Dramedy: Part Two: Character

With F.J. Pratt and Randall Jahnson

Sit-com writer F.J. Pratt says the best comedy comes from character. Which is funny because screenwriter Randall Jahnson has always maintained that character is the fountain from which the best drama flows.

Coincidence? Or could it be that comedy and drama are more closely related than we think?  Could it be they’re simply two sides to the same coin, er, character?  And could it be that F.J. and R.J. are brothers who were separated at birth?

Join them for a rousing Part Two of Dramedy, in which they’ll share their tricks and techniques (and the results of their Ancestry.com reports) for creating three-dimensional characters, drawn from the respective wells of Comedy and Tragedy.

Watch them mud-wrestle over such questions as:

• Do dramatic characters benefit from moments of levity?
• Do comedic characters deepen with a dose of gravitas?
• When and where in your scripts are these moments revealed?  And how do you implement them?

F.J. maintains that, in comedy, not all characters are funny all the time. In fact, it’s the “down” moments that reveal the character’s emotional core. In drama, R.J. feels that the hero’s journey—the entire movie or series—is in fact a steady march to the revelation of the character’s authentic self.

Other topics include character behavior, dialogue, and shifts of tone brought on by a character’s actions.