What's your advice on punching up a script?
Question from a subscriber
Lora Dailey sent in this question:
Would love to hear advice on punch-up revisions.
Tip #1
There’s a lesson I learned many years ago, when I was a writer on King of the Hill. That show had a very large writing staff. Maybe 20 or so writers. It was so big that on any given day, the writing staff was divided into 3 separate rooms:
Story Room - worked on breaking ideas for future episodes
Re-Write Room - re-wrote the script that was currently in production
Joke Room - fed scenes from the Re-Write Room, and were instructed to pitch on jokes
On my first week at King of the Hill, I was assigned to the Joke Room. I was eager to impress the other writers, and somehow managed to pitch a joke that got a huge laugh from the room. The writer who was running the room told me to take the line to the showrunners and pitch it directly to them.
They were in the Re-Write Room, and I interrupted by pitching my joke. Again, it got a giant laugh. The showrunners loved it too. So imagine my shock when they told me to go back and write 5 more jokes.
“Why?” I thought. “This one’s perfect. Everyone loved it!”
I returned to the joke room, more than a little miffed. It felt like they were just giving me busy work.
I was so pissed off that I decided that I wouldn’t give them 5 more jokes, I’d give them 10 more. Just to shove it up their asses.
It took an hour or so, and I came up with nine more great jokes. I don’t know if any were better than the original joke, but the variety was impressive. I surprised even myself, and it forever changed my attitude towards joke writing.
That assignment that unlocked my creativity. It taught me not to become too attached to any one joke. Jokes are disposable and you can always make more.
