Writing loglines for a comedy
So now I have 120 pages of the funniest damn stuff you’ve never seen and I have to describe it in three or four sentences. How do you convey the witty dialogue, the clever visual gags, the essence of the humor in a logline?
Whenever I write one it ends up sounding like it’s describing an action movie or drama. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
– Jeff in Maplewood
You aren’t going to be able to summarize the visual gags, puns and one-liners in a logline, so don’t try. Rather, you want to distill what’s funny about the idea of your movie. The best practice is to take existing movies and figure out how you’d boil them down if you had to write a logline.
None of these would classify as John’s Best Effort, but they get the point across:
Groundhog Day — Bill Murray gets stuck repeating the same day, again and again. Every day, he tries to do something different, but the next morning everything resets to the way it was.
Shrek — A grumpy ogre and his hyperactive donkey have to save a princess. The world is made up of all the different fairy tale characters, like the Three Little Pigs and the Gingerbread Man.
Clueless — An airheaded but ultimately well-meaning Beverly Hills teenager tries to “makeover her soul” in a riff on Jane Austen’s Emma.
Accept the fact that some movies aren’t so easily summarized. For instance, we never did come up with a logline for Go which sounded actually funny.
Note: Looking up the IMDb summaries for these examples proves that anonymous posters can do better than the pros. For Shrek:
A reclusive ogre and a chatterbox donkey go on a quest to rescue a princess for a tyrannical midget lord.
Damn. It’s the “tyrannical midget lord” that makes it funny.
June 17th, 2005 at 11:59 am
You knew this was coming, John!
A resourceful chick desperate for Christmas cash double crosses a notorious drug dealer in this intertwined tale of tantric sex, feuding soap opera hunk lovers, and pyramid scheme-loving undercover cops.
June 17th, 2005 at 1:35 pm
Not sure where in the world DirectTV gets its taglines from, but the best I ever read was on the dish for Hal Hartleys “TRUST” - atleast part of it read:
An unemployed television repairmen carries around a hand-grenade, just in case.
June 17th, 2005 at 2:04 pm
Though I wouldn’t say I’m any kind of master when it comes to writing loglines, I’ve had to develop the skill somewhat over the years I’ve been reading scripts. So a few comments.
Jeff — you may be having a little trouble with this if the script you wrote is full of funny gags and lines, but is not built on an inherently funny concept. This is certainly possible to do (I think many Woody Allen movies would fall into this category, for example), but is definitely a harder pitch. Though I never do it, you might try keeping the logline straight with the simple added words “an [adjective] comedy” somewere in the logline, as an identifier. I don’t do it because I’m not pitching the script I write loglines for, and there is another spot where I specifically identify genre. So there’s no reason for me to. But it might work well for your purposes.
Also, in general on loglines: I always try to keep my loglines to one sentence, 20 words or under (though I think 25 is certainly acceptable). When you have to do this, you’d be amazed at how much is extraneous. By now it is a rare film that I can’t summarize in 20 words.
Start with the main character and basically just summarize his or her central plight. I forget which blog I saw this on recently (Thinking Writer? Complications Ensue? Somewhere else?), so my apologies to the writer, but I saw a nice little formula. It went something like: “A _____ must _____ in order to ______.” That pretty much summarizes any good logline, I think!
June 19th, 2005 at 3:03 pm
It went something like: “A _____ must _____ in order to ______.� That pretty much summarizes any good logline, I think!
May I suggest the slightly more verbose (but I think more effective, especially for a comedy):
“A _____ must _____ in order to ______, but then ______.�
(Incorporating a bit of Shane Black’s pitching advice…)
June 20th, 2005 at 7:32 am
Thanks for the advice!
June 20th, 2005 at 7:36 pm
Hey,
I just saw Go again for the first time since I saw it in the theater.
I’d forgotten how good it is. Great job.
Zay
June 26th, 2005 at 9:39 am
Thanks for all the effort you put into your site for fellow writers. I see that you have a caveat up front about the quality of the above loglines — and this isn’t going to be one of those attack-the-successful-guy-out-of-jealousy things that make my blood boil — but I find it ironic how often this kind of advice falls flat: In the examples of loglines you’ve offered, you’ve violated your own counsel two out of three times on word count, keeping them to a single sentence and by the evidence (in my opinion) that none of the three are funny or even humorous. Do you have any loglines for your own pitches which worked that you’d care to share, whether they followed your own advice or not?
June 27th, 2005 at 10:55 am
F Link:
I think the goal of these loglines is not to make you laugh out loud, but to say, “Yeah, I see how that could be funny.”
Real humor doesn’t come in a sentence, or three sentences, unless it’s a play on words. A good limmerick does not a movie make.
July 1st, 2005 at 3:24 pm
Comedy is about perspective. How I see life and its meaning drives my comic perspective. I see log lines from thrillers and see their comic possibilities. Howard Hawks the great American film maker once said, ‘whever I see a story I work out how to make it funny’. A number of writers have said that thillers are just comedies without the laughs. So to write a log line for a comedy is even more important than for anything else.
May 13th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
You write a comedic logline like you write a joke. You end the sentence with a punchline or something comedic (i.e.; tyrannical midget lord).