Four Christmases is another in a long line of Hollywood comedies that rises and falls on its premise. A good comedy premise is usually based on a stark contrast that grabs the audience, creates the comic story engine and generates the laughs. The idea of this anti-Christmas movie in which a couple is forced to visit all four of their nightmare families in one day promises a laugh-filled comedy from beginning to end. But that’s not what the audience gets, and the cause of the failure is embedded right in the premise.
I have long pointed out that the great weakness of the “high concept” premise, on which much of mainstream Hollywood pictures, especially comedies, are based, is that they only give you two or three good scenes. These are the scenes where the big twist, the story flip, the stark contrast first occurs. Unfortunately a movie has anywhere from 50-70 scenes. If you don’t know how to extend the premise to the full 100-120 pages, your comedy is going to die after about ten minutes.
This problem with the high concept premise is exacerbated by comedy writers who think you write a good comedy by stringing together as many jokes up front as possible. The comedy dies because the writer has not created a comic structure – a comic engine – that produces the jokes organically and builds the comedy steadily to the climactic endpoint.
Four Christmases exhibits both of these classic mistakes. Notice that the premise in which the couple visits four nightmarish families dictates that the contrast with the first family will produce an initial set of laughs as the audience sees the fundamental contrast for the first time. But from then on, every new visit to a family is essentially the same beat. Each subsequent family may give a slight twist to the idea, but the contrast has become old hat.
Four Christmases uses another technique found in most Hollywood comedies: the writers try to string jokes for three quarters of the story and then devote the final quarter to character change. This is both unbelievable and dull. For one thing, the character change here – the couple is supposed to see the value of having a family – is the opposite of the horrific families the two encounter on their tour. For another, the change isn’t set up structurally. Each time the couple gets to a new home, they are forced to have as many contrast comedy scenes as possible before moving on the next home. The couple has little time alone as they experience each new nightmare of a family. So it is a jolt when suddenly, at the end, they have a self-revelation about great it would be to start a family of their own.
You can clearly see the serious flaw at the heart of the Four Christmases premise if you contrast it with Little Miss Sunshine, the best movie comedy to come along in a few years. Simply put, where Four Christmases, and most high concept comedies, are front-loaded, Little Miss Sunshine is back-loaded. Little Miss Sunshine gets funnier as the movie goes along, until the final scene at the beauty pageant when the audience is screaming with laughter. Instead of stringing a bunch of jokes together at the beginning and blowing the big contrast of the film ten minutes in, Little Miss Sunshine writer Michael Arndt creates a comic journey line that gives the audience the big contrast of the film last. They have ninety minutes to get to know the characters, with all of their weaknesses, so the comic contrast at the end has much more pop. And the character change, when it does occur, is not only believable, it happens simultaneously with the biggest laughs.
If you would like to learn how to write a comedy film that builds steadily to the end, consider taking the Movie Comedy Class, or look at the Comedy Add-on to the Blockbuster software, which includes a detailed breakdown of Little Miss Sunshine. Comedy is hard, but it gets a lot easier when you know the techniques.
