Work, Bananas, and Jane Espenson

You won’t find me writing about work on this blog, besides general observations about the business environment, or travel dispatches from locations I visit as a result of my employment. That’s been a deliberate policy from the outset – despite the fact that it requires setting aside some very, very good material.

But here’s something that falls under the “general observation” category – because I think it’s probably true for almost any job in America: We all want to imagine that our workplace is a sitcom, our coworkers are a zany cast of characters, and the jokes are always slap-ass funny. If you could pop the roof off a greasy spoon lunch joint in Wichita, Kansas and a prestigious law firm in Boston, Mass you would find one thing in common – there’s a couple of jokesters, some teasing of the junior staff, and banter sprinkled with lame, overused punch-lines from real television sitcoms.

Which is why America, as a whole, should be reading Jane Espenson.

She a TV writer whose credits include a few geek jewels like ‘Buffy’ and ‘Battlestar’ – but she cut her teeth working in the trenches of sitcoms, knocking out joke after joke for weekly episodes. Her blog is ostensibly aimed at frustrated would-be screenwriters who are attempting to break into the business, but for all practical intents and purposes it serves as a place where plots, characters, dialogue and humor are analyzed with keen patience. And jokes – funny or not – go under the autopsy knife.

She often dissects “clams” – TV-writer lingo for rank, overused laugh lines. Examples abound – the terrified passenger saying “I thought you knew how to drive this thing!” or somebody deadpanning “Well, I think that went well” after some kind of noisy confrontation. You can “freshen up a clam” – for example Borat, in his humor class, getting it wrong by saying “This suit is NOT BLAAACK!.” But unless you’ve got a clever variation, these comedic tropes should be off-limits.

Which is why the proverbial guy from accounting needs to familiarize himself with the list of clams. Saying, in 2007, that you’re going to vote Cheryl the administrative assistant “off the island” because of some minor incompetence should be met with bored silence – because workplace decorum usually forbids the practice of getting up from the conference table and having somebody hold down Mr. jokey jokester while the others kick him in the head. (“You’re a real funny guy, Larry.” WHAM. “Not!!” WHAM.)

Maybe I’m being too severe. Some people are easily amused, and lighthearted banter is harmless, eh? Personally I find gallows humor in an office setting to be a constant source of funny, but you have to be careful with that approach if you are a manager. ( “We’re getting new office furniture next month. Which should be nice for those of you who haven’t been fired by then. Ha!”) And Jane Espenson would remind us that trying to be funny, and failing in a funny way, can actually be quite funny.

One final note – I learned via Espenson’s blog the phrase “bananas on bananas”, which is TV-writer lingo which supposedly dates back to the vaudeville era. It denotes a follow-on joke simply that simply isn’t necessary after material that was genuinely funny. For example, if the hobo steps on a rake, and then staggers backwards and slips on a banana peel, it simply isn’t necessary to have him get hit with the seltzer water. This is one gag too far, or the comedic equivalent of (another great phrase) “gilding the lily”.

But I’d like to see “bananas on bananas” be used in a broader context, to describe, for example, long-winded corporate memos, or overenthusiastic advertising campaigns, or impractical foreign policy suggestions. Feel free to try it out yourself – throw it out casually in your next meeting or social occasion, and adopt a look of puzzled surprise when people say they’ve never heard it before. But you may need to jump on the bandwagon quickly, before it catches on – at which point that proverbial banana turns into a clam.

Tags: Jane Espenson, Television Comedy, Screenwriting