Creating Comedy Characters
So you want to create a comedy character. Perhaps it’s a character for you to perform or for a sitcom/comedy drama script. In this post I am particularly thinking of narrative comedy script characters, but these thoughts can be equally useful for sketch characters and so on. Here are some ways you can explore and develop your characters to make them as rich and comedic as possible.
Base your characters on real people
Characters are fleshed out and made individual by drawing on the qualities of real people you know or have encountered. Whether they’re neighbours, bosses, colleagues, friends, family members or even spouses, real life offers up an abundance of eccentric and dysfunctional people who can become comedy characters. When you have a real model behind the character they become more individual, believable and idiosyncratic.
You might base a character on someone close to you, your nearest and dearest, however, if you’re basing a character on someone you know less well, or even have only seen fleetingly, there’s a lot you don’t know and you are fee to invent to fill in the gaps. If you don’t have a real-life model (or models) in mind you are more likely to draw on stereotype and cliché.
You can draw on a number of real people to flesh out your character picking up on their mannerisms, speech patterns, attitudes, beliefs as well as their biography and life experience. Since you’re fictionalising, do feel free to do them a terrible disservice and focus on and exaggerate all their worst qualities. And in terms of their biography, if they’ve done three really stupid things in the last five years, your character version of them will have done those three stupid things in the last three weeks – of if they’re a real klutz, in the last three days. Then once you have identified the kinds of stupid things the real person does, you can invent more in a similar vein for your character.
Positives and negatives
Let’s think about basing a character on a bad boss you have had in your working life. Maybe you have one now! It can be brilliantly cathartic to take these dreadful people and turn them into comedy characters. Your characters have a problem or a goal and they set about trying to get what they want with their limited skill set. They don't have the skills, knowledge or ability to effectively achieve their goals, but still they try. (Just like your bad boss). A first question to ask of your boss is: What’s wrong with them?
This will be where the comedy lies. All their negative qualities, failings and shortcomings. Have a clear, short list of these issues. This is enough to get started. A next step to ask is: Who else do I know who’s like this? Now you are drawing on bad qualities of other people to make this character even worse.
Then having considered your boss’ negative sides ask: What’s right with them? If you really despise them or find them totally contemptible, this can be tricky! They must have some positive qualities. What are they? A balance of positives and negatives makes the character more rounded and engaging – even if the negatives are likely to dominate with many characters, that bit of humanity is important. For instance with Basil Fawlty (who was based on a Mr Sinclair who ran the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay with his terrifying wife):
Basil Fawlty
Negatives: Petty, vindictive, snobbish
Positives: Witty, resourceful, energetic
Two perspectives on your characters
Here’s another way of looking at your character from two perspectives: firstly, describe how they see themselves and secondly how others see them. If there is very little difference between these two perspectives then that would be a self-aware, functional person. The bigger the difference the more comic and/or tragic the character. Steve Coogan’s appallingly brilliant Alan Partridge, for example, was based on a number of real-life British TV presenters. Many potential models for Partridge have been identified but (fortunately) there isn’t one single person who embodies all of Partridge’s traits, so it’s very much an amalgamation of different individuals and Coogan says there is a lot of himself in Partridge too. Here’s how you might describe Alan Partridge in this way:
How Alan Partridge sees himself: Charming, funny, relaxed, professional, friendly, popular
How others see him: Petty, vindictive, neurotic, incompetent, loathsome, moribund
When you’re developing a character, think in terms of the first list as how they see themselves when they’re at their most self-regarding and the second list as how others see them when they are most critical. This creates a persona and a shadow. List 1 is the persona they try and project, list 2 is the shadow that undermines and contradicts the persona. Think about THE GAP between how characters see themselves and how others see them – the bigger the gap, the greater the comedy (and tragedy) of the character.
Likeability of characters
Often writers get feedback that their characters aren’t likeable enough and yet at the same time there are often sitcoms with characters who behave badly and aren’t obviously likeable. And yet so many viewers have an appalled fascination with the truly dark characters, for example Julia Davis with Jill from Nighty Night. Returning to the point made about basing characters on real people, even Julia Davis’s horrific creations are, as she says, based on people. She described Jill as the ultimate extreme narcissist and sociopath, and acknowledges they’re traits she’s interested in and that run through a lot of her characters. She says she does see such people around and continues to be shocked by their behaviour and wants to keep looking at it from a slightly different perspective each time.
You couldn’t however have a cast made up entirely of these extreme types. Imagine if Jill, Basil and Alan Partridge were all in one show! They’d cancel each other out. You need the reasonable and normal people around them for contrast but also to create a way in for the audience. We sympathise with those people. And indeed we need characters who are holding it together.