As I don't think I've mentioned here lately, I teach a Comedy Writing class down at U.S.C. once a week. We do things like read Henny Youngman jokes aloud and discuss which ones are funny and why…or we watch and critique clips or the students write assignments which we read in class. I spend a lot of time discussing my aberrant philosophies not only on how to write something but how to shepherd it through the process of reaching an audience without losing all amusement value in the process.
At today's class, we're going to watch an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show — the one I've embedded below — twice. First time through is just for enjoyment. Second time through, we'll be following it line-by-line in the script (I have copies) and we'll be pausing and discussing how this or that worked. I did this last semester and the students seemed to profit from the experience.
One reason I picked this episode, apart from it being one of the best installments of maybe my all-time favorite TV show, is that Carl Reiner wrote it and then it was performed and filmed, pretty much as written. There were very few changes made, mainly for clarity or to eliminate redundancy. During the era when I wrote sitcoms, it was pretty much assumed that the script on the first day of rehearsal was meant to be beaten and pummeled and rewritten many times, stem to stern, before it went before the cameras. In fact, if you had a great line, you learned not to put it into the script until later in the week. That way, it stood a chance of survival.
They reportedly had weeks on The Dick Van Dyke Show when the scripts underwent extensive renovation but they were not the norm. Most weeks went as this one must have, where they pretty much filmed the script the writer wrote. Here's one week when they did about walnuts and things turned out fine…
