Pineapple Express is one of my favorite movies and I think it's one of the finest comedies of our generation. I often find myself watching the scenes over and over again on Youtube to cheer myself up.
A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon Seth Rogen's interview on GQ's Youtube channel which inspired me to read the script and write about it.
When I read the screenplay the biggest highlight for me was how it played with expectations of the reader/audience. It's like a recurring theme throughout the movie. Even with the casting choices, Seth Rogen says that originally he was going to play Saul and James Franco — a more conventional lead — was going to play Dale. But then, they went the opposite way.
I want to focus on a particular scene which Seth Rogen says got the biggest laugh in any of his movies: The foot through the windshield bit.
It's my favorite bit on the movie as well. And it has rather simple math to it. But before you can understand the scene and the comedy factors in it, you have to understand laughter.
What is laughter?
William McDougall believed that "laughter has been evolved in the human race as an antidote to sympathy."
Freud stated, "Laughter is a release from tension."
Robert McKee says:
In drama, when the gap between audience expectations and unfolding events opens, surprise and curiosity result. The audience looks for the hidden causes as to why the world reacted the way it did.
In comedy, when the gap between audience expectations and unfolding events opens, it should come as a rush of insight, resulting in laughter.
He also goes on to explain the simple math of jokes and how they work:
A joke has two parts. The set-up builds tension, playing on emotion. These emotions operate on a primal level, and they're hard to arouse. People would rather remain calm.
The punch is the second part of the joke, and it suddenly reveals a situation we would never associate with the first. It is incongruous and cuts across the set-up. They collide in the audience's mind and explode. Reason quickly recovers, but the primal emotion is still there, with nowhere to go. Laughter gets rid of that emotion. Laughter is not an emotion, it's the getting rid of an emotion. You can laugh over any emotion you're feeling. Fear, pain, anger, etc. Laughter is a criticism we hurl at something stupid or ugly.
If I were to explain it with more simple terms,
Jokes have setups and payoffs as well. But in comedy, the payoffs are called punchlines. Because the math of jokes goes like this: you create a logic, you set one thing up, you set a routine — this is called setup — and then when it's time to pay it off, you break the logic completely and unexpectedly — punchline.
The whole point of setups and payoffs are that they're expected. But it's not the same with jokes, you expect that there's going to be a payoff of that setup but — the comedian breaks the logic. And then, comes the laughter.
So let's get back to the foot through the window bit. The setup is that they need to get rid of the windshield because it's covered with paint. And Seth Rogen's character tells James Franco's character to kick it off because he knows every character in movies do that. And we as the audience know that as well. We've seen hundreds of scenes like this and they kicked the windshield out all the time.
Then, comes the punchline. The breaking of the logic:
Saul kicks it and his foot goes through the windshield. His foot gets stuck and he keeps driving with one foot.
The subject of the set-up has to be something intense, so as to get the emotions flowing and churning. That's why comedy breaks taboos. Religion, death, politics, sex, scatological, are all fair game. If you allow anything in society to become uncomical, it gains power and can swallow society.
Punchlines work best in intense situations or emotional moments. That's why comedians dive deep into their troubles, and darkest nightmares and all that. Because they're not that far away. Comedy is embedded in us.
You lose yourself following a sincere story and all of a sudden the logic that's been building up, the routine breaks unexpectedly and you laugh.
In Pineapple Express they wanted to bring life and death situations and higher stakes into comedy. And I think that's why this movie works so well. They don't just tell a simple story and "insert" jokes here and there. The jokes are the story. It's embedded in the characters and the world in the movie. When they kick the windshield it also informs characters. They clearly watch a lot of movies that's why they've been ahead of the bad guys. They knew how the bad guys would react to that situation. That's why they're talking in a self-referential way constantly.
A common but false belief is that the principles of good storytelling don't apply to comedy. They do.
If we talk about the structure, the script has a very simple structure to it. Dale witnesses a murder and finds himself on the run, escaping from bad guys with his dealer Saul and as they try to get out of the situation they connect as friends.
The last scene is not in the screenplay, I think they came up with it as they shoot the movie. We see the connection, the growth at the last scene as they joke about what has happened to them.
Another thing about the script is that except the last scene it's very much the same with the movie. Another common but false belief is that in comedies actors would often improvise. They mostly don't. Of course, they are trying and having fun with the lines, and the scenes but compared to what works on the page those improvisational lines have fewer chances of getting into the final cut. Because the actual lines have been edited and tested hundreds of times till they get to the final form.
People often discredit comedy but I think it's one of the highest forms of art. Only in comedy you can test your material and see clearly what's working and what's not. And that's a very important thing for a person who wants to learn more about the craft of storytelling.
I recommend reading the Pineapple Express Screenplay. Take your favorite jokes in the script and break it down. What's the setup, what's the routine that's been building up in the scene? And what's the punchline? How does it break the logic of the setup?
Pineapple Express Screenplay [PDF] by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg — For educational and research purposes only.
Note: The sentences in the quotes are taken from the notes I took in Robert McKee's seminar about comedy.