"To praise a person's sense of humor is almost a declaration of love": Artyom Prokhorov on the role of humor in dramaturgy

Can history exist without humor? Is it possible to learn how to make jokes? Finally, which of the ancient Greek philosophers laid the foundations and principles of storytelling? We talked to Artyom Prokhorov, senior lecturer at the Faculty of Creative Industries Media Institute, candidate of art history, screenwriter and creator of the training courses "Comedy Tools in Storytelling" and "Screenplay Development".

© From the personal archive of Artyom Prokhorov

"The ability to joke is a trainable skill"

My path to the movie industry was quite winding. I studied at Bauman Moscow State Technical University, my diploma says "engineer", but in essence, I was more of a programmer. While still studying at university, I started playing KVN student humor show and played it for several years. Our team reached the Russian Premier League, and it was through KVN that I realized that I was interested in moving towards humor. As soon as I graduated from Moscow State Technical University, I immediately enrolled in the Master's program at the Higher School of Economics in Media Production in Creative Industries, which is what is now called Interactive Media and Digital Industries. It was while studying for my Master's degree that I realized that I wanted to work in film production - and after my studies, I got a job at Star Media Film Company. There I worked for five years as an editor on several seasons of the series "The bloodhound", the series "Awakening" with Yevgeny Mironov and the movie "Heart of Parma". 

All this time I kept in touch with the National Research University Higher School of Economics and, having entered graduate school, I realized that I was interested in teaching along with science. It turned out that working with scripts and plots became my specialization in teaching. The idea of the discipline "Comedy tools in storytelling" belongs to Maria Alexandrovna Shteinman, who leads the track "Storytelling" on the educational program "Media Communications" and who offered me to teach this course, knowing about my experience of playing in KVN.

The discipline is half-analytical and half-creative, and the assignments are also split in half. You cannot learn how to write and come up with humor if you do not do it all the time - it is in all the screenwriting textbooks. Being able to make jokes is a skill that is practiced. For example, it is possible to set yourself a goal of writing ten jokes a day, even if they come out awful and unfunny at first. Eventually, months and years later, many of those jokes will already be decent. There are certain humor techniques and moves that are universal to many jokes. Thanks to them, it is possible to come up with new jokes based not only on pure wit, but also on generational experience.

 "To praise a man's sense of humor is almost to declare your love for him"

No story is complete without humor. Take any movie, especially a popular movie - you will not find one that is deadly serious from beginning to end. Somewhere, there will still be a comedic scene (or several) or a comedic character - a so-called comic relief through whom these comedic situations will be played out. It is always very important to change the tone of the narrative and, following it, to change the emotion of the viewer. Even Aristotle said that people have only two main emotions: joy and sadness, and therefore, there are two genres: comedy and tragedy. In fact, comedies almost cannot exist without drama; they often have a dramatic component. At the same time, drama cannot function without comedy either, and so these two genres are closely related and viewers want both emotions to some extent. 

Modern society is so organized that the sense of humor has become a very important quality and criterion by which we evaluate a person, and the author - in short, all the people around us. Now we live in such a time when to say that a person has a great sense of humor means practically to declare him in love. Therefore, when we watch or read a work, we are always pleased if we understand that the author in addition can joke and has a good sense of humor.

For the course "Comedy Tools in Storytelling”, I collected all the existing works about humor in science - there are not as many as there could be. There are seminal authors, such as Schopenhauer, Bergson, Propp, and Freud. Serious study of humor began to be engaged in only in the XX century: before that, it was believed that humor - it is not serious and do not pay much attention to it. Then the community of scientists came to the conclusion that it is an important thing in society, in the communication of people with each other and in general in all aspects of human life. In addition to the scientific base, there is also a base from practitioners: these are such authors as Scott Sedita and Steve Kaplan, who went into the topic of humor rather from the side of acting and screenwriting. They do not have a scientific basis themselves, they do not refer to anyone, but what they describe really works in practice - and you can see examples of it in a lot of sitcoms and comedies.

Aristotle and modern storytelling

 There are various typologies that attempt to categorize stories and reduce them to a certain set. This does work, however, all stories are still unique and even similar ideas can be developed in different ways. Gradually, over time, the stories become more complex. For example, you can think of the new movie "Everywhere All at Once," which builds on a fairly complex concept and many plot twists - but could that movie have come about if there was no "Matrix"? Probably not. In other words, there would first have to be a move in the form of a "Matrix" movie, followed by a move in the form of an "Everything Everywhere At Once" movie, where a similar idea is developed in a more complex way. Perhaps in the future there will be another step further into the depths of this plot. It is through the combination of the common and the unique that we get exciting new stories. 

Basic things about modern storytelling were written as far back as Aristotle in his treatise Poetics. Everything that later theorists (Robert McKee, Paul Joseph Gulino, Blake Snyder, and others) have described is in one way or another a paraphrase of Aristotle. What he writes about seems perfectly natural now: the narrative must have a hero at the center, it must have a goal, conflict on the way to it, ups and downs - now these elements are in any, especially popular, story. It is such a successful treatise that to this day both I and many other teachers still recommend starting the study of drama and screenwriting with it. If you have truly internalized what Aristotle laid out in Poetics, you already have enough basic knowledge to create stories on your own. You need to realize, however, that dramaturgy has still become more complex since those ancient times. Just as we've stepped from "The Matrix" to "Everything Everywhere at Once" in the span of twenty-odd years, so too have we stepped from the ancient Greek era to more complex stories. Despite this, at their core they still share common conflicts and trajectories.

 "Neural networks are very lazy screenwriters."

Artificial intelligence can already, and now replace, screenwriters. The main question is what level the script written by it will be. For example, STS shot a sitcom "Sidorovy", which is positioned as completely written by a neural network. The channel says that there was an editor there, though, who ruled the text - but how it was produced exactly, we do not know. From what I have seen from the results of neural networks, I would say that so far neural networks are very lazy writers. Everything they come up with is either clichéd or lacks variety of plot twists. The neural network by default doesn't put much effort and tries to make the plot as simple as possible - until you as a human give it your own ideas and ideas in a query; something that the neural network itself is not capable of generating. The neural network may produce something that looks like a human work, but it will still be obvious that no mental effort has been put into it, and what is written is as if compiled from someone else's work or from the most trivial things that first come to mind.

For now, neural networks are just a tool, and you have to learn how to work with it to put it into practice. I think that with the development of artificial intelligence algorithms, they will already be able to fully replace screenwriters. I would not say I am alarmed by that. So far, we look at what neural networks have done with more of an emotion of surprise: "Wow! It was not a human, it was a neural network. For it to be a full-fledged story, we need the emotions of joy and sadness mentioned by Aristotle - and that's something neural networks don't know how to do at all yet.

If the neural network learns to write something in the near future, its first creation will most likely be investigative scripts, because everything is very schematic and clearly organized in them. I, for example, worked on the second, third and fourth seasons of the series "Itcheyka" for Channel One. This series is procedural, that is, it is based on a procedure that is repeated from series to series. In this case, this investigation and similar series require a structural-systematic approach and are written according to strict laws. 

"Writing is rewriting"

There are obvious qualities that can be used to characterize a good screenwriter: observant, well-read, literate, creative, hardworking. The least obvious quality of an ideal screenwriter is a willingness to accept criticism and a willingness to rewrite his script from scratch almost without regret if there are fundamental problems with it. Beginning screenwriters do not realize that they need to rework their story - the experienced ones, on the other hand, are eager to rewrite until they can get it close to perfect. Even the experienced screenwriter realizes that out of the dozens of script submissions (brief descriptions of a project over several pages) he has written; only a couple or three will be realized - at best. He knows this, writes the applications in the desk and collects them in his folder just in case. Maybe a contest will be announced, and then this application will finally be pulled out of the drawer. An experienced screenwriter realizes that there must be many of these stories to be successful. One of the tenets of screenwriting is, "To write is to rewrite." You have to be willing to constantly work on both yourself and your text.

Right now, I have no aspirations to pursue screenwriting on my own. I have worked as an editor, worked with scripts and directly as a screenwriter when necessary at certain stages. I am more interested in short formats in creative work. When I create something myself, I strive for brevity. However, to be a professional screenwriter or writer, you have to realize that you cannot live without it. If we talk about movies and TV series, for example, I am interested in them more from a research point of view. There is a creative component in both science and teaching. In fact, creativity (screenwriting) and science have much more in common than is usually thought.

When one is just learning how to write screenplays, developing one's own mindfulness, one should work with simple stories. In order to analyze auteur filmmaking, one still needs to start with easy-to-follow stories. Venerable directors know all the same dramaturgical techniques, but they also know how to turn them inside out, how to work with them in such a way that it makes even more of an impression than a story built according to all the canons. If you learn from simple yet popular stories (such as Marvel movies and Pixar cartoons), then you are sure to reach the top - but it is the other way around that will be difficult.

© From the personal archive of Artyom Prokhorov

Author : Ksenia Zhakova, 2nd year student of the Journalism educational program

Translation by Juan Pablo Flor