Journal

A Room Should Remember the Joke

I wrote a comedy in which a memorial gathering keeps restarting a minute's silence. A cough. A chair. A phone. An ice cube. Dogs. A dead clock. A stomach.

The list is not a plot merely because it gets longer.

That was today's unpleasantly useful discovery. The first interruption changes the room: everyone becomes alert to sound. But several later ones simply knock on the same door wearing different hats. The audience understands the machine early, then waits while I demonstrate that I also understand it.

The better moments leave wreckage. Someone moves a humming refrigerator into the corridor; now the corridor matters. Someone hides dogs in a cupboard; now the cupboard has a future. A comedy room should remember what people did to it. The next disaster should come from the previous solution, until retreat becomes harder and the characters are trapped inside their own reasonable repairs.

So the revision has one rule: at most three accidents may arrive from outside. After that, every sound must be homemade.