Well, that was fun. A bit of an uphill battle, but I’ve survived.
The good news – the basic foundation for the horror-comedy outline is complete. Even though I had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen, it consistently went through a steady stream of changes, edits, tweaks, and so forth.
Let’s just say that what I ended up with is several versions removed from what I started with. For the better, I’d say, but still pretty darned close to keeping with the original idea. Even managed to come up with some new twists and wrinkles along the way.
Despite still considering the story as pliable as warm Silly Putty, it really is coming together and I’m quite happy with the results. Sort of a pre-first draft, one could say.
But in addition to the ongoing process of fine-tuning the story, there’s the just-as-if-not-more-so important part of making it funny.
When they say “dying is easy; comedy is hard,” they’re not kidding. Quite an apropos phrase, especially in this context.
Like with the comedy I’m polishing now, the more I work on it, the more opportunities I expect to find to work in a suitable joke of some sort. Sight gags, plays on words, what have you. I think that’s similar to how the ZAZ team did it with Zero Hour for Airplane!. Not that this script will be anything like that, but you get the idea.
I think I’ve discussed this before, but as I outline, I’ll also include potential lines of dialogue or specific actions for each scene. Same thing applies here. But now that the story is (somewhat) set in place, I can now fine-tune both that and punch up the jokes as I work my way forward.
Luckily for me, there are also great examples of films that did this sort of thing, so I can watch those to get a good idea of how to approach it with this story. Not a bad self-imposed homework assignment, right?
Finding the funny for this won’t always be easy, but coming off doing it for the previous script, and with the burden of telling the story in the first place somewhat out of the way, it seems just a little bit more so now.
Easy, that is.
Maximum Z 
Can you recommend a good funny movie?
That’s a pretty broad question. It depends on what kind of funny you want. Of the most recent options, I’d go with GAME NIGHT.
I’m working on outlining for the first time. At first the process was wreaking havoc with my mindset but the more I get into it…it’s just kicking my butt! But in a good way. I like what you’re doing with adding dialogue to the mix. That might actually make the process feel more natural for me.