Sure, Badfellas is a funny novel, but what influential pieces in comedy history led to its creation? What comedic stylings blended to inform its particular breed of humour?
Welcome to another episode of Questions Nobody Asked But Maybe I’ll Say Something Interesting in the Answer.
1. The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show
I remember this playing on Teletoon Retro back in the day. (Well, not the day. My day.) A well-written cartoon with low-low-budget, UPA-style animation whose charm more than makes up for its lack of effort. I tried fashioning cartoon gangsters in this style as Badfellas cover art, but I could never get them to look right. It’s not enough to be lazy; you have to be skilled.
The show was divided into segments: Dudley Do-Right, Peabody’s Improbably History, Fractured Fairy Tales, and those serialized Rocky & Bullwinkle adventures. I never caught the show often enough to know what was going on, but I wanted to. Each adventure ended with a cliffhanger that didn’t offer perilous suspense so much as “What absurd Deus Ex Machina gag are the writers going to pull to solve this one?” And they always ended with alternate wordplay titles for the next adventure:
I oded to this in one scene of Badfellas:
Will our heroes make it out alive? Or will they implode like grapes under a hammer?
Find out in our next episode: Into Thick Air or Tank You Very Much.
Badfellas, chapter 30
How they came up with so many puns I do not know. They must have had a room of writers whose sole jobs were to pun.
That’s another thing: So many of these segments (like the one above) ended with climactic puns. Inspired by this, I naturally decided early on that every chapter of Badfellas would end in a pun or similar linguistic gag.
He imagined a great silver organ stretching to the heavens. This was his pipe dream.
Badfellas, end of chapter 3
This was a nightmare.
This pie chart breaks down my writing time:
But who can argue with results?1
2. Terry Pratchett
He had to come up, didn’t he?
I’m a fantasy reader. The name Terry Pratchett is whispered with holy reverence just a decibel above Tolkien and Voldemort.
That said, he’s usually not fall-out-of-your-seat funny. He’s more mm-that-remark-was-humorous-indeed funny.
But there was no sense in starting from scratch. I had to stand on the shoulders of giants (sometimes literally). So, in part, I stole the prose. Pratchett’s narrator is mainly third-person but sometimes omniscient in a way that allows him to facetiously comment on the world of the story. And he’s slightly formal in the way British writers sometimes are. You see these same things in Douglas Adams. Their stories usually begin with narration rather than action, as well. We cannot get into the story without some remarks about society first.
3. Arrested Development
Frasier is a show about smart things, but Arrested Development is a smart show.
It’s clever. Very clever. And I maintain that Blue Tobias is the funniest gag ever done on TV.
I don’t know how much Arrested Development actually influenced Badfellas, but I wish it had been more.
4. Seinfeld
In one particular way: Seinfeld does plenty of bits where a mundane situation is subbed in for a more serious one and played dramatically. Like the library book detective, the spit recreation of JFK, yada yada.
That’s all Badfellas is—a world where sugar is treated like drugs.
5. Gravity Falls/Phineas and Ferb/The Simpsons
Growing up, Gravity Falls and Phineas and Ferb forged my humour. They are to blame for this. (The former also has the honour of being the best show ever made.)
Then there’s The Simpsons, which in its heyday was the funniest show humanity had produced. (“They’re saying Boo-urns!“)
6. The Jack Benny Program
Comedy is harder without visuals. Besides the lack of silly visual gags, cutaways, and ironic cuts, in writing you have to describe something for the audience to see it. Take this Simpsons joke (Bart is looking for a stolen lemon tree):
Suppose I tried to write out this scene.
“Oh, it’s no use. I’m never going to find that tree.” Bart sat on the sidewalk in front of a patch of grass on which sat an object that looked like a lemon. “This whole raid was as useless as that yellow, lemon-shaped rock over there.” Bart looked closer. “Wait a minute… There’s a lemon behind that rock!” Bart grabbed the lemon that was behind that rock.
There’s definitely a better way to do it, but you get the idea: The gag doesn’t work in writing.
So I needed to find out how to make jokes that work in writing. If possible, I even wanted to find ways of telling jokes that can work in writing but not on camera. Find my advantages.
As it happened, old-time radio comedy had figured this out long ago. They came up with jokes that only worked because you couldn’t see anything. The master of this (as far as I know; it’s all I’ve listened to) was the Jack Benny Program.
[Jack and his polar bear, Carmichael, are at home with a cold.]
Jack: Show the doctor in.
Rochester: Okay, here he is.
Jack: How do you do, Doctor?
Doctor: Well, well, young man, you need a shave.
Jack: That’s the bear. This is me over here.
The Jack Benny Program, “Jack Has a Cold”
- Lawyers. ↩︎