DZ-83: A Very Thematic Stand-up Special! — Transcript

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And now for Front Matter.

Isn't this the front matter?

Hi, I'm Chas Fisher.

And I'm Stu Willis.

And welcome to Draft Zero, a podcast where we normally work out what makes great screenplays work, but today...

We are trying to work out what tools screenwriters can take from stand-up comedy specials. It's storytellers, stand-up comedians are fantastic storytellers that can hold your attention for an hour, an hour and a half, a couple of hours. And we think they've got some great tools to teach us that we can use in our own screenwriting. And we are joined by a wonderful special guest, Alice Fraser, a comedian, podcaster, documentarian, just all-round fantastic human. Welcome to the show, Alice.

Hello. Thank you for having me.

And, Taz, what are we going to be looking at?

Okay, so we're going to have some discussion around Alice's amazing show, Savage, which is available on Amazon Prime here in Australia, and I presume around the globe.

And in podcast form as well, isn't it? It's still in podcast form, get through ABC.

And we're also going to look at the specials Nanette by Hannah Gadsby, Baby Cobra by Ali Wong, and It's the Fireworks Talking by Daniel Kitson.

All right, so why did we decide to do this, Chaz?

Maybe because we're all in lockdown and we all just needed to, like, inject six hours of comedy into our veins.

And more interestingly, why did Alice decide to join us?

I am also in lockdown and my motivation is much more sinister. By analysing comedy, I promise to take the joy out of it for you. I'm just sharing the pain.

So there's two interesting things that... Audiences should know about you, which is that you, and I'm quoting you, is you've got this view of the world that's the empirical versus the poetic. And as we talked about in our pre-talk, Draft Zero is about finding the empirical in the poetic. And more specifically with your show, Shavage, you've translated it from a stage show into a stand-up, a recorded special, and also that you are looking at developing it into a series, right? So moving it from stand-up into drama. So, it's that kind of combination of the analytical mind, but thinking about how the slight differences in long-form storytelling. So, stand-ups are long-form storytelling, right? And it feels to me that they use some techniques that are similar and some techniques that are different from drama. And we spend a lot of time thinking about screenwriting and talking about screenwriting, but we're very specifically looking at drama as kind of a meta-genre of what we're talking about. And just as a note, this originally started as a, because we were interested in talking about Bo Burnham's Inside, but we watched it and don't feel like it's a comedy special in the way you think about it. It's kind of like a film essay, like If It's For Fake or Sans Soleil, that draws inspiration for comedy specials. So we might talk about it, but it's so much more immersed in film form. And where what you do, when you see Alice's show, other than you pulling out a ukulele occasionally doing a little bit of a music banjo sorry how dare you yes you are largely holding people's attention with just the story that you were telling so i mean we let let's talk about the process of translating to a show because i think taking savage talking about what savage is and then moving into the show before we analyze um nanette.

Yeah now alice do you want to pitch us what Savage is as a stand-up show or should we go to the Wikipedia summary and read it out?

Oh, God, I don't think I could bear a Wikipedia summary. It's a show about... about loss.

So there are going to be points in this show where you're not going to be sure if you should laugh or feel sorry for me. I suggest you laugh. If you don't laugh, this shit still happened, but it will have happened for nothing. And that is on you.

I think a lot of people think of it as a show about death, but it's not. It's a show about the slow process of losing someone you love. And for me, there's one important moment in the show that I begin with that I want to bring people to an understanding of the emotional impact of that moment. So I start with the moment and then I come back to it later with kind of the import. So the whole structure of Savage is kind of your unloaded gun, loaded gun scenario. I repeatedly introduce ideas with low stakes only to bring them back with higher stakes. So I think, is that a summary of a show? I don't know. That's the way I think of the show anyway.

And I was just about to like give an example from your show, but you have warned me quite fairly that comics hate non-comics, repeating a joke back to them and getting it completely wrong.

So I'm here to correct you, so it's all right. It's all right.

But like setups and payoffs is something that we're going to talk about throughout all the shows. But you had what I thought was like a throwaway joke about buttholes.

That is what is wrong with everything that we live in a world where everything has to look good and smell good and taste good and not have hair on it. This is the slippery slope that leads to anal bleaching. You know, that's a thing now. It's not just sitting on a lemon. People pay and they've got like a Bunnings paint colour chart to figure out what shade, If you take nothing else away from this show, let it be these three facts. Buttholes are brown. They are meant to be brown. And we are all going to die.

That then suddenly comes back at the end of your show to be hugely painful and poignant. And this incredible foreshadowing. And you do bring the buttholes back throughout.

It sort of appealed to Chaz's sense of very fecal-orientated humour.

Yeah, I think sometimes what I think stand-up is really good for, and there's so many different kinds of stand-up. I should start with that. There's so many different things that you can do with comedy and so many different things that people legitimately do with comedy, from giving just ridiculous relief from the stresses of the world to dealing with quite difficult and complicated ideas. The thing that I quite like doing is reaching for difficult things, really hard things that are hard to grasp or hard to wrap your mind around or even hard to pay attention to because they're emotionally painful and using comedy to kind of make people open to those ideas. And the reason I called the show Savage is because I feel to a certain extent that's quite a cruel thing to do sometimes to force people to look at stuff they might not necessarily want to do. And that includes this sort of combination of visceral and brutal humanity and silliness. The butthole is about confronting our deep vulnerability and our humanity and the pain and sort of the horrifying indignities of chronic illness, but also... In a way that people can absorb.

It does make me think of, I think, that kind of structure of starting with something that's either the silliness or seemingly slight and then pushing deeper and deeper is something that I think all the comedy specials that we're going to look at do. I mean, and Savage, no exception. We should say that, yes, there are many different types of stand-up comedy, and obviously Chaz and I are now filtering of picked stuff that has got a larger pattern to it, right? All of them, on some level, come full circle, is the very basic structure. We didn't pick something that's just a series of skits, for lack of a better word. We're possibly going to be using the incorrect non-comedian jargon for this kind of stuff. Also, that kind of theme. All of the specials are really focused on some kind of unifying idea. I don't think Savage is any exception, but when you structured the show, this is what I'm kind of curious. I don't want this to turn into an interview, but it's really interesting to hear you talk about it because I think it will help us analyze how other people do it. Did you start off with that kind of circular structure and go, I'm going to start off with something that's offhand, the unloaded gun, and then you're going to load it or tightening the spring?

So part of it is just feeling out the audience as you go. The story of me doing the show the first time was that mum was in the palliative care ward and I rang the Sydney Comedy Festival and said, I cannot do a show. I can't do a show. And they said, Shane Smith at the Sydney Comedy Festival, I'll always be grateful. He said, you can cancel until five minutes before the doors open. So don't worry about it. Don't think about it. And so I went in and I literally had printed out all the jokes I was working on at the time, all the jokes that I was doing in sets and all the jokes that I'd written and tweets and everything. And I printed out this story about my encounter with the guy who I call Dick in the show. And I had literally, I had two stools, one on each side, and I was, how many jokes do I need to tell before I can tell another thing? Bit of this story. So before I can sort of smack you in the face again. So it was the initial kind of feeling out of the show in the very first kind of trial of it was just that, trying to balance out how much I could demand of them and how much I needed to make them feel comfortable again. And so that, I think, was the first stage. So I didn't plan it out as having that circular structure, but I realized slowly that if you introduce this idea in a harmless form, then they're willing to swallow it later, when if you presented it raw out front, they would recoil. So that happens repeatedly from the first story I tell about Mark Abercrombie all the way through. You get the idea in a harmless form, and then you get it kind of as a full dose, and I find that quite satisfying as well.

I mean, Baby Coppa, I noticed, was doing that. She would almost go for the cliched joke, the obvious joke, and then use that as the way in to kind of push you further and further before she – or deepen the joke. I mean, her purpose seems a little less emotionally driven than what you were doing, but it's that same kind of structural idea, I think. Yes.

And interestingly, I think you're sort of, as a female comedian on stage, and particularly as an Asian American female comedian on stage, just being on stage and saying anything is a political statement. So the first thing she has to do is just be funny. And that in itself is kind of a political act.

I can tell that I'm getting older because now when I see an 18-year-old girl, my automatic thought is, fuck you.

And so I think... The fact that she doesn't then do a kind of an Edinburgh-style show, first of all, she's working in the American format, which is quite different from the English and Australian festival circuit format.

I'm going to interrogate you about that because that's interesting, but go on.

But yeah, I feel like the story that she's telling is partly told by her presence on stage. And, you know, again, this is where kind of the screenwriting part of it comes in. One of the things you realize when you put something on screen is that there there's a story that is told by the picture as well as by the words and her being like visibly pregnant on stage is also telling a story just her doing that on stage is telling a story at the same time as all of the jokes that she tells and.

Very early Hannah Gadsby and Annette brings up the fact that you know that she's been mistaken for a man that's kind of really an early part of her set is dealing with that kind of visual element, her presence there, her being misgendered.

Now, I don't feel comfortable in a small town. I get a bit tense, mainly because I'm in this situation. And in a small town, that's all right from a distance. People are like, oh, good bloke. And then you get a bit closer and it's like, oh, no, no, trickster woman, what are you doing?

Yes, well, that whole show is sort of about mistaken identities and sort of where things are mistakes and where they're malicious and where they're done purposefully and where they're not done purposefully and telling half the story versus telling all of the story. So her telling you that she is often mistaken for a man, And I think of as a way of introducing that idea of what she is and isn't mistaken for.

I'm going to put a pin in that because I do want to come back to that when we break down the net. I just think it's just finding these connections now. I want to come back to the format thing, right? Like, because it's not something like, it's a format. Okay, of course it's a format. And that's going to be a structural thing. And so I'm going to be particularly thinking about it, like, because we get too often hammered with screenwriting that there's, and now that you may be looking at screenwriting, I know you said you've got a master's. narrative rhetoric.

Yes. From Cambridge University, yes.

But, you know, we've got, like, the hero's journey is a dominant way of telling stories, right, in Western screenwriting. And then there's so many versions of it, whether it's Dan Harmon's Story Circle or Save the Cat, they're all variations of it, right? But what's interesting is when you see different structures, right, and they all serve different purposes. And it's interesting because I think you are perhaps more liberated in stand-up to pursue different things. What is the difference between an Edinburgh format and a Sydney format and an American format?

So, the Edinburgh and Australia, the UK and Australia structure of a show is –. Influenced by the festival circuit, which is that you have a one-hour show, you book these one-hour slots into the venues because that's the size of slot the venue offers you unless you're a very famous act. So you have an hour to work with and you're competing with, in Edinburgh, 3,000 other shows and you have to be memorable. So an hour of jokes just doesn't cut it. People don't remember you because there's nothing distinctive about you necessarily. But also, in addition, if you're turning over a new hour every year for the festival circuit, you have to turn over a whole new hour. That lends itself more to storytelling than just to joke writing because joke writing is very, very energy intensive. In America, they're all, or certainly until recently, until the kind of Louis C.K. Era, Netflix era, content machine era, their pressure was to make a five-minute set for television, that you would get a five-minute set for television, you'd get on Conan or you'd get on late-night shows. So what you had was people honing five minutes for years and then maybe 20 minutes and then that would be their headline set. And they would have that and they would work that And then they would build an hour from these small pieces, which is why American stand-up specials tend to come across as more disconnected, more just jokey bits. You know, five-minute bits or 10-minute bits. And they might sort of cohere and there might be a structure that emerges or themes that emerge by virtue of what they're interested in as people. But the pressure of the festival circuit is that you have to hold the audience's attention for the hour. and there's a way that audiences' energy moves in an hour, like you know there'll be a dip at around 40, 45 minutes.

I'm sure if you looked at the Beau Bohannum inside special where he accuses the audience of looking at their phones, it's probably roughly at that point, right?

Yeah, so you need to stick in a song or a big thing or a high-energy thing or you have to have their attention in the first 30 seconds in this way and you have to – these are things that are necessary to control an audience in the room, and that also influences the structure of the show. Whereas in America – in an American special, they might not be thinking like that because they're not used to doing the show as an hour. They're used to doing it as 10-minute bits in clubs.

So you must have performed Savage, I guess, hundreds of times before the recording that's on Amazon?

Yeah, so I would have done it at the festivals and then I recorded it for the ABC as a podcast, the trilogy podcast, and then brought it back again. Yeah, it would have been about a year after that, which was very surreal because you're not used to thinking of them as something that you bring back.

So, was that part of why you, because you told us that you were reluctant to take it from stage to screen, was the revisiting part of that reluctance or was it actually something to do with the form that you were pushing against?

There are a couple of different things. First of all, it's a very specific slice of time that that show tells and I didn't want to do it a disservice by not feeling it in the same way anymore. The second thing about it is that... I feel that the screen flattens stand-up. Stand-up is so much as an art form about the live art form. It's about the experience of the people in the room. There's a way that audiences laugh that says, oh, we've had too much or this is too much for us or we want more of that. And even if you're saying the same words night in and night out, the way you deliver those words might be more intense or more diffident or more self-deprecating or more shy or more questioning depending on the audience. And Savage is so much about the intimacy of that show because I didn't want it to be misinterpreted. It was such an important story for me to tell that I felt like I had to be in the room to control the room. When I performed it live, I would be on stage as the audience walked in and I would offer them water or snacks and I'd be like, this is my space, you're in my space. I kind of undermine and reset all of the expectations that you have going into a stand-up show, which is that the stand-up emerges triumphantly to a blare of lights and noise and you're presented as a kind of a figure. Savage was about that kind of shared humanity and I was like, how do I do that on a screen? You know, I can't absorb people in my space. I can't control their experience in that way. So a lot of the choices that I discussed with the director and the director of photography were about trying to maintain that intimacy or to give some sort of proxy of it.

Other than the, and we can get into the actual shooting and staging, but did the content... Of the show change in any way to try and provide that intimacy to an audience sitting on a couch you know at home.

Uh yeah to a certain extent i cut all the songs um because in the show in the live show in the room the songs were there was about four songs that were necessary to break tension but because you can't build tension across the screen in the same way as you can in the room I didn't need them. That was, I think, the major content change. There was a few things that their lawyers flagged at Amazon Prime. There's a joke I have about Tom Cruise that they said, oh, he's very litigious.

So if you do not like action movies, do what I do when I watch action movies. You know, in that sequence where they're running and they're running and then they run around the corner of a building. If it's Tom Cruise, it's a very extreme angle because he's got a low centre of gravity.

And I'm like, you can't libel someone on facts. So, yeah, I changed a few jokes. Probably one or two jokes that I would want people to be in the room for to make sure that they really got it. But, yeah, other than that, it's substantively the same.

Are we ready to... Transition, uh, super awkwardly into talking about other people's standup. It's like, yes, I just thought we, we had in our pre-chat, you know, talking about how the sausage is made, uh, we identified some tools that seem to be common throughout all the three different specials that we're going to talk about. And I'm just going to rattle them off now and hope that we get to all of them in some form or another but uh theme is you know you've spoken about the you know the edinburgh and the festival model and i think you know theme as much of a story seems to be tying a lot of this material together pacing set up some payoffs we've already uh got some great references from from your work alice recontextualization which uh if i don't know if you listen to script notes alice but they talked about today as backshadowing rather than foreshadowing shadowing a measure of self-awareness which i do wonder is just whether it's become a mandatory trend in stand-up now that i'll be interested to talk about but just like it would appear to me that you know you kind of almost have to comment on who you are as a comic and how you're relating to an audience and again like sort of tell them how you're making the sausage at the time and all the different comics that we're about to dive into do that at one point or another they sort of step back from the material and comment on their craft.

They're preemptively retroactively thinking. Yeah.

Shtick in terms of all writing from character and catharsis, which may be tied into theme as well.

Yes and no.

Okay.

Well, yes, but also no.

All right. So just a gentle reminder that we're going to do Nanette, Baby Cobra, and Is the Fireworks talking. But Alice, I also don't want to dump you in trouble by like, we only pick things that we love and want to talk about how they do things well. So I didn't want to go, oh, God, are we going to ruin Alice's career by having her shit on these huge stand-up specials? But yes.

It's the fireworks talking was the first stand-up show that I saw that really opened up to me what stand-up could be. I had, as I think most people do, a very fixed idea of what stand-up was. And I saw his show in Melbourne in 2007, before I was doing comedy at all. And as he came to the end of the show I had tears in my eyes not because the show was particularly sad but because he had hit every beat perfectly the rhythm was so perfect and the delivery was so perfect and in that last five minutes I could feel him bringing these threads together and I was like don't fuck it up like just don't fuck it up and I had tears in my eyes just of the like don't fuck it up variety and then he brought it home and it was this immense uh catharsis just to see him perform that skill. In the way that, you know, watching the Olympics at the moment, you see people doing a sport that you have no idea what that sport is, but you can tell which ones are good at it. And so, yeah, I wanted us to have a look at that show because it is so, for me, as a very inexperienced, well, at that time, completely unexperienced comedian, it was just such a perfect example of the art form.

I definitely want to get into it. I think we'll leave it towards the end because it's going to be something that presumably a lot of people are not familiar with, or they should go and get it on Bandcamp. And I think it'll be really useful because you'll be able to bring all the loose threads together and make the audience cry at the end, breaking down that show for us, right?

The perfect podcaster.

Yeah. Somehow that's what we're going to do, but we just make it up on the spot rather than carefully crafted over years. Okay. So, Nanette, which was, I have to say, it was a bit of a phenomenon, right? It felt like it was a genuine, at least in the West, the Anglo-American West anyway, a phenomenon, right? And it kind of really hit a nerve thematically.

There is too much hysteria around gender from you gender normals. You're the weirdos. You're a bit hysterical. You're a bit weird. You're a bit up top. You need to get a, you know, your gender normals. Seriously, calm down, gender normals. Get a grip. No, I'm in and a dress. That's so weird. No, it's not. Do you know what's weird? Pink headbands on bald babies.

It felt like it was very much at the right time and also that it was America's first proper introduction to the Edinburgh format of show, where it isn't just jokes, where there is a heart to it and there is a meaning to it and a story that is brought home and this catharsis at the end that may not be entirely comedic. And she got the credit for that and also the backlash for that from people who were not familiar with that very well-established form of comedy, which is that festival format.

Not just the well-established form of storytelling, which is why, like, essentially on some level, we'll break down, like, the more technical aspects of catharsis later, but on some level you get to the end of something and you want to know why it's worthwhile, right? Why have I spent an hour listening to you to tell this story? And Annette is like, brings that home. You're like, okay, so this is why you have gotten up and spoken to me for an hour. And this is what makes it worthwhile. Right? And I think that's something that a lot of people don't actually ask enough of their own work, which is what is that? This is such not the reference, but I'm just going to bring it up because it's the perfect example, which is Wrath of Man, the new Guy Ritchie movie. Chaz and I watched it. And the end of it was like, that was really cool. It did a bunch of really cool shit. but the end is just like, It's over now. Go home. Like, that's it. That's the ending. And I'd love a good action movie, but it didn't even bother to try to have, like, some kind of, like, family moment. You know, at least Fast and Furious, that's becoming a running joke, but at least it tries to make it about something, you know?

Yeah, it felt like a lot of the pacing choices in Wrath of Man were distancing you from the central character. And the affect that flattened affect of american masculinity was so all pervasive that it showed no emotional depth at all he expressed his happiness in the same way as he expressed his sadness which was uh you know through inarticulate grunting.

Well i mean so we're kind of talking broadly about theme here like why have we just watched what we've just watched and for for me for screenwriting like I often I've got a I've got a strong theme idea coming in but I know a lot of people don't there's no right or wrong way to do it but my theme nearly always changes like I get a a better idea of what I'm talking about after having written it and Alice like you were so clear about savages about a show about loss did you know that going in or was it something that came from the creation of it?

Savage was a while ago now, and I was very sad when I wrote it, so it's hard to remember. But most of my shows, I'll think that I know what I'm writing about, and then about two weeks into performing it every night at a festival, I'll be like, oh, that's what it's about. It reveals itself in that way. But this kind of, what you're calling theme, this kind of pathos thing, this like, it's really, I think for stand-ups, that old school Aristotelian rhetorical structure is a good way to think about it, which is that you have the ethos and the logos and the pathos, and they all have to be present. Ethos being the comedian telling you who they are, and they can tell that to you either by how they look or by the jokes that they tell or by explicitly being like, hey, a funny thing about me. That's a thing that all comedians do. They tell you a little thing about themselves.

We've mentioned what Hannah Gadsby talks about, the misgendering. We've talked about Bo Hennem. It literally starts off with his song, I'm healing the world with comedy. You've got Baby Copperhead, as you talked about. She steps on the stage as a pregnant Asian woman doing comedy.

Hello. We are going to have to get this shit over with because I have to pee in like 10 minutes.

And Daniel Kitson, I mean, it's a little bit more interesting what he does there. I'm trying to put my finger on it.

It's got a title, this show. It's got a title. It's called It's the Fireworks Talking. That's what it's called. It's the Fireworks Talking. And it's called that for various reasons, not least, I think, because if we want our words to resemble anything in our brief time hurtling through space on this planet, then it's fireworks, isn't it? We want our words to be explosive, to be beautiful, to be transient, you know, to be disproportionately moving when set to classical music.

It's also because I'm listening because it's an audio stand-up, not a visual one, but I think there's this sense of him just starting, like, I don't know.

So visually speaking, if you see him live, he comes on very disheveled and very sort of professorial. He's always performed as a 45, 50-year-old man, even when he was in his early 20s. That's his thing. It's a non-threatening kind of persona, which allows him to play with status in the way that he does. That he has also the stammer as well is a way of... It's not that he has a stammer on purpose, but he uses his stammer and he plays against it. It gives him more room to be high status on stage. And every time he's high status, it's a surprise.

So he's low status playing high status. That's interesting. I'm going to write that down, I think, because I reread that Keith Johnston chapter this week on status. Anyway.

And then you have Logos, which is the structure, and then Pathos, which is why are we watching? Why do we care? And that's what you're talking about.

Yes. But like, so let's just repeat those three things again for me, if you don't mind, because these feel like this is actually what we're talking about.

Ethos, logos, and pathos is what I think about. So ethos being who you are in relation to the audience. Why should they listen to you? What's your position? So, you know, I'm a maths professor, and therefore I can talk about this maths subject. Logos is the structure, and that's the joke structure. Are the jokes funny? Do they work as jokes? Does the story make sense? Does the story follow? Does it, if it is non-linear, are all the pieces in place? Do they come back in a satisfying way? Does the logos work? And then pathos, why do I care? And that's, you know, that can be sad or it can be, it doesn't need to be sad, but it is incredibly important. You know, if this math professor is telling you math problems that all make sense, I don't give a shit. Are these math problems relevant to my life? Maybe I give a shit.

Yeah.

You know?

To bring this back to Nanette and sort of, I guess, render it down to, let's apply these to the practical example that we've got. I mean, she was-

This will connect to what you're going to say, but I would just want to inject. I think the reason that theme is interesting and pathos is more useful is I think theme in the way that we think about it has two separate meanings that are related. I think there's theme is like the organizing principles of material, okay? That you can have a theme where stuff is organized by color, you know, or melody, or I'm just using examples in other artwork, you know.

Or it's an hour about cars, but actually it's about family.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's a unifying principle. And, you know, something like, I'm going to use inside because it's so visually obvious. It's literally called inside. And he's inside a room the whole time, even though there's, you know, Chas and I had a discussion about this. It's like, there's no bathroom. The kitchen's got stuff, but it's not food. It's clearly this artificial unifying idea of being inside and representing mental illness, getting to the pandemic, right? But, you know, Baby Copper and Nanette and Fireworks, by the title, has got these unifying elements, these little threads of storytelling. They come back to and i think the net has got those unifying elements that they they bring together but you don't always similarly some of the tangents are only connected like they're just like branches of the story that don't connect to the ending but they kind of fit within the unifying theme which i think is something that screenwriters can take can take is they don't actually think about enough about the unifying elements you know i mean like we joke about fast and furious but that's what that franchise is it's got an incredibly powerful theme which is It's about family. It's about cars. You know, it's kind of like an action movie, and that's what brings it all together on top of the meaning. But I think Nanette's got a bunch of those kind of unifilming elements on top of its pathos.

Well, and also having those kind of moments, even if they don't really connect or pay off, which sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. The amount that people will bring to it if you give them these points of connection is amazing. So much of the work of Savage is done by the audience. So much of the work of Nanette is done by the audience. Because even though Hannah Gadsby speaks very explicitly about her experiences and her trauma, she's not telling the whole story. She's allowing you to understand the whole story with your own stuff. You know, definitely.

You've spoken about how pauses are so important in your stand up because it's about audiences, you know, filling that gap. But in terms of what you're saying for theme, I think, yeah, the word theme is like kind of too broad. It almost becomes useless at a certain point. For me, the pathos thing, like, why should I care? And the logos thing, like, you know, how is this structured? To me, one of my most important things when writing to have a vague idea of what my theme is, is I know what doesn't belong in the story. Like, I know what stories or characters or moments I don't want in there. And I imagine with these long stand-up specials, like Stu was saying, there's, you know, lots of tangents and branches, and we can probably come up with examples from all three, where they leave the central trunk or the central kind of unifying idea of the the special but you know either thematically bring it back through segue or you know through transition or it just always feels of a piece that they got there you can see kind of how they got off the trunk and then how they get back to the trunk as well.

Well an example in nanette is the apparent tangent about uh picasso.

But he did suffer a mental illness Picasso did he suffered badly and it got worse as he got older Picasso suffered the mental illness of misogyny split the room.

So that's that's telling you something about Hannah Gadsby her interest in art history so she's she's revealing something of herself there and it is also giving you this structural template for what men are forgiven for and how society forgives men and will will tell stories that work in certain people's favors or not in other people's favors and that is her introducing this theme that comes in importantly towards the end about stories half told and why those stories are half told who it suits to tell those stories short and in the way that she then reveals that she has told her story short and her motivations for doing that.

I think, you know, we don't want to like retell jokes or necessarily spoil an ending of something because it takes away the power of it a little bit. But here on Draft Zero, we do spoil things like there's no tomorrow. But just to give some context is like almost the first half of Hannah's stand up of Nanette is, you know, a series of connected jokes and bits. But it stops, you know, she starts alternating between stand-up and, like, just pure kind of anger and emotion without trying to make anyone laugh at all. And as she's going, she's commenting deliberately on, you know, whether she's trying to make people laugh or not.

To the men in the room, I speak to you now, particularly the white men, especially the straight white men. Pull your fucking socks up! How humiliating. Fashion advice from a lesbian. That is your last joke.

And to me, one of the unifying structures of it that she comes in quite early on, but it's not in the opening few minutes, is I'm quitting comedy.

I do think I have to quit comedy, though. And seriously, it's probably not the forum to make such an announcement, is it? In the middle of a comedy show, but I have been questioning, you know, this whole comedy thing. I don't feel very comfortable in it anymore. You know, over the past year I've been questioning it and reassessing, and I think it's healthy for an adult human to take stock, pause and reassess. And when I first started doing the comedy over a decade ago, my favourite comedian was Bill Cosby.

And she's described it on she was i heard her on mike babelia's podcast working it out she called the structure of nanette a fugue which i had to google because i didn't know what it was but it's a a musical contrapuntal compositional technique in two or more voices built on a subject a musical theme that is introduced at the beginning in imitation repetition at different pitches and which recurs frequently in the course of the composition. And I think we've got that not just in your show, Alice, but in all three other shows that we've done here. So she tells the same stories. And then tells how she's been telling the stories and constantly moving between making the audience laugh and then also like kind of revealing the truth of her own story and being able to not make them laugh. And at the same time telling the audience when and why she's making them laugh or not, which is incredible.

Yes, she introduces the structure of the whole in miniature, which is the telling of a joke and then the telling of why she's not going to tell that joke anymore. Why that joke is no good, whether it's her self-deprecating and then telling you why she's not going to self-deprecate, all the way through to this story that she told at the beginning and then she tells the full version of at the end, her kind of underlying artistic thesis. And I'm never sure if she believes this or not, is that comedy is not a complete story. But I think by comedy, she means a joke. She says it's just two parts. It's a set up and a punchline. And that that is doing a disservice to the complexity and then the fullness of stories. And I don't know how much I agree with her about that, but it's certainly a very powerful message that that special puts across.

As I said, we'll probably play excerpts rather than me butchering the material.

But you could save the material so we can laugh at you and then we can replace it with an excerpt if you want.

Well, you know how she tells the joke of her mother, of coming out to her mother and her mother's response and then recontextualizes that later by retelling the story and then like saying this is what our relationship is now and deliberately doesn't tell a punchline on that true moment.

I looked at my mum in that moment and I thought, how did that happen? How did my mum get to be the hero of my story? She evolved. I didn't. I think part of my problem is comedy has suspended me in a perpetual state of adolescence. The way I've been telling that story is through jokes. And stories, unlike jokes, need three parts, a beginning, a middle, and an end. Jokes are only two parts, a beginning and a middle. And what I had done with that comedy show about coming out was I froze an incredibly formative experience at its trauma point, and I sealed it off into jokes. And that story became a routine, and through repetition. That joke version fused with my actual memory of what happened. But unfortunately, that joke version was not nearly sophisticated enough to help me undo the damage done to me in reality. Punch lines need trauma because punch lines need tension and tension feeds trauma.

That is definitely like a joke structure to me, you know, set off payoff reversal, right? There's a setup, which is the joke, the original, there's the payoff, which is like, I'm going to tell the emotional payoff and there's a reversal, which is like, you're going, Oh yeah, her mom is really sweet and she has evolved. And she's like, she even takes that away from me. And then she kind of like undermines it a bit, but that's interesting. Because she jokes, makes a serious comment on the joke, and then jokes to let the tension off the hook, and then deliberately removes that final joke at the end. That's kind of what Jim, it's ABC, ABC, ABC, AB, right? It's kind of like unresolved. If you think of musically, she is finishing on the Discord as the structural idea. I mean, it's beautifully structured. I mean, this is why we're doing it first, because it is an astounding piece of kind of storytelling that feels so effortless when you watch it. And I'm sure it was anything but effortless on top of the actual trauma she had to experience. Look, this is, I'm just going to speak freely. It is interesting that I find it harder to speak about these stand-up shows than I do movies because the connection with the creator is stronger, right? So, I feel like I can, we praise the work of other films all the time and we try to not be negative in terms of what we talk about from storytelling. It does feel like, ah, we're commenting on someone's work that is intimately connected to who they are. And that's something that we fail to do with Pablo Picasso, right? Like, as in we fail to not to see the person connected to who they are, we always separate them. And I'm just going to say, it made me think of David Bowie, because there are stories about David Bowie, and he seems to get a free pass.

Well, yeah, it's an interesting thing with stand-ups and that's part of the way that different stand-ups deal with that. Intimacy is always interesting to watch, whether they do create a persona to give them some distance from the audience. Or, you know, even just a joke is a shield between you and the audience. Or it can be a door between you and the audience. It can be an invitation and depends on how you use it. And I think certainly in Nanette, Hannah Gadsby has comments on the fact that she has been using jokes as a distancing mechanism, as a way to distance herself from her traumatic experience, a way of rewriting those traumatic experiences, a way of getting the dig in before other people do. This self-deprecation is a way of distancing you from yourself because you are making fun of yourself, which in itself implies a distance. It implies that you're outside yourself and you can make fun of yourself. So there are different ways that you can use a joke, structurally speaking.

I noticed you doing it a lot in Savage where, you know, you'd hit us with this huge emotion bomb and you'd let us sit with it. and you would nearly always pull us out of it with, a relatively quick joke not to this is going to sound terrible but you've told us already like you've got the benefit of when you're writing stand-up shows you're performing it again and again and you can feed off the audience the trick that we aspire to as screenwriters is to develop that level of control and manipulation of the audience without unless you're in animation that iterative process of being able to test it and do it over and over and over again and you know there's obviously ways of like staged readings and things like that to try and approximate that process but i do think the control that all of the specials that we're looking at today exhibit over their audience that is something that we can aspire to in long form writing yes.

Certainly certainly it's a really interesting process to watch yourself to stand up after you've done it.

That's extremely uh surreal.

And weird so you you there's different forms of the iterative process as a director or a screenwriter you get to change things and you get to see them done or shift them or change the order of things post hoc whereas in stand-up you have to kind of run the whole thing through or you know if you're doing it american style uh run 10 minute bits in different clubs and then stitch them together in the order that you think is right.

That would be so strange because a lot of what makes all these specials to me- Special. Special is their transitions, right? So, Hannah got on to the- What a transition.

Chaz.

Thank you. Hannah gets on to Picasso- And earlier on to Van Gogh, you know, Van Gogh, she was talking about.

Yeah. She's already seeded the idea of Van Gogh, right? Because she connects that to mental illness and a guy being like, you can't take your meds. She seeds that idea. Then she brings up the art history. There's nothing else I can do. I've got a degree in art history. Right. That's the structure, right? So she's already connected thematically, unifying elements, connected art.

Well, both of them, she gets to them because she's talking about quitting comedy. Like in the first one, it's a guy who's come and given her some, not feedback, but an opinion on her show just after doing it. And the next time she's saying, as you said, Stu, what would I do with my life? But she uses that kind of the logos of I'm quitting comedy and leaves us at the end with why she's quitting comedy. Like, why should we care that this person in front of us, ostensibly, you know, we came here to buy a ticket to be comedied at. and we're getting told why no more comedy will be forthcoming.

I mean, what a great central dramatic question, right? Like going and just out there and going, I'm quitting comedy. And you're like, really? Are you? Check your watch like at the end of the show?

Like you said, Stu, like foreshadowing. I mean, this isn't even foreshadowing. A central dramatic question isn't foreshadowing. It's posing a question in the audience's mind. But Alice, you did this as well in your show. You told the audience the experience that they're going to have right at the beginning in a way is kind of setting them up and preparing them for it.

Yes. The central question is what is comedy for? Is it for taking our eyes away from difficult things or is it for dealing with difficult things? Can you do comedy about things that are very sad? Question mark. And then I hope that I answer that in the course of the show.

So yes, it doesn't stop them being sad. And, you know, Inside is very clearly set up with like its song. I mean, it's almost like a musical. I want song where it's like, you know, I'm healing the world with what is it? I'm literally healing the world with comedy metaphorically. Right. And that is actually a question. It's like, are you going to heal the world? And there's also just that running question of like, can I complete this special? Like we know he's completed the special because- We're watching it. We're watching it. Right. And it's very deliberate. I mean, it's a tangent back to that, but I think it's very deliberate. The beginning is just like written, performed, directed, and edited by Bo. And it's just that at the beginning. And at the end, you get the credits for all the online editors and the sound mixes and the colorists and the rest of the team. But part of the shtick of that, the Egos, am I saying that correctly? Ethos is the positioning yeah i've just combined it with the ego from freud and got egos ethos i mean that is the.

Other question is can you do a show that's entirely up your own ass.

Apparently so um and people.

Will love it.

But that's part of like that is an ethos that is a presentation there and her what's interesting about the can i quit comedy is that something that's very personal to her and the ethos and your thing about i've experienced loss um and i'm sorry Like, not only talking about a comedy, I just talked about my uncomfortableness about talking about people's stand-up show, I'm talking about a stand-up show that you wrote about loss. So, I'm hopefully not going to step on any landfines. And then you're us basically exploring that question for you, right? These are questions for you. And in some ways, it feels like Hannah is debating about debating within that kind of rhetorical sense between the positions of, is there value in comedy, right? Right. I'm quitting comedy comes from her having come to a conclusion, but it seems the show's structure is literally debating the value of comedy. I don't think Baby Copper has that. I don't think, and it's going to be interesting to look at because I actually think it's an example of the American style, which is it's more of a series of like 10 minute bits strung together thematically. And it does an attempt of pathos at the end.

And also the nature of that American style is it's more explicit. One of the things you notice if you perform to an American audience is that they are a very polite and mainstream American audience. There are, of course, alternative rooms all over the place, and this is a very generalized statement. They like to know when to laugh. They like to have a punchline that's very clearly set out for them. They like that rhythm of stand-up that's familiar to them so that they know when they should laugh and when they should stop laughing. And that's different in the UK, different in Australia, again.

I think that coming back to storytelling, because I've been thinking about this recently with Turning Points, right? And one of the dilemma of having all our screenwriting education focused on, like, the hero's journey, right, in various forms. And you see this criticism around, like, Marvel films, and you watch all these video essays on YouTube, and they pick a film, like, that we love, Manchester by the Seaside. And they sit there and criticize it because it's missing these structural elements that come from the book, right? And you're like, you are missing this incredibly powerful story about fucking grief, right? Because it doesn't adhere to the structure that you're expecting. So you end up creating this feedback loop because people are taught to like this structure. It's like Pavlo's dog, right? And then because then something doesn't have that structure, they find it really frustrating.

So I did a reading of the pilot episode of the show that I'm basing off, Savage, with a number of actors. And sorry to bring it back to my own experience here. But it was fascinating listening to the actors afterwards i asked for for notes and what that you know what they'd gotten from it and all of that and specifically the young men actors in the room were like what's her arc what's her journey how does she feel about this and why isn't she following her dream here and all of the female actors and the older men actors i didn't have to say anything they were like it's so obvious what is motivating her she's just getting through the day. She's, you know, all of these different competing interests. And then I got these notes afterwards from these screenwriting friends who were like, well, you need to show her development over the course of the, and by her, I mean the character that's based on me. So it's all very stressful. That she has to change and learn and grow and be moving towards a goal. And for me, the whole point of that episode is to show this person who is in a trap. You know, in that the context of it in this broader version of Savage, in this broader universe of Savage is that she's looking after her mum, she's working in the law firm, she's doing stand-up, and she's trying to keep everybody happy. She's doing all the right things and she cannot, like it's too much. She's completely trapped by all of these competing wants and needs and her kind of her journey is, irrelevant you know she is completely in this in this trap of her own making without ever having done anything wrong and that's the if there's an arc it's just her realizing the corner that she's backed herself into but to have that be so evident and obviously this is down to my very rudimentary like screenwriting skills i'd have no screenwriting skills but just for me that this like screen the criticism i got was very screenwriting 101 according to this script we need to have this arc and in my head i'm like well i need to listen to these people because they're the ones who actually know what they're talking about but equally i don't want there to be an arc i want this to be the i want you to see that this is a frustrated arc i want the don.

Draper You don't watch the pilot episode of Mad Men and go, wow, Don Japer didn't really learn from his experience, right? What changes is our understanding of it. The pathos in Mad Men is the pathos isn't the actor changing. It's us going, it's deliberately bookended by him from every of the pilot. Like it's him waking up with a mistress and then going home to his family, right? That's kind of like the journey, but he doesn't change. He doesn't change for seven seasons. Right? But that's interesting because it comes back to what you're talking about with ethos, right? And the presentation and also our expectation of characters, right? And her being a woman on stage in the Sydney Opera House and also then presenting to American audiences, it's all very connected. That we, for so long, male characters have allowed to be unchanging and the kind of, this writer, I called it her, called the steadfast arc, okay? So a character doesn't change and they change the world around them, okay? And it's usually because they hold some kind of truth, you know. Hunger Games is a great example of that. She doesn't change Jennifer Lawrence's character. She just convinces everyone that she's right and then you can stand up. That feels so unusual because it's a kind of structural thing that we've attached to men. And that is, it's interesting because stand-up, because it's so obviously closely, more closely tied to the ethos that is being presented to us, that they have to kind of tackle that, you know, that they kind of have to speak about the elephant in the room, which is literally them on stage, you know, alone.

Yes, who am I? Who am I to you? And some, you know, surprisingly often you'll see a comedian address that directly and they'll say, I know what I look like to you. Next time you watch a stand-up special, see, I would say the majority of stand-ups at some point will go, I know what I look like to you. You are thinking this when you're looking at me.

And that's the challenge when introducing any character in scripted storytelling as well. Like, how do we want the audience to react to their character? Are they aware of how they come across or not? Do they revel in it? Is it a choice? All those kind of things.

So, I want to get to the catharsis moment, right? Because I think it is definitely in the net. So, my memory of our episode of catharsis, but I didn't revisit it because I was lazy and I was still preparing the homework for this episode, is that it was this idea, the beats of catharsis. And what I remember is that there's this moment of discombulation, right? Something that seemingly came out of nowhere that threw us back to the beginning of the film of the story. And that caused a moment of self-reflection on the audience. And then that is connected to the reflection of the character, right? So the character, or is it more that the character, that makes the character reflect and then we connect with them. It's, I can't remember the exact order of beats.

From my memory, like there's something, a setback happens, like, as you say, like a discombobulation, and then the character has a realization, and then the, you're kind of prompting, and look, Alice, with your masters in rhetoric and telling us about Aristotle, you've probably got this at the fingertips. But then the audience is thrown before all this the audience is thrown back to the beginning of the film or the story so that they go this what we're about to see is what this has all been about.

And these are the specific techniques that allow the structural stuff that allows this to happen and i think what hannah gatsby does is that i can't remember the exact moment but when she transitioned is it no it's the story it's the story about the guy and the her being assaulted That's when it really goes to the next level, right? When she talks about, oh, I was nearly killed by someone, and she goes, like, ha-ha, and he laughed at me because he called her a faggot and realized. And then she tells the rest of that story. And that, to me, is the final, like, it's becoming more serious. You know, the structure of the show is it becomes less joke-suffy. You know, she tells joke, joke, joke, then it's joke, serious joke, serious joke. Joke serious, then it's just more and more serious, right? And she goes into that moment, and it forces us to reflect on the very beginning and the what is it all about. And it kind of brings everything together. And as you say, we might self-reflect because to her talking about it, you know, I start thinking about her being in Tasmania and her mum, and I think about Nanette. She said, like, she never explains why, who Nanette was, but you get this sense it might be connected to the story at the end. And all those things bring the feels together. And I'm not just using feels, I mean, it sounds so flippant given what she's talking about, but it's literally making me feel and reflect on what I've been watching and listening to.

So, that is the process of catharsis, which is more often associated with tragedy than with comedy. It's that in its very most basic form, you attach the audience to the characters. You invest the audience in the process of the character. So the crisis of the character becomes a proxy for the crises of the audience. And then the resolution of that crisis is cathartic for the audience because they have attached to the character. And so in that way, I think of the structure of Nanette as being this process of she couldn't tell that story at the front of the show. She has to give you all of this context and build-up so that when she reveals the second half of this story, you know who she is. And you know, you've seen, you've witnessed her coping mechanisms, healthy and unhealthy. You've witnessed what it's done to her character and to her anger. It provides a kind of a retrospective context for all of this anger that has been peeping through throughout. And all of a sudden, this anger is so justified by that final story. It reframes all of the moments before that were deliberately not comedy. And it justifies them. in a very satisfying way.

And it allows us to leave, even though we're not left with a... Happy comedy jaunt out of the auditorium we're not left with baggage like she does, deliberately provide us as an audience with catharsis so that we can reflect on it like we're not leaving burdened but all the all the specials do it and and your work as well alice like they all very deliberately throw the audience back as they're wrapping up to what they've started with baby cobra as much as it is more of like the american style a collection of bits there is an organizing structure to it which is all about um nearly all of the material that she's chosen to keep in there is about her relationship with her now husband as she's talking.

I grew up a lot this past year. This past year I also got married. Yeah. To a man who now has HPV. Very lucky guy. He gave me something. I gave him something that will also last forever.

And I don't want to ruin it because it's like the whole thing is like a setup, the whole organizing structure is a setup for a gag at the end, but it is the organizing principle is all about her relationship. And she goes at various points, retelling all the beats of their relationship to just keep orienting us, keep orienting us. And then at the end, you know, it lead that retelling of that whole thing is a joke. Now, I wouldn't say it's catharsis at that point, because it's not about us having an emotional experience, it is really just a joke. At the end but it is using that tool of throwing us back to the beginning to go like this is what this was all about yes.

It's structural resolution to things that didn't necessarily look like they were purposive at the time.

And i think what's interesting about inside is it does coming back to i i know you're trying to set up to baby cobra and i want to find a way to come back to nanette And I'm going to do that via inside. Bo keeps on intercutting the musical numbers with the shots of him alone in the room, right? And that is exactly like Hannah Gadsby punctuating her jokes with a serious moment. And then he just brings it back at the end by the show ending with him watching himself projected trapped in the house, right? It's very kind of performance arty by the end. You know, I was like, oh, this reminds me of Sheila Booth watching whatever it was, three days of Sheila Booth or whatever that weird thing. But it's the same kind of structure, right? And sometimes it's introducing the bum note or whatever it is. God, that's such a weird way of expression. The moment of contrast that then you can bring it together. You know, it is the fugue kind of structure, right? And I think that's a really interesting structural position. I wanted to come back to Hannah Gatsby because not only is she meta about her process of writing the show, she's meta about the structure, this idea that I'm the master of tension. All this is, is about tension, this tension, and then I resolve the tension, jokes are the half the story. And we've talked about that briefly, but I think it'd be interesting holding onto that idea because it's something that we do talk about in screenwriting. We've got a three and a half hour podcast about questions in sequences, right? The films ask a question and then they answer the question and that often the answer prompts a new question.

Certainly with Gatsby, she's doing this as meta-commentary on society as well. The reflection is both inwards and outwards in that she's saying, I'm the master of tension, tension release. I build the tension, I release the tension. She's also commenting on the ways in which, and this is one of the reasons why the special hit so hard at the time that it was released, that she's commenting on the ways in which women are held responsible for making things okay, even when those things are things that have happened to them and every woman has experienced that where something has happened to you and you tell someone even in the process of telling someone oh this person did this thing to me and then you go I'm fine I'm fine I'm fine it's okay and you have to make it all right all of a sudden because female anger and female pain is seen as as inappropriate or uncomfortable in ways that we are not equipped as a society to properly deal with and so her refusal at the end even if it is just an artistic refusal to resolve that tension as you say she does it is a satisfying show so she does in some way resolve the tension but her express refusal to resolve that tension, is a comment on this kind of call to action that the show makes of stop making it all right Stop only telling the funny half of the story. Stop. Or I'm going to stop doing that. And as the audience attached to her story, we think, well, we will also stop doing that.

And it is, I think, part of the reason the show made people uncomfortable and they were not happy with, or more specifically, the reason that people did not like the show is because it set out to make them feel uncomfortable and they did not like sitting in their discomfort. Right? And so they're looking for a way out. And it ends with her going home with tea, which I love. She looks so happy and she's got these dogs. And it's like she's dropped this truth bomb and then she is detaching and we are seeing her in her private. We're getting access to her private life, you know, and that is an interesting framing device.

Which, yeah, is also a statement and comment about trauma, you know, that women who tell their traumatic stories are not obliged then to be constantly in a state of suffering. You don't have to be the martyr.

I'm going to awkwardly transition now to Baby Copper unless there's any other conversation about Nanette because this idea that you brought up about women, because she uses this just a little bit about bossy and that we call women bossy and bossy is being bad. So that feels like this connection to what Alice Wong is doing because she does that really dirty comedy and it's coming out of a pregnant Asian woman and that is definitely meant to be a contrast in the same way that Hannah Gadsby was commenting on about angry white men can be so, like they're allowed to be angry comedians. I do it and it's no longer, I'm no longer a comedian, right? And it seems to be something that she's saying. And then Alice Wong's embracing that kind of American-style dirty humour, and it's coming out of someone that we normally wouldn't, or I wouldn't, and this is revealing my prejudice.

I think it's just Ali Wong.

Oh, it is Ali Wong.

You're correct.

I'm Alice.

But, you know, she is creating, playing with that idea that she's a small woman telling these big jokes and she's taking up a lot of space on the stage with her volume and her gestures. So, Chaz, do you want to kind of summarize what the show is about?

Yeah. Like I said, it's mainly a show about, like, how she got to be pregnant and married and, like, meet her husband. That's kind of, like, the story she keeps coming back to and ultimately resolves with. but it goes through a lot. I think she does less of the commentary. So there's only one point where she directly talks about kind of who she is as a person, as a female comedian.

It's very rare and unusual to see a female comic perform pregnant because female comics don't get pregnant. Just try to think of one, I dare you, there's none of them, once they do get pregnant, they generally disappear, that's not the case with male comics, once they have a baby, they'll get up on stage a week afterwards, and they'll be like, guys, I just had this fucking baby, that baby's a little piece of shit, it's so annoying and boring, and all these other shitty dads in the audience are like, that's hilarious i identify and their fame just swells because they become this relatable family funny man all of a sudden meanwhile the mom is at home chapping her nipples feeding the fucking baby and wearing a frozen diaper because her pussy needs to heal from the baby's head shredding it up she's busy and.

She brings it back to a joke which is like you know in nanette hannah's talking about quitting comedy in Baby Cobra. She's talking about trying to retire as soon as possible. Like she wants to stop working.

Well, so that's the interesting thing from a screenwriting perspective as well, because so much of Ali Wong's special is about the typecasting that her audience, and particularly America, is very racially aware. I started stand-up when I was living in New York and so many of the jokes that are told are racial. And certainly they were in 2009 when I was there. It was an incredible thing to see as part of the culture. It's an obsession within the culture of people being very conscious of their demographic within that society in a way that, although Australia has its kind of racist issues, I don't think we have that quite as much, or certainly not to that degree, of people performing or understanding themselves as their demographic rather than just as a person. And that all ties in with these ideas about privilege and so on that we can go into or out of, but let's say that this tendency exists in the American audience too, so that they will look at Ali Wong and they will think that they'll cast her in their mind as a type. And most of her jokes are playing against that type. So it's a thing that I don't know if you can do as much as a screenwriter because so much of it, casting is about casting the right people who fit these types, who tell the story with their presence or their face or what they look like. But that's one of the great things that you get to do in a special is if you understand how the audience sees you, you can play with or against that story.

So what do you, like in terms of her humour, like I've watched the special three times now. Her brand of disgusting humour really does appeal to me. But she's got a running line about HPV.

But I did it on purpose. because I knew that he was a catch. So I was like, all right, Allie, you gotta make this dude believe that your body is a secret garden. When really, it's a public park. That's true. That has hosted many reggae fests and has even accidentally let two homeless people inside.

She's using these bits that seem kind of outside of the theme, but she does keep bringing it back to that structure in a way that I was very impressed by. And that I can now see it after hearing what you've said, Alice, how there are two kind of different formats to it. And I can see how this kind of fits. But when I watched it the first time, I kind of felt like it was like an Edinburgh special. Like it felt like one story with just like tangents.

I mean, it is. It is very much a cohesive story. And that's due to, you know, her putting it together as a special like that. I think that is a tendency now more and more in the American specials to come more towards this long-form storytelling type thing. I think you can see it's interesting because it's still in transition. You can see where the bits are club bits and where the bits are deliberately written to be interstitial or storytelling or connecting tissue. But she is such a consistent performer and her voice is so clear that it all works cohesively to tell the story that she is telling, which is about how women should be, how relationships should be, what women should be interested in. The idea that all you want is to get married and have kids and, you know, retire. And she's simultaneously telling that story and going against that story.

The one bit where it felt really transgressive for me was none of the actual body humour. It was her bit around housewives and feminism.

I think feminism is the worst thing that ever happened to women. Our job used to be no job. We had it so good. We could have done the smart thing, which would have been to continue playing dumb for the next century and be like, we're dumb women. We don't know how to do anything. So I guess we better just stay at home all day and eat snacks and watch Ellen.

And I was just like sitting there like laughing, but also like, am I allowed to laugh at this?

And that was something that got passed around, like either as viral marketing or because people took it without context. Because I think the recontextualization she does at the end, the punchline is to make you recontextualize everything that she's just said, right? It's not an emotional one, but it's a intellectual kind of reversal at the very end of the special. I do want to kind of like dive a little bit deep because it also connects to the rhythm, right? The club bit versus the storytelling bit. Because for some reason, the way I would describe the rhythm of the Ali Wong special is it's a lot more like super fast jazz. It reminds me of like Jimmy Smith, you know? It feels like it's really fast and they just riff on this idea and they go, we're just going to explore this idea. And then it comes back to the drum beat and then it goes on this other like solo and it comes back. but whereas the Hannah Gadsby is a little bit more symphonic right like it's a feel like maybe you've got it in my head because you've described it as a fugue and I'm like she.

Described it as a fugue I didn't even know what the word fugue was so just.

It's casting me my mind back when I studied music composition and wanted to be a composer and and that structural stuff and Ali Wong feels more like yeah she's just riffing on an idea and explores it and she introduces like a simple joke right and then she kind of builds on the joke and builds on the trick which is building the tension she's tightening the spring to come and or as you you know she's loading the gun but i think maybe now as i think about it's like you crank it tighter and tighter she takes something simple and makes it then turns it into the disgusting joke right and then pushes it into, uncomfortable territory i'm sure that bit i would be surprised if that bit about feminism is halfway through the show or close to 40 minutes when people are getting restless and she's actually, playing with the rhythm of it there by pushing people into a place where they're either like oh yeah, or like, I can't believe she's saying this, probably is at that point to re-energize people. So what is the... Kind of difference between the club stuff and the kind of written stuff, Alice, that you can kind of feel? Because you're the expert here in terms of you've got to have an instinctive reaction to that stuff.

I would find it difficult to describe it unless we were sitting in front of it watching it. But there are these self-contained bits in there that you can feel. As you say, there's a joke and it's introduced, it's unpacked, it's explored to its nth degree, and then it's resolved and brought back i would say i i don't know ali wong's process whether she has enough people to have done full uh however many full previews before she did the show but i imagine that certainly at least each of those bits was done in a club as a bit as a self-contained piece that it holds itself together and it kind of is satisfying in itself and then all those are put all next to one another and then there's these interstitial bits that connect them.

I'll be like, doing anything look at that housewife just walking around all day getting massages and her lululemon pants like that bitch is a genius she's not a housewife she's retired I do write for fresh off the boat on ABC yeah which is, it's a great show I love it a lot I love my co-workers it's a great writing staff And in terms of day jobs, it's probably one of the best you could ask for. But I still got to work at an office.

Yeah. I think it's Robert Bresson who was like, a movie is three good scenes and no bad ones. It's like maybe a comedy show is three good bits and no bad ones.

Well, I think I would say the bits where she returns to the reprise are the connective tissue. And then the bits where she's exploring a joke are the more clubby bits.

Okay. So you've just used a rhetorical term here. And this is great because this is cool. Like reprise. What are you talking about by reprise?

I'm talking about returning to the theme, reprising or repeating the chorus.

Yeah, which is about when she met her husband. Would you see that as one of them? Yes.

Yeah, absolutely. That's the skeleton of the show. That's the bit that all the other things are attached to.

Don't try to tell me to get my shit together when I heard you not have your shit together. My father-in-law had this huge sit down with me and my husband recently and he was like hey i want to talk to you guys about money you guys need to make a lot more money if you want to provide your children with the same kind of privileged childhood that you guys had, like, why are you telling me this shit? I should not be a part of this conversation. You tell your son that. Don't you understand that I trapped your son for his earning potential?

And by returning to that central theme, she makes those bits relevant, which they might not otherwise be, but she ties them back in.

It makes the audience think they're relevant and look for ways for them to be relevant, which is a structure you can use in a feature. I mean, a lot of features people can see, you can write stuff that's really episodic, which may be an epic.

Or sequence-based.

Yes. So, you can have stuff that, I mean, and we've talked about it, the Pixar stuff is very sequence-based, right? And they'll do, here's the horror sequence, here's the heist sequence. They do genre, really genre-driven sequences. And yet, because they're really thematically driven, they can kind of get away with stuff that's quite episodic in some ways, right? Like literally changing genres in the middle of the film. And I guess like Fast, I haven't seen the new Fast and the Furious because it could be such a good counterpoint because it just, it just like there's a bit, there's an action, all the rock. We watched that with, uh, for our lockdown movie. And it's just like, why is this car chasing here? It's literally the equivalent of a bit, right? It's like, we need to do this cool thing and we'll just connect it to, to the main trunk of the story and people will be, just go with it.

I mean, the thing that I've always loved about the Fast and the Furious series is the car choreography. Because I was always a big Hong Kong action movie fan for the fight choreography and the way that they can tell the stories with this camera cinematography and the movement of the cars and you follow the narrative, even though it's just cars driving presumably fast. I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the other thing is the kind of transition that she uses, right? Because I think if we can kind of, if there's any observations, that would be fantastic. Otherwise, it's like, yeah, it does this thing. Yes, it does it very well. Cool. You know, obviously, if she's doing that kind of like, here's the main theme, the trunk, and then we're doing these little bits that are branching off and we're kind of connecting in or that she's building, I guess it's more specifically the bits. The bits feel like she's transitioning, right? They've got really tight transitions between ideas.

There was one where, like in terms of transitions, the one that really stood out to me as not, as being bit driven is she had resolved a bit and there was a big laugh and then she comes in with so I'm pregnant and there's no connective tissue whatsoever so it was clear like one section finished and another section started and the reason why that jumped out at me is it was one of the few moments where it felt like that like of that American style like I'm moving from one section into another one and I'm you know almost starting from scratch as it were yeah.

And again And I'm purely speculating on her methodology, but I can imagine her walking on stage at Caroline's in New York and going, so I'm pregnant and getting that big laugh at the beginning of a set and doing the rest of that bit as her set.

The bits that stand out to me, you know, is the one where she's describing her body as a public park that's had two homeless people sleeping in it.

And then she riffs on that to tell a story about the time she's met a homeless person. Yeah. So, building on that idea.

Where she is talking about, you know, she's glad that her husband is Asian so they can be racist together. Like, there's an extended bit about racism.

But i think that for marriage it can be nice to be with somebody of your own race the advantage is that you get to go home and be racist together, you get to say whatever you like you don't gotta explain shit my husband half filipino half Japanese. I'm half Chinese and half Vietnamese. And we spend 100% of our time shitting on Korean people. It's amazing.

She's got a whole lot of stuff with her mom. And then leading up to the end, so after the housewife bit, which I think you're right, Sue, I think she's deliberately placed that, that very transgressive, awkward section, you know, around that lull, because then she starts talking, you know, almost like workplace observational humor. She starts talking about her job as a writer on Fresh Off the Boat.

Which undermines this very story, because she's talking about how the dreamy women, and you're like, wow, you are a really important, you know, you're telling a story about Asian Americans. You're a writer in that. Like, that's incredibly empowering. and she places it specifically after the story where she says that feminism is the worst thing that happened to women.

Well, I feel I almost have to undermine the joke at the end because the punchline, I'm not going to say what the punchline is, but the punchline is that she is working, right? That's the recontextualization of the whole bit about she's looking to retire, she's looking to not work anymore, and the punchline is she has a job.

She doesn't just have a job, it's that she's successful at it and she's got economic independence.

Yes, and I think that's one of the... So with Ali Wong's special, I think one of the interesting things she plays with is honesty and truth. Because she says these really transgressive things and you're never sure if she means them. And often she is talking against these narratives. You just said she's very happy that her husband is Asian so they can be racist together. That is an example of she's playing against an assumption that the audience has, which is that Asian people have racism at them. They don't put racism out. So the joke is not the joke that you think it is necessarily. It's not the joke that's on the surface. It's also playing with a kind of these currents that are working in society around her. So where she appears to be being very, very explicit and aggressive, I think often she's being quite subversive.

Sue and I have been debating what is theme for a while now, and we actually had a reader of one of our most recent scripts kind of question the theme of the script because the lead character's arc didn't dramatise what the movie was about. You know, Sue and I were like, You know, this script is doing very well for us. We're really excited about it. It's getting a lot of good traction. And our theme is actually like around the commentary around it, like the world, the setting, the challenges. But it's not, we're not like having the plot go argument, counter argument back and forth around what the theme is. We're not arguing it through the plot. We're not arguing it through the character journey. It's in our setting more than anything else.

And are you saying that's like Ali Wong?

I think so. Like she, it's like the way she goes about her comedy is the ethos for her is, and the logos is kind of more strong in her stuff than the pathos in contrast to Nanette.

She is very self-aware. She is very conscious of the narratives that are being brought onto her by her audience. And, and she is using those, what the, what the audience has brought in. And she's using that as part of the material that she's playing with and playing against. And so there's these two stories that are happening at the same time. And this constant question of whether she means what she's saying. She's casting herself as the villain or the anti-hero. But as you've seen in this kind of modern trend for anti-hero movies, the audience sympathizes with her and empathizes with her.

She's literally calling herself the baby cobra. I just kind of realized, I was like, what's that got to do with anything? Now I'm like, oh, this is pre-contextualizing, nice.

So, yeah, she's playing with that. And even within that, with the kind of ideas of agency for women and for Asian women and for pregnant women and the ideas of sexuality, you know, just even wearing leopard print, a tight leopard print bodycon dress while pregnant is a statement. It tells a story and it tells a counter story at the same time. I see that as very much part of the show, how she's chosen to dress. Yeah.

The tension of the show, coming back to Hannah's thing, she's creating a tension that she's cutting and she literally cuts it at the end. But it is interesting that you're talking about like Hannah's got this misidentity as a structural element and you've been talking about the truth and the honesty as this structural element. And I think it's interesting because what we didn't do in our script is that we had all this social commentary, but that commentary didn't actually appear in the final scene. It had been existing through the bulk of the second story, but we added just this tiniest moment that reminded the audience... Of the, of the social commentary. And it made it so much work, but it made them go, oh, that's what it's all about. It's like, that's what we've been saying for like, we've been telling you, we told you, and we were telling you.

For a hundred pages, but we didn't put it on page 101.

You know, it's that idea. You tell people what you're going to tell them, then you tell them, and then you tell them what you just told them. And it's like, that's what we didn't do. We didn't tell them what we just told them.

What's the, it's the Betty Crocker cake mix situation, I think, is the real question for all art creation, maybe.

Okay, I like this, go on.

So they used to, the original Betty Crocker cake mix was just powdered cake mix and you added water and it was very unpopular because at that time housewives were mostly making things from scratch and this convenience was, it felt too impersonal. So then they took out an egg from the recipe and the powder. So you add water and an egg and all of a sudden it becomes this best-selling product that is still immensely popular today. So, I mean, that is the question, I think, is how much work... Do you let the audience do? How much work do you demand of the audience? How far do you guide them? And how much do you tell them? Because at a certain point, it's the Betty Crocker cake with the powdered egg inside. There's no interest for the audience. They're not engaged because you're doing all the work for them. There has to be space for them to come in and bring their egg and feel part of it, which is one of the things that the screen makes more difficult, that intimacy of them being in the room. It's very easy to make them feel like they are necessary for the journey of the show. They are compulsory for the journey of the show. If they don't laugh, the show doesn't work. Whereas you can't pretend that with an audience that is not present temporarily in the room. So you have to find ways to give that proxy, whether it's by making space in the show, whether it's through the use of camera angles and lighting, choices that you make ways that you break up narratives that they might be bringing in that you let them do some of the work.

Yeah i mean that's a constant tension in all screenwriting is like how on the nose should this dialogue be do i have to say it can we like have it for the in the script for the reader so the reader gets it but we know it's going to be cut in the edit later because audiences will get it when two people are performing it like it's that constant So.

That is huge in terms of transferring Savage to the screen, because I am used to saying all the things with my mouth.

Can you, I mean, it feels like it's all the rage, even though it's at least 500 years old. Can you use soliloquies like Fleabag?

Well, I thought about all of these things, but one of the things that you have to learn or that I have had to learn or am still in the process of learning is how much you can show because I have to create the whole scenario with my voice and I have to explain where I'm coming from and all of that if I'm on stage, if I'm the only person on stage. Whereas you can do things with actors and setting and screen and things can be told in a glance. I don't have to say certain things, which is super interesting because I already think of Savage as a very restrained, very held back, very withheld, very thin story. And so at the same time as I'm building this kind of visual world and this performance world and all these characters and everything, which feels like adding a lot, there's also all this wordage, wordage, verbiage that I have to take away or that I can take away, that I should be taking away. So it isn't just somebody saying, hello, I am a stand-up comedian. Like...

I think this will let us transition into Daniel, I think, but I think Baby Copper does it. We brought up the park thing a few times. Something that I've been thinking about is all of them have to use imagery in the words that they say, right? That they've all got visual systems in what they talk about, right? Hannah comes back to the tea in the saucer a few times, and then we actually visually see it. Baby Copper, she's got these stories that have been around visuals. I think Daniels, in particular, is really good at creating pictures with words.

As love, for example, thrives on a delusion of uniqueness. We all like to tell ourselves that our love is different, our love is special, our love is unique. How dare the plebeian monsters that roam the streets use the same word for their TikTok tin hearts that I use for my capacious, thudding monster of affection. How dare they? How dare they? Let us march upon utopia, my sweet. When other people talk of love, they may as well talk of turnips and trousers for all they know.

And something I think as screenwriters that we don't think about enough with dialogue. We think about imagery that we see, that we write in action lines, but we don't necessarily think about the images that characters conjure with their words. And that is also related to dialogue, okay? I don't know if Ali Wong does it, but obviously Daniel and Hannah both play characters.

Ali puts on her Asian and her mum a lot as well.

I mean, it's that whole heightened dialogue. The dialogue is not naturalistic, right? And so you get this interesting tension with the kind of casual storytelling of the stand-up comedian with these clearly artificial characters, right? And how they can kind of heighten it to an essence. And it's just so interesting to see that on screen. I'm not sure if there's a lesson to take beyond the heightenedness of dialogue. But the imagery that they use and how that imagery can kind of be passed around and becoming a unifying element, like the fireworks in Daniel's work and in Baby Copa. I mean, there's obviously the visual imagery of her pregnant, and she actually knows that she's got a lot of really abject stories. Like, part of her challenge and that honesty and truth is how much she loves talking about bodily fluids, right?

She conjures a lot of mental images.

I also decided to have a kid because I'm only 33, which I know is not technically high risk. but my body was starting to show signs of change. And it scared me. Like, I'm only 33, and my pussy is not as wet as it used to be. It's very demoralizing, okay? Do you remember when you were 18 years old and your pussy was just sopping wet all the time? All the time, you just took it for granted that you could just reach your hand down your pants at any given moment. You throw up the peace sign afterwards and there would be that snail trail in between your fingers. Oh my God, it was so juicy. You could just blow a bubble wand with it. Just, ah!

It's transgressive it's abject and it's interesting and i think i can only speak from my experience with being a male it's it's that access the interiority the intimacy of something that is normally that people don't feel comfortable about right somehow it's the male comedians can talk about bodily fluid but it feels progressive when female comedians don't but it's really visual strong language that creates pictures in your head.

Yeah yeah and certainly that that one of the things that you sort of have to be aware of is that the words somebody's saying are not necessarily what they mean and and that the performance is sometimes playing against you know the villain speech where they talk about how they only want the best for everyone is is important and i think that's one of the reasons why i called for a lot of these long shots where you can see my whole body because there's jokes that i deliver in Savage that I am pulling away from physically as I deliver them. And that physical awkwardness is an important part of what you're telling.

So with going into Daniel's special, It's the Fireworks Talking, I can rattle off some things I think it has very much that it does the same as Hannah and Allie and yourself, Alice. But then I'm really interested to hear what you found to be so mind-openingly different in terms of how stand-up works. So, do you mind if I jump in with what it does the same? So, again... The title of the show is also like what his opening line is about and he repeats it a lot. He comes back to the topic of fireworks a lot and then concludes cathartically by bringing it back to the fireworks to round out the show. He also is very aware, not just of himself, but also of the, like, there's two moments that really stood out for me. Like you said he's got a stutter which for his brand of comedy is quite astonishing because he speaks at a breakneck pace and a lot of his comedy is not about they're not necessarily jokes or even observations that are funny it's how he articulates very mundane things talking at a breakneck speed with an amazing uh turn of phrase so for him to have a stutter like he does stutter quite considerably at one point early on, and he calls it out as a- as a joke.

It's a complex feeling, you know. And for me, for sort of a city of Edinburgh, by the way, it would appear my stutter is going to play up a bit tonight, so the initial timing estimates may have been optimistic.

And then there's one point where he looks like he's made a mistake, covered for his mistake and told a joke or, you know, made a silly observation and everyone laughs. And then he points out that he did that on purpose.

It was about two years after, not two years, about two weeks after Bonfire Night. Two years after Bonfire Night, of course, is Bonfire Night. Now, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. That looked improvised, didn't it? I looked like I made a mistake and I corrected it with wit and verve. That wasn't improvised. That is now the 60th time I've done that.

And it makes everyone feel awkward. Like even you can feel it, even in the audio, like that it doesn't get a laugh, that he points out that he's like controlling their reactions. In the same way that Hannah does the same commentary of like, I'm in control.

Yeah. It kind of connects us back to that ethos thing that they kind of pull, they take the mask of the wizard, so to speak. I'm mixing so many metaphors there, destroying.

They're also doing something that is an observation about what the audience is thinking that makes the audience feel exposed and revealed. Because by saying, I did that on purpose and I'm in control, they're also saying, I know that you didn't think I was in control I know that you underestimated me and I know why you underestimated me and then they're also relying on the fact that they are, likable in this way that plays on the perceived low statusness to reassert itself and give them back that power of the audience even though they've showed their hand and Even though I've showed you how this magic trick works, you are going to fall for it again. And that says something about you as an audience.

Which is exactly, Bo Burnham does the same thing we pointed out with that song about like, you're looking at your phone, it's having a commentary on the audience. Does Ali do it in Baby Cobber? Is there, I mean, I suppose the feminism speech maybe because you're sitting there listening to a pregnant woman who was delivering a stand-up show, who's clearly working while pregnant, telling a story about feminism being bad for women. But I don't think she has anything that quite makes the audience, it makes us uncomfortable.

I think she does it in a sort of a slightly step to the side way in that all of her jokes are a joke about how the audience sees her and how she is not what the audience thinks she is. And even though she's kept telling you about this HPV or this or that, you still keep projecting these ideas of what a woman should be and what an Asian woman should be and what a pregnant woman should be. So this comes as a shock every time. So she's doing the same thing in a slightly different way.

She just doesn't have to call out how she's controlling the audience. She just is controlling the audience. She just doesn't stop to point out to them that she's doing it. Yeah, so I was just going to ask you, Alice. So I've kind of seen the similarities, I guess, in the work that we've looked at. But what to you stood out as it opened up? stand-up for you?

Well, for me, I think I hadn't been exposed to a lot of stand-up. I had some pretty basic ideas of what stand-up was, which was club sets, wear... Men tell dick jokes you know that I hadn't until that point seen stand-up that was even trying to be art I was trying to talk about something in a beautiful way I was trying to elicit emotions other than shock and laughter that was trying to really do this thing that Daniel Kitson has been so influential for which is tell these beautiful stories that that aren't about him, necessarily they're about the human experience and that they make the audience feel more human which is kind of my project in all the work that i do is i want people to feel more human and be more conscious of the humanity of the people around them and i at that time thought that the The only way that you could do that was through real art, you know, novel writing or, you know, academia or something that I was drawn to. And yeah, genuinely as an influential moment in my own life, watching that show was like, oh, this is a really interesting way to move people and change the way that they, not change what they think, but change the way that they think.

That's why you're so keen for us to look at it. And I think what is interesting is that he tells anecdotes, but the, like you, the anecdotes aren't focused on him. He introduces characters. He kind of seemingly adopts their voice, but he's able to effortlessly move between him as the character and him as an observer. But he's also aware of his position as an observer. It's awfully done. I mean, I'm trying to, I want to come up with more specific techniques. I'm looking at Chaz over Zoom to see if he's like, well, Chaz is like, I've got the list.

The logos, the structure of his show, he starts out talking about how fireworks makes him feel. And then he starts, the show is essentially a list with wonderful branches off to the side of all the things that make him feel that way.

I'm not talking about happiness. Let me be clear on that. I'm not talking about happiness. That's not too simplistic, you know, too mainstream, too bland a feeling for me. I'm not talking about happiness. I'm talking about happiness tinged with melancholy joy entwined with despair. That's what I'm talking about. That sort of wonderful moment where it suddenly hits you that you're alive, but you also realise that does mean you will one day die.

And he ends up near the end of the show re-describing those moments as moments and like defines moments as being different from a second. You know, Alice, when you said, you know, he doesn't really talk about himself, I'm like, wow, I felt such intimate connection with him because he is telling me the things that make him feel the way that I want to feel. He's prompting in me constantly what makes me feel that exact same way.

Yes. And that is more intimate because you're not asking somebody to come and look at your face. Yeah. Which is necessarily in a mirror. So you've already got these layers between you and them. If you're telling someone a story about you and what am I like, you're telling them how you think you appear to, you know, there's these layers. Whereas if you're asking someone to come and look through your eyes, even though you're not telling them about you, I feel it as a much more intimate way of storytelling.

Question for you, Chaz. Did you listen to it on headphones or did you play it through speakers?

Headphones. I was out walking.

I mean, I'm just, it's a tangent. It's a branch off our trunk. But because you work in podcasts, I just think there's also, I wonder if it's just the effect of watching stand-up on a television, versus watching stand-up or listening to stand-up as a podcast that changed the intimacy, right? There's looking at the screen, a speaker's over there, whereas having headphones always feels more intimate in terms of spoken word.

So that's one of the reasons why I was super reluctant to do Savage as a screen special, because I'd already done the trilogy podcast, which is Savage, The Resistance and Empire, three shows that I did that are all on the same theme, different explorations. I had already done them as a podcast with the ABC and I did them with binaural microphones, so that it's essentially surround sound and I don't know if it had been done for comedy before I know it had been done for action audio but that you feel like you're sitting in the audience and if you listen with your eyes closed you can hear people laughing around you and for me that was sort of a much quote-unquote better replication of being in the audience than you can get with a with a screen special and so so much of the way that i asked them to film that special was trying to compensate for, the distance created by the screen.

I mean, obviously you're related to this guy, Chaz. You've been middle-aged since you were 17. So there's definitely a connection.

So, you know, one of his moments was just him driving in the back of a car late at night down English country lanes. And that is one of my moments as well. I remember my parents getting plastered at one of their friend's houses. Hopefully one of them wasn't plastered as they drove us home. But I like, I know the feeling of looking out the car window when i'm supposed to be asleep in a car as i'm driving home down an english country lane i've also been dumped by waves uh on australian surf beaches and so he's got like an extended bit about.

I know i know what to do daniel don't panic i've won the wave and now you're outside i've under the wave and now you're outside daniel do not panic daniel dive under the wave and now you're outside what i didn't know is if if the waves already start to break on top of you you can't dive under the wave and now you're outside if you try to do that what you're essentially doing is presenting yourself to the wave and asking the wave if he wouldn't mind awfully fucking your face into the sand.

It comes back to his dad that he's tying it back to, but it's also about mortality and being aware of your own existence and things like that. So maybe it is just my personal experience of relating to him.

His choice of language also in terms of advice for screenwriters is like colour grading. The language that he uses and the height of the language that he uses the elaborateness of the language that he chooses in each scene shades the scene. So he can tell a knockabout joke with quite simple vocabulary. Then those are the jokes that come across as like, he's your mate in the pub, which you've commented on. There's also these incredibly elaborately worded, beautiful word pictures of the experience of, for example, seeing fireworks or birds. Being at night in the car of your parents, going home, knowing that you ought to be asleep. And I'd forgotten that, but there's a bit that I have in Empire, which is the third in my trilogy where I talk about pretending to be asleep so your parents carry you out of the car. I think that's such a human experience.

Well, I mean, going to Daniel's special, like, he's clearly got a structure, like he brings us back to it, but it doesn't feel, like it feels essential for that catharsis you have at the end because it is just building and building building on that emotion to then pull it off at the end but it doesn't doesn't feel essential to make to his skill set to maintaining my interest over an hour he could just talk at me about a series of unrelated unstructured things in his amazing turn of phrase and i would be engaged the entire time and i think people there are there are clearly screen storytellers who rely very heavily on the moment to moment experience like in terms of terms of phrase yep um well i was actually going to go like tarantino and diablo cody in terms of just we can just sit and hear their characters talk and that is entertaining while nothing might be happening right um which is not to say they're not masters of what is also happening in the background but that's they've got that tool set of just um turns of phrase but we're, You said Richard Linklater, Stu. So, he keeps you engaged moment to moment.

Yeah. I mean, what do you think is keeping you engaged in it before Sunrise?

Oh, yeah.

You know, and most of his films are those kinds of moment by moment people. Oh, boyhood. Like, they're all seemingly anecdotes connected by this thread, right? In his film. Oh, do you disagree, Alice?

No. So, this is just a side of what might seem like a complete side tangent. It was a piece of advice that I got about satirical comedy by Benedict Hardy, who was at that point directing the Arts Review and is now quite a famous Hollywood actor. But he said about doing political sketches that even if people don't get the joke, it still has to be funny. So say, for example, if I'm to tell a joke about what happened in the news today, even if people don't know that news story, the joke still has to work. So there has to be some rhythm to it some pace to it or something about the way that you deliver it or something about the the containing within it the seeds of its own logic that it will work even if you haven't watched the news today so either you can set up do it in the setup you can explain the story in the setup or it has to be about the way that you deliver it and, your tone of voice or your tone of phrase that makes it funny yeah.

Oh he is a master of humour through just language. Like he turns nothing into laughs, like in terms of the thing that he's talking about isn't funny.

Yeah, he's so good at words that he creates these pictures. And even if you had never gone home in your parents' car pretending to be asleep, you would understand that experience and it would be heartwarming, and it would make you feel this nostalgia because it's so imbued in the language and, as I said, the vocabulary and the tone is this colour grading that conveys the mood.

Is there anything technical that he's doing in terms of the language? We're talking about word pictures. So he's obviously using strong imagery, but there is anything more technical, anything rhythmic, anything structural in the kind of sentences? Is he using mirrored structures? Is he using building structures where, you know, you take that idea and you build on that, you know, it's a house, a big house, it's a big, bright, I'm just making that up in the spot. I'm trying to give structural examining.

He's using very specific and precise language where in vernacular speech, you might use an approximation or a more common word just to be more comfortable or because you can't reach for the word in the moment. He is using the exact right word you know he won't say a screwdriver he would say exactly which screwdriver it was it's a phillips head or it's a he he go he this microscopic in terms of what he's doing is a very close focus on the specifics of each scene that make it seem uh like if you're thinking in filmic terms it's hyper realized it's hyper focused it's almost slow motion it's very intense and that that specificity of language and the rapidity with which he delivers it the smoothness with which he delivers it gives you this feeling of intensity and and hyper hyper real reality and it's a very arresting way of using words.

It's the fireworks talking. He's even got a moment where he calls out.

Like, Occasionally during the course of the show, I will lend voice to your collective internal monologue. And when I do that, I may insert words you wouldn't ordinarily have conversational access to, like folly. You're very welcome. Thank you, Daniel. That's remarkably perspicacious of you. Yes. How typical of an audience to slightly misuse the word perspicacious.

Yeah, yeah, he does. He does draw attention to the thing that he's doing. Yeah, so again, you can say, I picked up a screwdriver and screwed in the screw. Or you can say, I picked up a seven and a half inch Phillips head screwdriver with a black and white striped handle. And it becomes a completely different scene.

It's almost like what ASMR does. But with, like, word pictures. And the other thing you're saying is playing with status, right? And we haven't, we've done an episode on status, but, like, many years ago. And sadly, Chaz and I's status has not really changed the intervening seven years. But it's interesting because, you know, it's something that I think theater people talk about. Maybe comedy. I picked it up because of doing improv and Keith Johnston's book on improv. And then yet it's not talked about that much, at least in Australian filmmaking circles, maybe because we're not as socially aware of status in this country, or we just don't have that background. But you've talked about it a lot with all of these performance playing with status. Is he doing any kind of status shifts in his storytelling?

Knowing yes absolutely all of the time all of the time uh all comedy is playing with status one way or another and it again depends also on which country you're doing it in that will affect the way that you play your status on stage and it will also affect because it will also affect what, assumptions people make about you coming onto stage you don't want to play too low status because then people feel sorry for you and they can't laugh you don't want to play too high status because then people think, who the fuck do you think you are? So it's this line of being high status but puncturing that or letting people in to be on your side. So, yeah, Daniel does it a lot in that he is so dominant on stage in the way that he presents all of his stories. He's so in control of the audience and he will occasionally draw attention to that but he's very capable of playing it down as well. His use of the stammer, for example, is a really good example. It's a thing that could be an impediment but he... He absolutely knows how to deal with it and the ways in which it affects the delivery and the ways in which he can recover from that all play into his status on stage.

And him shifting between that kind of more simplistic is just a guy at the pub telling a joke and him going into those kind of really highly detailed word pitches is kind of, I would say, and look, status is culturally based, I would suggest. I don't want to say I would say, but there's definitely cultural implications to it. And I would say using those kind of more complicated word structures is high status.

Yes, absolutely.

Like we've talked about status, not just in like status shifts and how that can like drive energy into a scene by like changing status. But, you know, as Stephen Cleary has talked about it in our dialogue thing, like different people will talk in different ways to other characters, depending whether they're feeling high status or low status in relation to them. So just an awareness of that in any kind of scene writing will make the scene inherently more interesting and make your characters feel more individuated.

You can absolutely change how a character, if a character is a villain or a hero, by bringing in someone higher status or lower status than them and having the way that they interact with that new person change. So you can have someone who's seemingly lovely and then they treat a serving person badly and you know they're a villain. Equally, you know, you can have somebody who seems in control and is very reassuring and comforting and then someone comes in who's higher status than them and you see them behaving as a sycophant and you immediately lose respect and they can never regain that status. And you can do that in stand-up all the time, in everything.

In fact, some of the kind of shifts in character voiceover, like I'm just thinking about like casting our mind back to Hannah when she plays those characters, there's a status shift in the characters.

But in all the debate about homosexuality, no one ever really talked about the lesbians. Do you know? Like, it's all the gay men. They're the problem. Anal sex, that's when the devil will get you. But lesbians, they're like, no. What even are they? What they do, they really?

You know, she is doing these shifts of people and the way that then she is interacting with the world, I guess.

And then by definition, by telling the story, you are automatically the most high-status person in it because you're the one who has the control of the story.

Yeah, and I was thinking about that with ethos, coming back to what, because we talked about it before, but let's come back to it. Like Daniel's ethos, if he is kind of being a documentarian, telling these other people anecdotes, mostly focused on other people, how is he positioning himself as the framing device? What is his voice on these moments? Is that he, is it this hyper real, there's that great line.

Increasingly, as human beings, we're disengaged from the moment, from the actual moment of our own lives. We live retrospectively or aspirationally or increasingly, for me, preemptively retrospectively. That's a new thing. Quite often, I'll find myself in a situation, not engaging with a situation, but already planning how well it's going to work in anecdote form. That is no way to live your life.

How is he positioning himself as the storyteller?

Look, I don't want to speak for Daniel. I could ask him.

I mean, sorry, I'm not talking about this on a process level. I'm looking at it as the text. And this makes it hard because it's stand-up, but really what I'm interested in is how the text presents itself.

In that show specifically, in the fireworks show, it's him or I feel that his ethos is he's going through a scrapbook that he's found in an old bookshelf and you're looking over his shoulder. And so he plays with, oh, look at this old thing that I've just found. And that's the kind of blokey thing. Kind of character, and then he draws you into it, and then he becomes this kind of archivist of human experience who's revealing these things to you in this slightly melancholy, slightly nostalgic way.

That's a great description. It's interesting that you've given his voice, his character voice, an actual character. And I love that because I think if you want to do a lesson, character voice, the person who's telling the story in the big print. So, with character voice, there's how the story is told, capital, structural stuff. But there's also the voice in terms of how it's being told just in the in-between, in the big print. And just thinking of that as having a character is useful. And now having met Shane Black after being such a fan of his scripts and the kind of, like, asides with him, it's like that's obviously a bit of a persona, right? He's literally putting on a persona in the scripts that he writes, you know? Being that kind of like, he is playing the character of the smartass detective, the noir detective in the scripts that he writes. And it's such an interesting idea. And it's great to kind of unpack, because I think you can play with that without necessarily being I. Whatever is in it comes to my mind is we read the pilot of True Detective, right? And the style of that, beyond the dialogue, his style is really commanding on the page. It's like, notice this, notice that. Like, he is issuing you instructions, right? And it's got a personality to it that you could describe as a character in the same way. It's like, oh, it's an archivalist. And I think, you know, if you want to look at a script from the perspective of who is the character that is actually writing the words, I think that could actually be really helpful in terms of character voice. Is there anything else you kind of wanted to say about Daniela? Anything that he's doing, we've talked about status word pitches, transitions. I mean, the transitions just seem with all of them. It's like they have an idea and then they just take one step beyond the idea. I mean.

Yes. I think in the way that you do a show, if you've done it a number of times, everything follows naturally. Everything knocks on, whether it logically ought to or not. It follows on by association in your mind. And so it seems natural. And that's partly just the force of character of the comedian delivering the bit. It makes sense because it's what happens next. Sometimes things happen in a show because they have to have happened by the end of the show.

Yeah. In terms of you being able to get to the point at the end, getting to the pathos.

Yes. Sometimes the setup is just there because it needs to have been there for the punchline to work.

Well i mean we've spoken about we we did a whole i think god three episode run on character motivations in particular when they feel like they don't work and that's because the writer has needed something to happen in the story without like doing the work to make the it ring true for that character in that moment in that story yeah.

I mean i think it's like i can't remember i'm going to attribute it to shane black but it mightn't be he because he talks about setup and payoffs and reversals and he's like on the first draft i write all the payoffs and then the second draft, I wrote all the setups, right? And it feels like he could possibly do the same way in structuring it. Because what I think the big thing I've taken away from this, and it's come from you, Alice, is ethos, logos, and pathos. I think they're all forms of theme. The way that screenwriters think about theme is actually all those things intermingled, right? And if you want your writing to be better, being conscious of the ethos. Who the person is telling the story, as we heard from Ali Wong, is part of what the thing is about, right? Okay, it doesn't have to be, but it can be. You've got Logos, which is the overall structure, can be what the theme is about. And even though we didn't talk directly to Inside, the structure of Inside, the way it's structured, is what it is about. more than the ending itself. But even Nanette does that beautifully, right? It's about the tension and release and then her very structure of joke and then the serious part and then joke serious part and I'm just going to leave you on the serious part is part of what it is about, is the theme. And then you've got the pathos which is how it all brings together and makes you go, what is it all about? It's actually what it is all about. But it's not just about your ending. And I think for me that is super insightful because I can sit there and go... Because I definitely think structure is theme. And I look at a film like Zero Dark Thirty that is supposedly anti-torture, and I'm like, the whole structure opens with torture, right? Oh, it's anti-torture. No, you open with them torturing someone to get information, you end with that information leading to them getting Osama Bin Laden. The structure of the film, the text itself, says torture works, right? Regardless of what the externality of the filmmakers are. And the ethos of that film doesn't cut against that, right? The storytelling of that film doesn't undermine its own structure.

And the people whom you are meant to care about as well, the pathos, who you're meant to identify with in that movie and who you're meant to care about in that movie doesn't cut against that message either.

Yeah. So the externality of the author intent, I'm someone who's, weirdly, as a screenwriter, is someone who doesn't care about author's intent. Because I think as soon as you think film should be about the author's intent, it makes your work lazy. Yeah.

That's the great thing about comedy. You might think it's a joke, but the audience will tell you if it's a joke or not.

Yeah. You know, and they have to laugh at it without knowing what, without having to get it, which I actually think is really super insightful as well. This idea that people have to understand it without having to understand it. That having a highfalutin theme, right, that may connect to bigger ideas, if they, if, if it still has to be funny.

It has to work even if they don't necessarily get the other stuff around it or what you're trying to say.

And I think all of these stand-ups all use these three things as part of how they create meaning and a meaningful – like, that's how they make them funny. But in terms of them being funny and, you know, healing the world literally metaphorically is connected to how they use these three elements.

Yes. Yeah. And I think the satisfaction, I don't know, I can't speak to the other shows, but the satisfaction, a lot of the satisfaction in Savage is in resolving these things that might not have seemed important, but were important. All of my shows, I think, I write like they're detective novels. So things that seem like throwaway things, when you come to the end of the show, when all the threads come together, you go, Oh, that thing actually was really important all along.

The but was really important.

Yeah, everything was really important. Turns out of all the things.

The but was the important part, which is really, you know, everything. I've been watching David Mamet masterclasses, forgive me, and he's been like, everything tends towards the punchline. So he's got a whole thing about, you know, I spent, you know, you ask a comedian what they've been doing all week in America, in LA, and they're like, I've been taking off a few syllables, right? That's it. like all everything is about the punchline and i don't think that's strictly true but what is interesting particularly about what you did in savage is everything connects and was that something that you were i mean now i'm ending with the question even though we're meant to be right but was that something you were conscious of or was it that you put them in there and you had to you were consciously trying to make them integrate them into the end or was it they were naturally because it's in the soup of what you the stone soup.

It was all backwards when i was structuring it after the first trials and was thinking what is this show what am i writing about what am i trying to say the things that i was trying to say were all the difficult things and everything else is just laying the groundwork for people to be able to take it. Either building up the strength of the audience, building up the trust of the audience, or building up these reference points for the audience to understand these stories retrospectively. So, you know, every harmless story is the shell of something that I'm then going to pack with gunpowder and give back to you. And you will accept it because you've held it before as a harmless shell. So whether it's about the story about, what do I call him? I'm trying not to say his real name. at Toby in the Savage special, that at the beginning of the show, which is ostensibly, and it does also work as a status thing. It lowers my status. It shows me as awkward and vulnerable as an opening piece, but it also introduces the idea of the unfinished containing the infinite, this idea that comes back right at the end. And I feel like everything is like that. Everything in the show is like that. I think, well, how can I tell people this thing that I think is important and have them actually listen to and hear it and feel it properly? And it's often about laying that harmless groundwork so they're used to it.

I think in screenwriting, there's a lot of plot recontextualization. Like you lay groundwork, you know, set up and pay off for story things to be surprising or to happen. But I think what all these stand-ups do, these specials do, is they do it for emotional reasons as well. And I think TV is particularly good at that. The current run of like limited series stuff where, you know, you can lay groundwork in episode one that you can recontextualize in episode six. So, I mean, the main thing that I'm taking from this that isn't the theme, because I think that is the big thing. She's hit the nail on the head is I'm going to look for opportunities to lay emotional groundwork for recontextualization later in the story. And also I'm going to be less afraid, I think, look, the different projects will call for different things, but I am... I'm amazed at the ballsiness of telling the audience what you are doing. And I've just recently been rereading a run of comic books called Sex Criminals. I am definitely betraying my sense of humor in this podcast. But there's one bit in like the fourth book of the six, like it's the low point of the run. And the girlfriend says, I want us to stop being criminals. And the boyfriend's response is but it's the premise of the book you know and and it's just such like kind of throwaway line but i think now we're getting so sort of cinema and story literate or audiences are as in particular that you can get away with the obvious or as daniel does like tell the seeming innocuous and just like how you tell it can make it powerful big.

Big mouth i just I'm still making my way last through season four, but they had this line.

Hey, Missy. Oh, hey, Devon. Look, I'm sorry Devin said that stupid shit about your hair on the bus. Yeah, it was not 100. Sure, 100. It's just that I'm really struggling with my racial identity right now. My mom's white, my dad's black. I'm voiced by a white actress who's 37 years old. It's all very overwhelming. Yeah, I hear that.

And then they just kind of walk past it, But they kind of have to acknowledge it, partly because I think they obviously have decided she just stepped back from that role and they're recasting it. But they kind of almost needed to just do the innocuous acknowledgement of, we know this is problematic. We know that you know and something is going to happen. And I think that it's funny because it's transgressive. But it helps you understand, we know we're watching a show. We know it's artificial.

The way that I come on stage in Savage is deliberately not the way you come on stage because I didn't want to have that thing where you're backstage with the comedian who's looking over their notes solemnly and then they come out to the blaze of light and the big announcement. And I didn't want to have that for that show in particular. You ought to have this kind of vulnerability and slight discomfort as a way of inviting the audience in and going, look, I know how this is meant to go and I know how I'm meant to be doing it. But, yeah, and in the end you want all your shows to have that surprise of the first time you watch The Usual Suspects and at the end of the show you're like, ah, Kevin Spacey was a rapist all along.

Wow, I think that is an in point. That is the pathos.

But thank you so much for doing two and a half hours. And I've decided I need to get a master's in narrative rhetoric because I pretend to have the knowledge that you just are able to rattle off. And it's, yeah, thank you so much.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. It was really fun and interesting.

Yeah.

And now for Backmatter.

Okay, so there's something I want to fix that, and then you talked about tension, and that's something that Hannah Gadsby talks about, tension, that, you know, punchlines is you create this tension and then the punchline relieves it, right? So I'm curious now, like the difference between tension on stage versus doing it recorded, how do you feel? Is it just something you feel in the tension or is it something that you purposefully construct when you're doing a live show?

When you're doing a live show, you can construct it live because you have a very clear sense of the audience. It's difficult to describe because it is so intangible, but for comedians it's very palpable and we will talk about it backstage. The vibe of the audience is so strong. So you can feel their breaking point in the room. You can feel where you're losing them or where they're slipping. so it gives you more leeway to push them to take them into interesting places sometimes you don't even need a joke to make get a laugh you just need to play with the with the tension there's there's a joke in the show about Turia Pitt that is the longest the longest joke in the world there's no swearing but it is the most dangerous joke in the show because it is purely about building tension. It's just feeling out the audience and how far I can push this story, building the tension before I get to a very, very fucking harmless punchline. The punchline is way for thin. It is just about the timing and the delivery of this tension.

What it's telling me is that you're conscious of the tension, right? You're sitting there going, I need to tell this joke. I'm going to inflate the balloon and whatever the metaphor is. And then I've got to time it right live. But when you're translating that on screen, How did you think about that? Because obviously screenwriters, we've got to be really conscious of an audience that we can't see or interact with, right? And the art of really good screenwriters and directors and editors, when it all comes together, is that feels effortless, right? And not everyone, like, you can see the divisive nature of a lot of content, the people, it doesn't always work for people. It still comes from somewhere and you've got that advantage that you can feed back. I'm assuming if you've done Savage Habitages of times, it fed into the show and the nature of the show and how you tell that joke. But then how did you change it when you had to put it on screen?

Well, it's an interesting thing having done now a year of Zoom shows. It is this kind of approximation. You kind of go for the safe middle ground of attention. If it were a particular audience in a particular room, if the audience is full of drunkards, you might tell that story a lot quicker. and if the audience is full of people who are on your side and you can just feel the love coming off them, you might push that story further. But for an audience that you cannot feel, you just go with the one that you know is probably going to work. So because you've done it so many times, you have a sense of where those boundaries are on each side, where the lane markers are, and you sort of steer in the middle there. And then also you play off the audience that you have. in the terms of a special, you play off the audience that you have on the night. And that was an interesting thing as well, because I was reluctant to have any audience shots at all. I said, I don't want to see the audience laughing. If you're going to cut to the audience, show them crying. And actually what I said was, if you're going to show the audience, show them along the row, because that weird thing of no one ever turns around and looks full in the face of the audience. Yeah. In because I wanted to have this proxy for the intimacy of the experience of being in the show I was like film over the shoulders of the audience if you want to have that feeling or go sideways I didn't want that from behind shot where you see the audience although in the end I had to negotiate down and they did do a few from behind shots which you know.

Well we're going to talk about interiority and how like this is slightly in how to direct a special not how screenwriters can learn from stand-up specials but your show has a like an audio visual component of the written words of an interview that you conducted and in the special because you got to see you live but I I've only ever seen it on on Amazon but the the words are playing often over the top of a shot of you like the audience in the live show would presumably be reading the words up on a screen behind you, whereas the juxtaposition of hearing the words and being able to read them, but also got that tension from it because we're just sitting watching you be still?

In the original live versions of the show, there was no written component. It was just the lights would go down enough that you could still see me, but not well, and the audio would play. These very small movements that I would make in that darkness to keep focus were all movements that showed me listening, to the thing and gave that indication that you should be listening and that your focus should be on these words that are coming through on the audio and of course that doesn't work on screen you can't just have a black screen for a minute uh with audio playing over it uh without fearing you know losing the kind of the dynamism of the show or that absorption of the show and so that was the kind of compromise that we came to going through the fonts that would be the most the big thing that i fought for was to have the words appear as they are spoken not to have them come up as blocks of text. I didn't want people reading ahead. I wanted that immersive experience of having it come at the same time and appear as in water as well.

Because, I mean, I think that's one of the things with stand-up versus that it's live and not read is that people are reading one word at a time and you've got control of pacing, which is something that filmmakers, in a broad sense, not just screenwriters, have control. Like, that's what we can do is control pacing. For me, you know, screenwriting is about how we can control time and time is like a resource of where we hold attention. We don't want to get into too much bogged in the details of directing a special, but the fact is a writer, like it's a writer can write in a script. We project words on screen, right? And that's a choice. And we can choose not to play it in black or this is how we hold the audience's attention at this moment. They're all things that a writer can do on the page.

Well, in stand-up, the words are the only bit that is sort of explicitly written, but so much of the performance is also in the script. So one example, I don't know if this is relevant for your screenwriting, but the people who directed Savage, who filmed it, were the people who'd done Nanette. And they had very strong ideas about what shots they wanted to use and what shots best conveyed intimacy. And that was basically from the point at which, this was their thesis, from the point at which it becomes intimate, we're going to do a close-up of your shoulders and head. And I said, no, not that we wouldn't have any of those shots, but that I wanted a number of shots of me from quite far back, isolated full body shots of showing me alone on stage quite small, partly because the performance was whole body and the way that my body moved was important to communicating the meaning. It was part of the script and also partly because I thought actually sometimes it is more intimate to see somebody on their own from far away, particularly in emotional moments. You don't ever really, like if you've ever been with a friend who's weeping uncontrollably or sharing something really vulnerable, it's extremely unlikely that you'll be staring them full in the eyes. So the way that my yeah the way that the physicality of that performance that is part of the script is about looking away and where i shield myself and that process of you witnessing me shielding myself is i think more vulnerable and intimate than necessarily being right in up close on my face the.

Bo burnham inside special is absolutely lots of little moments of him in an empty environment wide shot right they use that as a device as a transition device right But it's also about showing that vulnerability and spending alone time with someone. That's a screenwriting idea I've fixated on recently is that I'm often really scared about giving my characters private moments because it slows the story down. You've got to keep the plot pushing forward. And in my film, Restoration, we actually shot... I could say it's now, it's many years later. We shot pickups because I wouldn't shoot that stuff, right? I'd be like, we don't need it. And the editor's like, oh, we need a little moment of just the character at the end of the scene processing. And it's so much better, but sometimes I feel you don't have it. And it can be something that is a wide shot. It sounds like that's something that you're aware of, that idea of the moments that you give the audience of just, for lack of a better word, looking at you.

Yeah which is this odd thing of of being conscious as you perform of how you are perceived, so one of the framing devices i use in the show is i take my mom's rings off i wear them on the middle finger of my left hand my mom's wedding ring and her engagement ring and so the beginning of the show is me taking those rings off because at the time that i'm set the show she's not dead, so for me that's just a small thing and then at the end of the show i put the rings back on and no one would notice that really but it's for me that's really important part of the storytelling of the show is that we're placing ourselves at a particular point in time.

But now that you're you know you're now adapting this same piece again into a longer form but a scripted form for television what have what have you found are the the major challenges or or joys that you found there so.

The major challenge the really core challenge for me is how much of the story I tell. Savage is an illusion of intimacy. I create the illusion of intimacy by giving you very close-up shots of specific moments emotionally or comedically or very detailed vignettes and then I pull quite far back and speak in generalities and the audience comes to me with their own personal intimate moments that they load in their own emotions and that that's the trick of Savage is to appear to be revealing a lot because I'm revealing unusual things that you wouldn't normally reveal. But I don't, for example, ever describe my mum's physicality. I never, there's only one point where I quote her where it's not in her own words. My twin brother doesn't appear in the show at all. My father, I don't think, appears in that show at all. It's a razor thin slice of this very intimate experience and that was all I felt comfortable telling at the time because I didn't want to expose my family. It was very important, as you hear in the audio sections, that mum gives me permission to talk about her. So having to expand that out from this very fine... Story thread which is mostly told through gesture uh to having to unfold a whole world to show what it looks like to to tell these other stories to bring them in or not um that's the real challenge for me how much do i feel comfortable telling how much do i have to fictionalize uh my brother doesn't want to ever be in my stand-up so how do we do that do we have him be part of the show do we recast him do we like all of that is that is the big challenge for me.

I don't understand how you can be a stand-up comic and have a twin brother and not have them be part of your stand-up that must be one hell of a challenge.

Well i i never talk about my uh private life which is weird because people assume that i talk about my private life because i talk about things that most people don't talk about i think of myself as an open book with some sealed sections so like i never I talk about my sexuality or my relationships or my, you know, that, that kind of thing.

I mean, I think it's that illusion of intimacy is a really interesting concept, and that is kind of what we're doing as screenwriters, right? We're creating this illusion of intimacy with these characters, right? And all this stuff kind of alludes to it. People feel that they know Hannah, that they feel like they might know you, that they know Bo, you know, oh, he understands me, you know, and what we're going through. And then Daniel Kitson absolutely feels like he's just a mate telling you stories, you know, anecdotes. And it's that power of the anecdote, I guess, you know, that these really powerfully detailed vignettes give people access or this illusion of intimacy. And then you pull out wider and you can make those connections.

Yes. And then you sort of say, oh, well, they are all true. But then some of them are not true. Some of them are embellished or they're, you know, they're all artistically true. They're all reaching for a deeper truth.

Yeah, and I guess it's that creation of the shtick. It was something I brought up earlier, this idea that there's this kind of a level of a persona that's seemingly constructed that kind of presents the show. And look, that might be, I don't want to speak on behalf of your art, that is it a defense mechanism? Is it just a way of telling the story? But it feels like there is this construction of a persona that is leading us through the show on some extent. And how important, like, does that get changed per show? And is that something you have to be conscious of is if you're translating it to screen on both on the special in terms of the sitcom as well?

Yes. So it's harder to do in the sitcom, to think of yourself as a character and to think of my younger self as a character is a little easier than thinking of my current self as a character. But thinking about the flaws of that person and the blind spots of that person and what makes them interesting. I'm not used to thinking of myself as interesting. I mean the way that I think about it often is that I am not a character in my stand-up I'm the observer and the audience sees through my eyes and that's not true of all stand-ups there's a lot of a lot of stand-ups that are like what am I like and that's their shtick that's their they're conscious of the persona that they are projecting I'd like to be as invisible as possible in the way that I tell stories I I kind of prefer that neutral narrator, character on stage, that you're coming with me and seeing things through my eyes rather than looking at me. That's the way that I think of it. And then, of course, there are incredible stand-ups when all they talk about is themselves. Ali Wong and Nanette both are telling stories about themselves as characters or actors in the world. And that is very effective in what they do. Daniel Kitson doesn't tell stories about himself as much, but he is very much a persona. So having that persona is telling a story about himself.

And that's a lot, like, from a screenwriting perspective, there's a lot of stuff around voice of a screenwriter. So, you know, how much do you want to express the fact that a script has been written in the action lines? You know, so some, for some comedy scripts, they'll tell jokes in the action lines that the audience of the end movie or TV series will never experience. But it's, and also like your choice of words and your turn of phrase and all that kind of stuff. You can write from a persona when you are writing a screenplay as well. As always thanks to our amazing patreons who bring you more draft zero more often and in particular thanks to our awesomest of patreons randy beyond garrett jesse crobb sandra and tom you are all amazing thanks guys.

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