Zach WeinersmithSo, lately I've been working on these comedy novels for kids, and one of the interesting things about writing farce is that the rules are pretty open about things like coincidence, characters suddenly changing their minds, etc. BUT, some rules are pretty tight. Such as, callbacks.
Like, suppose you have a scene where someone gets hit with a pie. That might be a little funny. But if the pie was established as existing 5 chapters earlier it's MUCH funnier. Note that this is true even if nobody said "that pie took me ages to make, so I hope it stays okay!"
There's a scene in Wodehouse's very best book, The Code of the Woosters, where the Brute characters gets socked in the face. This isn't funny because of the violence. It's funny because wayyyyy earlier it was established that this other guy was waiting to jump whoever entered first.
And I think some of the humor is of course that he socked the wrong guy. But also it's just funnier if you heard about it earlier, so it's not ad hoc. I don't really understand why this is! But I feel like it's the key thing to Wodehouse's best moments.
Like, why has nobody duplicated him? Some people do complex plots (especially mystery/thriller authors) and some are very funny. But nobody does both the way he was able to, especially during his best working years from 1925 to 1955 or so.
Like by the end of his best stuff there may be as many as 10-20 threads set up, so that anything can pay out at any moment. It's so complex you can finish it, immediately re-read, and STILL be surprised! And when you later on top that the jokes were already good in isolation, it's magical.
PS: Unrelated-- a particularly interesting rule of farce (extremely conserved in modern sitcoms) is that main characters MUST NOT DEVELOP. They can realize this or that, or do the right thing, but at the end they cannot have fundamentally changed, unless it's ludicrous (e.g. they become a villain)
Like try to imagine The 3 Stooges and at the end Moe appreciates the value of family. Doesn't work. It's like the exact inverse of a crappy novel where the characters don't develop.
PPS: One thing that's easy to speculate about but which on some deep level I don't understand is the way in which genres come to have these rules, and how everyone knows them. I suspect they're something to do with maintaining tone, but it's hard to pinpoint.
ang_mo_uncle@zachweinersmith.bsky.social exhibit a: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I
(Mitchell & Webb - Brain Surgery)
(Mitchell & Webb - Brain Surgery)
Brain Surgeon - That Mitchell & Webb Look , Series 3 - BBC
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