It's TIME for comedy!

"Dying is easy, comedy is hard."
                                                        - Old Adage




"Tradgedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."
                                                        - Mel Brooks

Timing is the purest aspect of comedy. That's kind of why it was considered inferior to the only other kind of story in existance back then, the tragedy.

The most revered of writers back then had what I once recently called "diarrhea of the pen". Take Homer, for instance. He takes roughly 30 lines at the end of Book 7 of The Odyssey to describe the lineage of the Queen of Phaecia, just so that when Odysseus meets her next book he'll know something about her. This style of eloquent and descriptive writing greatly benefits the tradgedy, where the goal is to upheave a full eotional response fro the audience. For comedy however, this may not work.

Comedy is virtually never this discriptive (unless your comedicly listing off meaningless details). The makers of Airplane! have stated that making a large volume of brief gags allows them to move on from a potentially bad joke before it actually registers in your mind. The goal is to be concise, but not necessarily short. Especially in the visual medium, many authors like to draw out gags to almost excruciating lengths. This sets up expectations for the audience, which makes it funny for them to see just how long it goes. Seth McFarlane in particular grabs onto this style like a chigger and sucks it until it collapses from bloodloss.

Want to know how it's done? I used a textual type of comedic timing at the top of this page. By spacing out the two quotes, I prevented most of you from seeing the "punchline" quote until after your eye scrolled down from the "set up" quote.

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*For the record, if you don't get it, The black guy's name is Roger, the guy in the back is Victor, and Peter Graves is Clarence Oveur.

Epics by the Numbers

     When you discuss an epic like The Odyssey, you talk about a quest that the main character undergoes. Over the centuries our tastes in high adventure have yielded a certain fundamental pattern in the way such fiction is written.

     In the simplest works, the heroes will need to get to a place X, or obtain an object Y. The Odyssey involves the former for most of the book, with Odyssesus trying to get home to Ithaca. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings combines the two, revolves around getting object Y (The Ring) to place X (Mordor). Writers can weave any number of "equations" using these variables.
     Sometimes though, the what and where won't cut it. Sometimes you need a who.

Eh, close enough.

     Enter Person Z. The adversary who covets the Y, or whom the hero must prevent from reaching X.
Or, perhaps they're the only one who knows how to get to X, and will accompany the hero throughout the story. There can be any number of X's, Y's, and Z's in a story. Z-characters, however, are often nost plentiful. They will often take major roles in the plot; specifically a role the main protagonist or villain would not be able to cover. Marlin would not be able to assume Dory's responsibilities as comic relief if she was absent from the final draft of Finding Nemo, but Anchor, Chum, and Bruce could have been roled into one shark and not really altered the end product.

Now, not all genres are this formulaic (the more philosophical and artsy you get as a writer, the less you'll adhere to convention), but looking for the X,Y, and Z can make adventure fiction like The Odyssey much easier to understand.