Transcript: No Place for Thinkers

Rob Long on why logic and reason doesn't apply to comedy

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

I was once working on an episode of a comedy series, and I had a problem. The scene we were rehearsing was working well, but we didn't have a good way to finish it.

The slang term for this is, "button", as in: something to button-up the scene, a piece of dialogue or action that makes the moment seem complete. Comedies, unlike dramas, need a piece of witty dialogue to transition from one scene to the next — or, in the case of sitcoms that take place in communal areas (the coffee shop in Friends, for instance; or the living room in The Big Bang Theory) they need funny moments to cover the entrance or exit of a character.

"We need a laugh to cover the cross," is something we say in the television comedy business, or used to, because we know that watching someone walk across the set is boring. Or at least, we used to know that. We used to know that giving the audience something to laugh at while someone walks across the set covers the monotony of the movement.  

“That’s an awfully long cross,” we used to say — used to feel, actually, because you could feel it after a while — the weird wait for a character to move from one end of the set to the other. It made us itchy and nervous, until we covered it with a laugh, a line, something.

And it was positively painful, really, for a scene to end without a button. 

"Don't talk on the move," is another rule of comedy which means, essentially: if the line is going to get a laugh, make sure you stop, say the line, get the laugh, and then continue moving. If you talk and move at the same time, for some reason, it just doesn't seem as funny.

I don’t know if you noticed, but those rules contradict each other. You have to cover the cross but don’t talk on the move. If you’re saying to yourself, “They can’t both be true,” then maybe show business isn’t for you.