We’re currently halfway through shooting the pilot for my sitcom The Happiness Chain (thank you so much again to everyone who donated to the crowdfunder to enable us to make it, we couldn’t have done it without you!) and I’m so proud of how it’s all been coming together so far. The actors are all phenomenal, the crew and behind-the-scenes creatives are ridiculously talented and hard-working and, without wanting to get too carried away with honking my own sax (I think the phrase “blowing my own trumpet” is overused and bad), I’m genuinely really proud of how well the script has turned out.

In particular, I sensed something while we were filming the first half of the pilot over the weekend that I felt incredibly proud of – I’m not the only funny thing in it. Far from it, in fact.

Comedians writing sitcoms where they’re the only funny thing in it is one of my biggest pet hates with scripted comedy, but it’s incredibly easy to fall into by accident when you’re writing. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens often enough for me to feel bone-weary of it. Kat Sadler’s Such Brave Girls is a great example of a recent show where she’s resisted that temptation at every stage, and crafted such a funny, brilliant ensemble where every character has a really clear and well-written comedic POV.

But you don’t have to look far to find examples of shows where, effectively, the show’s comedic voice is that of the writer’s stand-up persona, and therefore their character is the only one given permission to articulate the show’s comedic ideas. These sorts of shows tend to frame their lead characters as being in some way dysfunctional or at odds with the world, so are written as though they have a comedic exceptionalism to them, while the supporting cast tends to be limited to representing reality or “the world as it is,” and to setting up or reacting to the main character’s eccentricities.

The best comedy shows know that nobody is exceptional and everybody is funny and everybody is interesting and everybody is boring. Their characters occupy clearly defined positions on the spectrums between extremes of personality, and they drill into what’s funny about those positions. Every character is therefore allowed moments where they drive the comedy and behave in ways that are selfish, attention-seeking, bizarre or chaotic, and other moments where they fade into the background and behave in ways that are simple or relatable or normal. Finding the funny in every single character is a simple exercise in knowing exactly what each character wants, and how far away they are from getting it in any given moment.

Of course, it hasn’t been a simple case of nailing this straight out of the gate with this script. Allowing every character to function as a genuinely funny character is really hard to get right, especially when your background is being a solo writer-performer. Us solo comics obviously have a really sharply defined idea of what makes our voice funny, so it’s really tempting (and easy!) to write in it all the time rather than going to the effort of finding and perfecting multiple voices that compliment one another. At the first live reading of the script of The Happiness Chain at mine and Miranda’s first Eggbox event at the end of last year, I was very aware that my character had nearly all the funny lines, and that only one other character really felt like a genuine comedy character in their own right. My reaction to this was one of deep embarrassment – as far as I was concerned, that just wasn’t good enough. If only two of the characters are funny, then it’s not really a comedy script, it’s a drama script with two funny characters in it. Unless everyone has a game to play, then it’s not fully working.

Two funny people being funny.

It’s also often hard to know if you’ve got this right until you finally see the script up on its feet being brought to life by actors, and I felt such a wave of pride at the weekend to see every single actor find the game at the centre of their character so easily, and then wring so much wonderful stuff out of it. Phil Ellis and Donna Preston were playing two minor characters who had the least to work with on the page, but I knew that at the centre of both of them was the nugget of something really fun that they would do something amazing with. I couldn’t have predicted quite how funny they would make it, though.

Meanwhile, Kathy Maniura is playing the script’s co-lead alongside my character, and in many ways that role had been the hardest character to get right in the scripting stage. Because I knew exactly how to make my character funny, it was proving all too easy for me to lumber her character with more straight-man moments that reacted to my character’s behaviour, as they function as a team for most of the script. I was fundamentally unhappy with this funny-character-straight-character dynamic, but unsure of how to fix it. Then it became clear to me – which character is funny and which character is straight isn’t something that’s baked into a character’s personality for all time. It changes scene by scene based on what the characters want.

I rewrote the script with a specific focus on what Kathy’s character is trying to achieve, and how her persona and point-of-view would drive her towards or away from those goals from moment to moment, and was so excited by how much more funny and alive she felt. So it was a real delight to realise, while filming our big scene together this weekend, that after having agonised over how to make that character really come alive, a lot of the laughs in that scene now came from her. My character was doing more to advance the plot while she had the space to be funny. Kathy so effortlessly took this character who at one stage had been quite functional and imbued her with so much wit and humour and silliness, and it was such a fun energy to bounce off and act opposite.

There were even brief moments during the day where that ego-driven part of every solo writer-performer kicked in and thought “Maybe you should’ve written some more gags for your character in this scene so he can hold his own against all these other funny characters,” but those thoughts were so easy to dismiss. Across the length of the entire pilot, my character creates plenty of funny moments, but he also regularly steps back and lets other characters take the lead. The feeling that he was one part of a really funny ensemble, with the comedic energy being passed between different characters as they came in and out of contact with their wants and desires and fears, was really gratifying.

I won’t know quite how this feeling manifests onscreen until we start working through the edit, of course, and I’m sure there’ll be plenty of in-depth to-ing and fro-ing over which jokes to emphasise, which moments to highlight and so on, but for now I’m so thrilled to have written and made something where the central character is frequently not the funniest thing happening in a scene. All my favourite sitcoms – Peep Show, Stath Lets Flats, even something like I’m Alan Partridge which was very much driven by one central character but never forgot to let characters like Lynn or Michael feel like characters funny enough to easily lead their own show – were shows that let their entire cast feel like rich, vibrant, and very funny characters in their own right. If we end up making anything that achieves even a fraction of that same feeling, then I’ll be incredibly proud of what we’ve made together. Watch this space!

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – Weirdos Comedy are returning to the Bloomsbury Theatre for their first Christmas pantomime in 5 years, this time about space. I’ll be popping up for a hilarious cameo, and the rest of the cast includes such buffoons as Sam Nicoresti, Andy Barr, Lucy Pearman, Pat Cahill, Matthew Highton, Cerys Bradley and many more!

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – I’ve been rehearsing with the Mayor and his Daughter, a wonderful double act whose debut show I’m directing. This week we workshopped a moment where I gave a bit of direction that is physically impossible to achieve (“make it so that your entire body goes completely limp and the only thing you’re putting tension into is using your arms to hold up the other person’s head”). What they came up with in response to it was so funny.

Book Of The Week – I’m reading The Winter War by Philip Teir, a novel about a seemingly perfect Scandinavian family on the brink of catastrophe. The last novel I read about a seemingly perfect family on the brink of catastrophe was one of my favourite books of last year, Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is In Trouble, so maybe this will be another winner!

Album Of The Week – Spirit Of Eden by Talk Talk. This isn’t what I expected at all! I thought they were a synthpop band??! This is some kind of slow, jazzy weird post-rock thing? I like it though. Somebody should sort out Talk Talk’s PR, I think they are very different from their reputation.

Film Of The Week – My Old Ass, Megan Park’s wonderful coming-of-age comedy that has an amazing sci-fi-esque twist which it’s great to know nothing about before diving in. A teenager about to leave home has a magic mushroom trip that forces her to reassess her relationship with her life and family. The cast are phenomenal, it’s so well-made and I loved it.

That’s all for this week! As ever, let me know what you thought, and if you enjoy the newsletter enough to send it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe, I’d hugely appreciate it. Take care of yourselves until next time,

Joz xx

PS Here’s one more sneak peek at last week’s shoot:

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