Set-ups are HARD.
When I wrote my farce, THE FARCE DAY OF CHRISTMAS everyone assumed the hard part was the end where it was a joke a second. Laugh had to pile on laugh in machine gun fashion.
But the truth is that was the easy part. I was just paying off everything I had set before. Many of the laughs were just reactions. Or call backs.
The real hard work was the first act. That’s when I had to establish everything. Once elements were in motion I was off to the races. The tricky part is to do that while still being entertaining. Those laughs were harder to come by. I had to devise comic situations that presented the necessary information in a fun way. It’s unreasonable to ask the person doing the pre-show announcements to say, “Trust us, it gets better in the second act.”
And you have to be careful. You can’t disguise the set-up info so deep into scenes that it doesn’t register or is not crystal clear. Remember, the audience might have to remember this or that fact for a half hour before it pays it. Just hiding it cleverly in a line of dialogue is not going to make the impression you need.
Achieving all that is tough. But a good first step is knowing you have to achieve all that. And it’s easy to overlook because good writers can make it appear effortless. It’s not. The clumps of hair I tore out are still growing back.
from By Ken Levine
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