How to jump from small to BIG in Stand-up and Comedy Scripts

Cassius Green having got the telemarketing job (and NOT an image of a slug destroying the planet - see the blog if that statement is puzzling you!)

Recently, in the Guardian Weekend supplement, the actor Indira Varma was asked about her greatest fear, and she replied:

“Slugs. And planetary annihilation”.

This is a dramatic leap from a small to a gigantic fear. (I was tempted to illustrate this blog with an image of a snail annihilating the planet - but decided not to add to the AI slop). Here’s a classic (non-joke) example of the same small-to-big effect from Neil Armstrong:

“One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Armstrong is doing the same as Varma (but in somewhat more historic circumstances), going from the small (“one small step for man”) to the big (“one giant leap for mankind”).

The undercutting version of Armstrong’s line would be something like:

“One giant leap for mankind. One small step for a bloke.”

Here’s an example of this small-to-big effect in dialogue from Boots Riley’s movie Sorry to Bother You, from the opening job interview scene. The interviewer, Anderson, explains why, despite Cassius Green’s ridiculous attempts to impress him, he is nevertheless giving Cassius the job:

ANDERSON

Alright, Cassius Green. Listen. This is telemarketing. We ain’t fuckin’ mappin’ the human genome or finding fucking alternative fuel sources. We jump from telemarketing to mapping the human genome and finding alternative fuel sources.

In my latest stand-up comedy writing Substack, I quote Iliza Schlesinger talking about the TV channel TLC. As she opens up the topic, she asks the audience what it stands for and gets the answer, The Learning Channel. Then she says:

“But if you watch its programming, you know that it really should stand for…”

At this point we assume she’s going to give us an alternative for the acronym TLC. “The Lame Channel” for example. But in fact she gives us this BIG alternative:

“The Remember That Fourteen-Year-Old Girl That Had A Baby When You Guys Were In Middle School? Yeah, Well, Now That Kid Kind Of Tries To Do Pageants Even Though She’s Awful Looking And Doesn’t Have A Command Of The English Language. They Live In A Double Y, But They Make Like Seventy Grand An Episode, And You Still Have A Shitty Job... Channel.”

This is misdirection. She creates an expectation (that she is going to give an alternative three letter acronym that fits TLC). She spectacularly explodes that assumption. It goes from the small TLC to the massive:

TRTFYGTHABWYGWIMSYWNTKKOTTDPETSALADHACOTELTLIADYBTMLSGEAYSHASJ.

This took a while to type up and it would certainly tax the continuity announcers every time they had to say the channel’s name…

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WHY THIS WORKS

Coming up with a different meaning for an acronym is a familiar game. For example, the very old joke about the defunct early twentieth century airline BOAC standing for Better On A Camel. So, this helps the misdirection as for TLC we expect something like “Totally Ludicrous Content”.

It’s also of course a comical summation of their content so gets laughs of recognition - and for audience members who don’t know the channel, it’s a funny way of bringing them up to speed.

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TRY IT!

In stand-up or in dialogue in yours script, make the audience assume you (or the character) are about to say something small in size or quantity...

...then go the other way and say something enormous

Or suddenly jump from referencing trivial things to something massive.

For more on going from small to BIG in stand-up comedy writing see my entirely FREE Substack.

Plus I write about small to BIG in TV and movie comedy scripts in my Complete Comedy Script Toolkit book, from which the opening of this blog is excerpted.