Last month, in a rare rainy weekend in Burbank, California, I attended the Steve Kaplan comedy intensive. The course was on a Saturday and Sunday from ~9-5. The website is http://kaplancomedy.com/

I thoroughly enjoyed the class and recommend it. Steve is a happy and warm instructor, which lends to the domain and also makes spending the weekend in a hotel conference room chair tolerable. I appreciated that he seems to keep the content relatively current while also using more classic material where appropriate. He provides handouts which is great because you can stress less about capturing all of the right notes. He kept it fairly interactive, with a few audience-participation bits and a group activity, which helped keep the room from feeling stuffy. He also tries to answer as many questions from students as possible.

As with the McKee class, I won’t give away all the key material, but lucky for you, even if you can’t make it to a class, you can pick up his book which comes out this summer. The class is well structured – going over the tools and concepts on Day 1, then looking at these things applied in material, on Day 2.

I actually wish I had this class before I ever wrote my first script. That’s because I had a romantic-comedy premise but didn’t have the tools to apply the genre constructs without feeling like it was cliché or overly-predictable. A future post will explain that I actually plan to tackle the premise from scratch again with the tools in mind, and see where it goes. The script that I wrote from the first, trying to work around what I conceived to be problems, will undergo a change to something new.

There are two nuggets I think I can safely share. First, Where McKee and Kaplan don’t see comedy in the same light, Kaplan did say that comedy tells the truth about people, and McKee says – write the truth. This really is what brings people to the theaters. We want to see people, like us, trying to make their days better, and dealing with what Life throws at them. Second, that all art is based upon death; as far as we know, man is the only animal with the working knowledge of our own eventual demise. This fact alone allows comedy and tragedy to have any meaning whatsoever.

Early in the course he helps clarify the difference between “funny” and “comedy” – he also provides a simple exercise to help explain how these relate to one another, and the differences between the types of comedies (comedy of manners, comedy of tragedy, satire, black comedy, sitcom, slapstick, etc.)

Kaplan spends a decent amount of time over the two days providing great tips about how to write and think about comedic characters, non-heros. Again, he provides lots of great examples, in both written and video form. And not just of things done well – he points out missed opportunities in material, as well.

One cool feature for students (which, I still need to take advantage of), is the opportunity to submit a small ‘homework’ exercise and get (*eventually*) feedback directly from Steve.

Steve also makes sure to cover the keys to a good joke, and when to use jokes, in general.

Early feedback on my first and second drafts of my romantic comedy were that it wasn’t “funny enough.” I’m confident that I now have the right tools to fix that and to write comedies much more effectively in the future.