HAROLD'S TOTALLY UNCENSORED SHOW BIZ STORY #1

"IT'S A LOVING"



The time, September 1985. The place, MTM Radford Studios, fabulous Studio CIty, California. The situation, a hit is born and Hecuba goes "one on one" with an actress to be named later... when I'm dead! While the rest of the cast and crew are gathered in director's chairs on the main restaurant set watching the first episode of "It's A Living" beam across the 20 inch Sony sitting stage center, yours truly found himself sitting on a bed on the swing set of "Jan's room" working on a better "Hello Joke" than the one we had. (More on "Hello Jokes" in a future glossary item.) But who comes over to supposedly go over the proper delivery of a joke than one of the stars of the show. I won't tell you the lady's name, because I'm a gentleman, but before I could say "Went On To Star On Wings", she grabs me by the Members Only jacket, if you know what I mean. One thing leads to another and Madame X and me find ourselves rolling around in the editor's booth. We put our clothes back on, say it was just one of those things and head back down to the stage, where we run into Fred Adelman, the president of the network.



Fred says "Hey, Harold (not my real name), and the chick shits a brick. I gather from her reaction that she thought I was Fred! She thought she was screwing the head of the network, not some ink-stained gag man! She went on to finally put the blocks to Fred after all, his wife found out and then jumped off an overpass on the 134 Freeway. Caused a 9 hour traffic jam and I didn't get home till 2AM. Yes, sir, comedy is a funny business.

HAROLD'S COMEDY GLOSSARY #2: "LAYING PIPE"



Now don't start thinking dirty, because Hecuba never works blue. "Laying Pipe" is a comedy writer's term for the process of setting the scene -- providing needed but often boring exposition for a scene or episode. It's called laying pipe, because, like all manual labor, it's difficult and thankless and should only be done by Mexican day workers (that last part is a joke, so save your angry e-letters!). As thankless and anti-comedy as it is, it is also an essential task. How else can you do a joke about a character's fat mother unless the audience knows that the mother is fat before the punchline? You tell me that, smart ass from out there who thinks he could do my job better than me!

Anyway, there is a craft to laying pipe in the most elegant, inconspicuous way possible. Let Professor Hecuba teach you by way of a "word problem."



You have been given the privelege of writing an episode of "Lotsa Luck" starring the great Dom DeLuise. Now, in this scene, Dom, in the character of Stanley Belmont, needs to make a Christmas-related joke to his mooching brother-in-law Arthur (played by that prick Wynn Irwin) and the joke hinges on the fact that he is Stanley's brother in law. The joke won't work without the audience knowing this fact and it's still early in the run of the show so you can't count on the viewers to know their relationship. Which of these lines do you write for Dom/Stanley?

a) "Arthur, remind me again why you're my brother-in-law."

b) "I can't believe you're my brother-in-law on Christmas Eve."

OR

c) "As you know, you are my brother-in-law, and as you also know, it's Christmas Eve."

The answer: NONE of them! It's too hard to lay this pipe, it can't be done. You cut the joke and give Dom some business where he accidentally drinks the water out of the Christmas tree stand. That's what a professional does.

Thus endeth the lesson.

HAROLD'S COMEDY GLOSSARY LESSON #1: "THE CLAM"



A "CLAM" is a comedy writer's term for a joke or form of joke that is old hat, overused, played out. It's the worst sin a comedy writer can commit -- to put a clam in your script. (That's why I rate my reviews in CLAMS -- Five Clams being the worst (FAMILY GOY) and Zero Clams being the best (STUDIO 60). And the cockamamie thing is that the ground is always changing. A joke can be fresh one moment and a clam the next, such is comedy.

For instance, when I came up with it back in 19-never-you-mind-how-long-ago, "Too much information" was the hottest gag to hit the sitcom world since Lucy met Ricky.



When it was uttered by the late great Nell Carter on an episode of "Gimme A Break" I penned, it detonated in that studio like an Atomic freakin' bomb! They had to stop tape, the laugh went on for so long. It made Sammy Davis kissing Archie Bunker look like "Death Of A Salesman" was how new and fresh that was. Now, 20 or so years later, having a character respond to another by saying "Too much information" is hopelessly old hat. It is a CLAM. Do not use it. And certainly don't use it four times in one script. I learned that when I submitted my spec "According to Jim" to my agent's hot-shit young coffee-getting monkey who now for some reason says he's my agent. Here's another CLAM for you: "Don't call us, we'll call you." Sadly, that CLAM is still being used. Godddamn them all to Hell!!!

That last part I didn't want to be on this thing, but I can't figure out how to make my son's computer erase it, so there you have it. Look for more Glossary items in the future, though I don't know how many more, because once I start work on "Studio 60" I won't have time for this nonsense.

ABOUT THAT TITLE....

Okay, I bet your wondering about the title of this cockamamie thing. Well, 'The Bad Pitch" is a sitcom writer's term. Basically, when a bunch of writers are in "THE ROOM" working on, or 'BREAKING" a story, we'll often use what's called "THE BAD PITCH" to proffer a story idea or "JOKE". It means, 'here's the obvious, not terribly original, probably not too funny version of what I'm thinking of and if you guys think it's a road we want to go down, then we'll come up with "THE GOOD VERSION".

A sample Bad Pitch: "So, what if Rerun says to the trampy girl, and here's the bad pitch, 'Hey, you're really trashy." And then she makes a fat joke about how he eats out of the trash." Which, after hours of work turns into this piece of comic dialogue:

RERUN: Girl, you're like a HIgh School on Sundays... no class.

SMART ALECK GIRL: Gee, Rerun that's so smart, they might accept you into Yale.

RERUN: Really? Yale in Connecticut?

SMART ALECK GIRL: No I mean Yale, in New Yersey.


That exchange took seven hours to perfect. But perfect it we did. And Fred Berry made that scene just sing. I miss him every day.