Bombol Comedy Club. Behind the scene #2: writing the script
Here one of the 12 comedy videos I wrote and directed for Bombol social media campaign.
The search
Bombol, a company specialized in innovative juvenile products, wanted to break with the usual ads featuring perfect, adorable, well behaved kids and show parenthood in all its glorious messiness. Stand-up comedy was the perfect way to do so. What we were about to realise, though, is that if you want laughs you need to look for just the opposite...
At the beginning, we asked the funniest guys in the HK stand-up comedy scene to write some new material about the craziness of raising young kids. Unexpectedly, with few exceptions the results were not as “sparky” as we hoped. Something was missing.
Great comedy is about truth and pain: it deals with aspects of life that we all can relate to, and highlights the incongruity and difficulties in those situations. It has to ring true to the audience, build an emotional connection. But there was no truth and no pain their scripts. It was evident that these talented comedians were not parents themselves. They had not experienced first-hand the ups and downs of raising young kids. They had no personal pain to offer.
The pain
That's when I realized I was sitting on a goldmine: as a mother of two, I had eight years of comic material at hand. I had the truth and the pain. I just needed to look at all my challenges and frustrations with the right angle. And add the right dose of that essential comedy ingredient: exaggeration, Yes, I could write about kids. So I wrote about cheeky, noisy, hyperactive kids making your life messy, complicated but ultimately very interesting. Totally autobiographical. And in line with the concept and brand image Bombol wanted to communicate.
I put many real life situations that occurred to me with my kids (my daughter climbing on furniture like a monkey… and falling down, my son licking everyone and everything like a puppy) and others that haven't (yet) but seem plausible enough. Every mum thinks her kids are the best. Well, I do too: I have the naughtiest, wildest, craziest kids in the world, a constant source of inspiration (thank you guys).
I also drew inspiration from films, another subject I know well. They are a rich fertile ground for humor, mostly based on unrealistic expectations set by Hollywood about how kids behave. But I also played with movie titles and how they apply to our everyday family situations, making them appear larger than life, as epic and dramatic as they feel when we are experiencing them (Castaway: my life s a full time parent, I am legend: when I mange to change the baby's diaper in a public toilet..). I only used titles from the 100 most successful films of all times to make sure people all over the world could be familiar with them. I went a little more specific with horror, using iconic titles to highlight the horror our lovely kids unleash on us on a daily basis (Psycho: my son when I give him the wrong cup;Jaws: my daughter when she went through that biting phase; The Thing: when I change their diapers...).
Bombol's initial project was to have three or four short comedy clips, no more than two minutes of film in total. I wrote twenty-four minutes of material, then cut and selected to arrive at 12 short films of 40 - 60 seconds each. Yes, I had pain to sell.
Writer, director (on set & post-production), producer.
12 comedy videos
Bombol ltd.
Hong Kong, 2017