The W Files

Just for laughs: seasoned comedy scribe Rob Sheridan dishes on writing funny.

Toronto-based comedy writer Rob Sheridan's name has been attached to some of the most acclaimed Canadian comedy shows, including The Red Green Show, Little Mosque on the Prairie, Corner Gas and Naked Josh. Sheridan talked to CS about the specifics of writing comedy and what line needs to be crossed for a scene to work.

By Matthew Hays

What's the main difference between writing comedy and writing something more dramatic?

Jokes. But seriously... I think the biggest difference from a storytelling perspective is that comedy allows you to get away with much smaller story stakes than, say, a one-hour police procedural. One of the things I learned working on Corner Gas was that small, relatable stories almost always play well. I don't remember who coined the phrase, but at some point I started calling those the ⌠I broke my shoelace stories. Everyone's broken a shoelace. It's a small, relatable thing, and as long as the audience understands that the stakes are high for this character in this situation, they'll go with it. In the end, it's always about what happens next. ⌠I broke my shoelace, the cab is waiting, and I'm having dinner with the guy that invented shoes. Well, that's not a very good example, but you get the idea. The Office can mine a half hour's worth of comedy from someone stealing a sandwich out of the lunchroom fridge. If people saw that story on CSI I'm guessing they'd change the channel: ⌠Why hasn't anyone been stabbed yet?

Do you ever worry about crossing the political-correctness line, or is that part of the point?

For me, if there's a line I'm always interested in crossing. It's more tonal than political. I worked for one producer who told me they wanted the show to preserve the characters' ⌠comedic dignity, which struck me as a total oxymoron. What's the most universal comedy thing in the world? Guy gets hit in the crotch. Now, I've never been desperate enough to actually put that gag in a script (yet) but we've all seen it a hundred times and, under the right circumstances, it's still funny. Why? I have no idea, but we certainly aren't laughing because the guy kept his dignity. "Comedic dignity" - I still have no idea what that means. I guess maybe Mosque had the greatest potential to cross a line or offend someone simply by nature of the subject matter, but I wasn't particularly interested in the politics of it; I just wanted to tell a few stories I thought might be funny. That's not to say I don't enjoy satire. I think what they do on The Daily Show is brilliant, but it's a different kind of show. I'm not convinced half-hour narrative comedy is the best platform for edgy, topical satire anyway. But I could be wrong.

When do you know, during the writing process, that something is just not working?

When I see it on TV. Kidding. I'd like to think that most of the time I catch it early. Sometimes when we're in the room and pitching stories, I'll hear something and I'll just immediately back away from it on instinct, either because I've tried to do a certain kind of story before and it just didn't work, or because I just can't think of a funny way into the material. Often I'm wrong and someone convinces me and then it works great. So you never know. The only thing I've figured out for sure is that if you have a solid story outline you can't go too far astray. If there are the right number of beats to a story, and they're happening in the right place, it doesn't matter how rough the dialogue or whatever may be in the first draft. It's completely fixable either in a re-write or by everyone doing a punch-up together. If the story structure is fundamentally unsound, however, no amount of funny lines or gags is going to save it. That's when you go down the rabbit hole and start from scratch and then no one hears from you all weekend. It still happens more often than you'd like√it's just the reality of doing 13 or 20 episodes of TV in a relatively short amount of time√but you try to avoid it as much as possible. Now, when you have something as air tight as my idea about having dinner with the guy that invented shoes, well, that's pure gold. There's simply no way to screw that up.