a lowland gorilla.

The message:  If you don’t want to get body-slammed by a lowland gorilla, abandon your cable system and switch to DirecTV.  As if a stunt man in a gorilla suit is going to influence my decision-making.  (Note:  In my day, the commercials used to explain why their product was better.  They were lying, but at least they made the effort.)

What struck me most strongly about the DirceTV commercial was the descriptive “lowland” preceding the word “gorilla.” 

That, my friends, is “specificity.”  It’s not any gorilla.

You get body-slammed by a lowland gorilla. 

(By the way, another example of “specificity” is “body-slammed.”  You will not get “knocked down by a lowland gorilla.”   Nor will you get – a marginal improvement – “bowled over by a lowland gorilla.”  Nor will you – which is almost as good – get “blind-sided by a lowland gorilla.”  You will, most specifically, get body-slammed by a lowland gorilla.”

On the “Specificity Grid”, “body-slammed” is a virtual “Ten.”  It is, by the way, also the “musical” optimal choice as well.  That’s hitting the “appropriate word selection” jackpot.  As a writer, you combine “specificity” with “musicality”, and it’s “Tip your hat, and give him a candy!”

Are we almost done?

Yes, except my qualifying example.  Although, as a rule, “specific” is funnier, it is possible to be too specific.  For example, had the commercial writers gone all “genus and species” on us and said, “You get blind-sided by a gorilla beringei”, the response, rather than “Ha-ha”, would instead have been “What?”  

“Lowland” was specific, without deteriorating into “What?”  Meaning that, though “specificity” is your primary “Rule of Thumb”, you have to careful not to lose your audience by being “too smart for the room.”

What about The Big Bang Theory?  The characters in that show are arcanely specific about their physics jargon and no one has a clue what they’re talking about.  And yet, the show is extremely funny and monumentally successful.

-----------------------------  (denoting “No answer.”)

Also, when in the Two Thousand Year-Old Man routine, Carl Reiner asks Mel Brooks, concerning the greatest inventions of all time, “What about the wheel?”, and Brooks replies, “That was good.” – “good” is funny, because it is the opposite of specific.

-----------------------------  (denoting “You got me again.”)

Okay, I am officially declaring today’s post an unmitigated disaster.  It happens.  I am not a machine.  Just know that I meant well, and I tried my best.

I am now going to stop writing, and cry.

"The Music Of The Write" *

*  A rhyming allusion to the signature tune from “Phantom of the Opera” serving no discernible purpose beyond the inexplicable amusement of the writer.

A while back, in the context of beating myself up for being unable to deliver up a novel, I wrote about the necessity – in whatever I do write – to continually look for improvements, in my relentless pursuit of communicational perfection. 

(This assiduous effort presupposes, as with the “Indisputable Truth” I am always looking for and shall write again about shortly, that a “communicational perfection” actually exists and it is only for me to connect with it.  A supposition that may ultimately prove incorrect.  In both cases.)

As then mentioned, a considerable amount of my rewriting involves deleting words and phrases I put in the first time, inserting in their place what I now believe are more accurate replacements.  Sometimes my most successful alternatives do not appear until my third, or possibly fourth, revision.  And then I smile, as only one can when their “Loftiest Purpose” has been rewardingly achieved.

After which I immediately start wondering if I could not possibly have done better.

Beyond the words – and you might think that, in writing, there is nothing beyond the words but you’d be wrong – there is another essential task that must be performed in the process of communicating on paper to strangers.  (And I consider this to be “communicating on paper.”) 

After the words – or, more accurately, correlative with the words…

Comes the music.

Hey, Earlo, are you writing songs here and we don’t know about it?

Precisely.  (And, if not songs, he bragged not entirely comfortably, some subspecies of poetry.)

I have previously mentioned that one of the smartest things I have ever said – and it arrived “in the moment”, rather than two days later when I belatedly thought of it – occurred when a writer-colleague once inquired, “Sometimes you say, when a joke is pitched:  ‘Too many words.’  What do you mean by ‘It’s too many words’?” 

I instantaneously, responded to this query by singing the iconic opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, but deliberately adding an extra note, so that, when I sang it, it came out, “Dah-dah-dah-dah-dahhhhh!”

My point being – it’s not as good.

In retrospect, I was not actually talking about “too many words.”  I was, in fact, referring to too many beats.

So that’s another thing I do in the rewrite.  Rereading what I have written, I examine the rhythm of every sentence, excising beats when there are too many of them, and adding beats when there aren’t enough of them. 

(I realize this process is subjective, but, lacking information about you, I must proceed as if my rhythm were universal.  Well, not “universal.”  But at least culturally in sync.)

Writing is not exclusively about content or the language you use to express that content.  A book is often enjoyable to read because it hits the ear – you see the words with your eyes, but you absorb them with your ears – in some a viscerally satisfying manner.  The material “dances its way in”, so to speak.

I can’t tell you how many books I’ve encountered whose subject matter appealed to me enormously, but whose writing style, auditorally, resembled a rocky ride on a bumpy road.  Despite my acknowledged interest in the content, I was finally unable to stay with it.  To me, it was a literary cacophony. 

The possibility exists, when I am writing my sentences the first time around, that I will be “off” with some of my cadences, my primary focus at that point being attending to the content.  Upon rereading, however, every sentence is accorded meticulous scrutiny for “rhythmical deficiency.” 

You cannot believe how many “it’s” I change to “it is”, and how many “I’m’s” become “I am”, all in the service of “mellifluous flow.”  If, however, upon further revision, I should add a “replacement word” that increases the sentence load by one syllable, I immediately revert back to the earlier contraction, so that the “beat allocation” remains aggregationally unaltered.

Does this all seem obsessive to you?  (Keep in mind I have a lot of time on my hands.)

Inevitably, my rewriting involves additions for comprehension, and deletions if it gets dull.  But I must also adhere to my “Inner Time Keeper” that keeps me ineluctably “on measure.”  

(“Ineluctably” is another example of my “rhythm obsession.”  I was not sure what “ineluctably” meant, but I knew it was “metrically perfect” for the sentence.   Sometimes, I employ such words as a bookmark, changing them later for a word whose meaning is actually appropriate.   In subsequent drafts, “ineluctably ‘on measure’” could easily surrender its spot to “inescapably ‘on measure’”, a more appropriate word with a duplicate number of syllables.) 

(I once wrote about the purgatorial existence of all the words that the writers take out.  I don’t know, do they feel like the “Fifth Beatle” who almost made it, but at the last minute, disappointedly missed the cut?)

So that’s a little secret about a less generally known concern writers think about when they’re revising.  It is possible some writers pull this off “on the fly” – they are spontaneously rhythmical on their very first try.  For me, however, there is a substantial component of post facto revisionizing, wherein I am on guard for superfluous notes to take out, and for previously unnoticed “bridging notes” that need adding.  

And then the thing’s perfect.

Till I read it again.

Was that at all interesting?  I hope so.  But you can never know for sure.
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In keeping with my "more responsive to my readers" M.O., the mysterious "Anonymous" inquired what my blog platform is.  I believe it is called "Blogspot." Although, in truth, I did not set this up myself.  Ken Levine, of bykenlevine.com fame, did.  So if you are looking for certainty in this matter, it might be best to check with him about it.  But thank you for asking.  And feel free to ask more questions about whose answers I am not entirely certain.  I sincerely enjoy the company.

"The New Comedy"

Last week, in his indispensible blog bykenlevine.com, my friend Ken Levine bewailed the disappearance – especially from the more critically approved “niche” comedies – of the classically formulated joke, wondering, “Since when did jokes become passé?”  (Oh, look!  My computer does accent egues!”  Oops, not that time.)

Full Disclosure:  When I was working, especially earlier in my career, I often took the opposing side, complaining, especially when a show’s writing staff replaced my more intelligent contributions with “just jokes” that my submitted drafts was being deleteriously “funnied down.”

While attending a runthrough of a revised Taxi episode I had written, I recall hearing Judd Hirsch complain, “What happened to that ‘primordial ooze’ reference we had yesterday?”  I had in fact written that discarded-for-a-joke “primordial ooze" reference, and Judd’s bemoanment was music to my ears.  To my credit, and the extension of my career, however, I did not chime in an irately supporting “Yeah!”

Here’s what this blog post is not about.  It is not about “Times change, and comedy changes with it.”  Though it could be.  In his post, Kenny L. unhappily asserts, “I just want to laugh.”

Well, to paraphrase what ventriloquist Senor Wences used to say – “For you, easy; for me, difficult” – “For you, funny; for me, excruciatingly contrived.”

Over the decades, comedy has inexorably evolved.  On the massively successful Milton Berle Show in the early fifties, the country laughed until it hurt when, upon the shouted cue “Makeup!”, a pint-sized Arnold Stang would come out and slam the show’s star in the face with an enormous powder puff. 

Today, that would be funny to three year-olds.  But a medianly savvy six year-old would likely sullenly respond, “That’s stupid.”

Without boring you and burdening myself with a survey of “Comedy Throughout The Ages”,  “what’s funny” has inexorably evolved in the direction of greater and greater identifiable reality.  It is generally known that both Seinfeld and – wait, let me go back further than that.

In the late seventies, before I departed for a vacation to Tahiti, I left my pet goldfish in the capable hands of (Cheers co-creator and friend) Les Charles and his wife Zora, and when I returned home it was dead.

I got two episodes out of that reverberating trauma, one on Taxi and one on The Cosby Show.  My point here being, that, on the more respectable sitcoms of the day, unlike the stories from earlier sitcoms, the best stories were believed to derive from personal experience.

(By Stark Contrast:

INTERVIEWER:  Where do you get the ideas for your “Mr. Ed” episodes?

“MR. ED” SCRIPTWRITER: Well, I have a talking horse myself, so the ideas derive from my everyday life.”

That did not happen.)

Going back to the sentence I started, it is generally know that both Seinfeld and Everybody Loves Raymond were famous for requiring the writing staff to provide story ideas based on experiences that “actually happened to them.”  

The evolution in that case was in the direction of making the shows more real.  The thing is, though the experiences from which the episodes were developed may have been real – or at least realer – the writing style remained decidedly and unashamedly joke structured.  (Which, to me, though unequivocally not to my bosses, seriously undercut the show’s “illusion of reality.”)

The latest evolution in comedy reflects a disaffection for stories based on everyday life, possibly because of the glut of them the audience had been subjected to growing up, or because writers simply ran out of interesting “reality based” ideas.  Leading to – in the temporal rather than in the qualitative sense – an advance to…something which, having been stylistically left behind myself, I am not entirely comfortable defining, because I am not certain what it is. 

The best I can do is to suggest that – what their detractors would call – “joke-free” comedy appears to be the product of a layered collective consciousness, to which the more demographically desirable segment of the audience appears to be wired.  That’s kinda muddy, I know.  But I’m on shaky ground here.

Unlike the “Uncle Miltie” show, today’s  “cognoscenti” may not look at television’s signature sitcoms of the past and go, “That’s stupid.”  (Or they might.)  More likely, rather, their response to what the audience of that day laughed very hard at would be a hostilely pejorative “That’s just a joke.”

But, and not for the first time, I have deviated from my central concern.

Which is this.

From its inception comedy was intended to be entertainment, and it was taken as such by its audience, who had no objection to that whatsoever.  Unless it was handled incompetently, the response was never “That’s just a joke”; it was a delighted and spontaneous “Ha-ha-ha!” 

Today, at least for the ostensibly “in-crowd” segment of the audience, any tip-off that “They are trying to be funny”, such as a traditional (and structurally required) joke formulation – no matter how funny (or sophisticated) that joke may be, their reflexive response is,

“That’s just a joke.  And we’re tired of jokes.” 

In the latest comedy mutation, a joke, or ironic observation, or whatever, cannot, to be accepted, feel like a joke.  Today’s audience still wants to be entertained, but seemingly contradictorily, they do not want what has traditionally been accepted as “entertainment.” 

As they attest in their critical comments to Ken’s blog, that audience laughs at this latest mutation in comedy, sometimes, as hard as we used to laugh at the old stuff.  So it is not that a joke cannot elicit laughter. 

It just cannot, without being directly acknowledged as such,

Send off the musty aroma of a traditionally structured joke.

"A Delightful Post 'Anniversary Day' Surprise"

*  Last Friday was our thirty-second anniversary.

Among Dr. M’s numerous assets are her prodigious problem-solving abilities.  As a result of her innate brainpower, combined with its natural proclivity to function in that particular direction, and augmented by her family background in apartment rentals, the accomplished Dr. M is able to studiously examine malfunctioning gadgets, appliances and plumbing fixtures and, considerably more often that not…

Fix them.

On the other hand – and I am about to assert that there are two hands in this matter – Dr. M. is not – and is aware she is not – reliably counted on in our family for comedy.  As an ability – I am arguing – comedy is the opposite of problem-solving, the joke-telling serving as a covering distraction from the fact that the “funny person” is unable to fix anything.  That is the whole point – aside from ”Look at me!” – of being funny:  People laugh, and forget you’re incompetent.  At least in theory.

This dichotomy appears to be the “Rule of Thumb” in these matters:  “Problem-solver” – not funny – “Funny” – unhelpful in virtually every imaginable regard.  (Generalizations, it’s true, but still surprisingly accurate.) 

As you may have noticed, this blog rarely, if ever, dispenses marital advice.  Consider this an exception:  If you are looking for a mate, it is best to complement your proclivities with a partner whose natural proclivities are the opposite.  You do not need two problem-solvers in one family – that’s just a waste.  Nor do you need two comedians who, when something breaks, will simply look at each other and shrug, and then maybe joke about it.  Though to no practical avail, however, as the thing, whatever it is, is still broken.  (And most likely laughing at you!)

All this leading to the story’s “turnaround”, that being the enormous surprise I experienced this morning when Dr. M, for the second or third time in our marriage – we can neither of us remember which –

Said something funny.

During breakfast, I was reporting on a TV debate I had watched the night before when Dr. M was out at a meeting (though she would never have watched it in a million years, her passed-along familial belief being that in a debate, “We like one side to win, and the other side to die!”, and that was unlikely to take place in this situation.)

The two hour-and forty-five minute debate (I watched almost all of it) concerned the (to a few, still controversial) issue of evolution.  The participants were the Best-Selling Christian author Ken Ham and the Emmy Award-winning educator Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”), the debate held at the “Creation Museum” at Petersburg, Kentucky.  (Which, to me, appears to be not exactly “Neutral Territory”, though, to their credit, no one in the audience shouted, “You’re going to burn in hell, Billy Boy!” at the “Science Guy”, which, to me, displayed admirable restraint.)

Anyway, my “debate report”, as is my habit, led me to maneuver the conversation to an associated area I knew something about (I rarely - and who would? – maneuver the conversation into areas in which I am ignorant, although sometimes, it turns out I know less about the subject than I originally believed.)

The associated “area in question” was the play (1955) and subsequent feature film (1960), Inherit The Wind, which, “on point”, involved the dramatized retelling of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial”, wherein a Tennessee schoolteacher, in violation of state law, taught the “Theory of Evolution” to his High School science class.

I had hoped to obtain credit and adulation for naming the original Broadway stage star of Inherit The Wind, whom I correctly identified as the celebrated actor Paul Muni.  I endeavored to win further approval and admiration by appending this little known but fascinating factiod:

“Unfortunately, he fell off the stage.”

To which Dr. M quietly inquired,

“Every night?”

My reaction began with a momentary silence.  Then I looked at her to make sure I was eating breakfast in the right house.  Then I laughed.  Then I laughed harder.  And then, there were torrents of tears cascading down my shocked and utterly incredulous chuckling cheeks.

“Unfortunately, he fell off the stage.”

“Every night?”

(I immediately imagined theater patrons sitting in the audience nudging each other, indicating, “Here it comes.”)  

I could barely believe it!  Dr. M had made a joke!  A monumentally silly joke!  And it was absolutely hilarious!

Problem-solvers are not supposed to do that.

And yet…she just did!

For the second or possibly third time in our marriage!

Do you know what that means?

If we make it to our “Golden Anniversary”, there will probably be another one!

I can’t wait!