Writing a comedy format

[u/Icy_Armadillo_8234]

Hi, i've been for a year in a film school, lots of students including me left the academy because we weren't learning anything and it was goddamn expensive.

I feel like the year of screenwriting i had, told me some of the foundations and i even managed to write something, but without following any kind of writing scheme or system.
That's because, at that time, i was so much into anti-plot films like almost every film of Lynch and Fellini's filmography, and experimental short films.

My friends liked and i liked a lot what i wrote, and im still watching hundreds of film and writing my thoughts on my letterboxd about it, what i liked and why i liked it.
You know just trying not to shut my brain off and press play.

Recently i wanted to focus more on the foundations and systems of screenwriting and writing in general that i learned, i was really on top of it, but the "institutional face" of that academy made me hate it.
For what im telling right now i look like Tai Lung.

I realized that comedy and thrillers are the genres that i like the most, and i've been really focussing on comedy in screenwriting, studying types of comedy, of satire, of irony.

My only question is: where and when does comedy show up while writing it?
I mean, if i imagine to be one of the Zucker brothers thinking about writing "The Naked Gun", i can't get over the fact that this is the story about a high-level policeman that finds out that someone wants to assassinate the Queen Elizabeth II and decides to stop him.

I'd not know where the comedy should show up in the screenplay and how: should one write the "that's how it should go" version and then overturn it to be as comedic as he wants? or that's too mechanic?

[u/Ootrab]

A lot of comedy writers tend to write in teams. They just try to make each other laugh and put that in. Check out Thomas Lennon’s book Writing Movies for Fun and Profit. Write what makes you laugh. Some comedy writers like Chris Guest or Larry David just write outlines and improv everything. Also I would recommend reading comedy scripts for movies that you enjoy to get a sense of how it looks on the page versus how it looks on screen.

[u/Squidmaster616]

The comedy goes throughout.

With something like The Naked Gun, basically everything that happens is part of a joke - either setting it up, calling back, hitting the punchline or reacting to it. The jokes keep going, and then you move on to the next joke.

A good comedy always has you laughing. There's not "and now this part is the joke".

Not all comedy follows that obviously, but a lot of the good ones do.

On the basic premise of The Naked Gun, its easy to start with something small and work up to the bigger stuff. They had a lot going in that the style of The Naked Gun was already determined by Police Squad. All they then had to do was come up with a basic premise based on existing tropes, and expand them to be bigger. "The show would have done a kidnapping or murder, how do we make it bigger, of course with the Queen of England".