10 Screenwriting Lessons You Can Learn From Star Trek Into Darkness
7. Humor Greases The Story's Wheels
If you have been keeping up with the summer blockbusters over the past few years, you will probably notice something fairly common: they have a lot of humor in them. Whether they are sci-fi adventures, apocalyptic dystopias, or just plain action movies, they all seem to be somewhat funny. Why? Easy: humor helps keep the audience alive and moves the story along.
In this film, Scotty is the main comedic character. Several times within the film, he is there to help Kirk achieve his goals but you hardly ever notice because he is making us laugh so much. While you may never want to rest too much on this, humor helps with things like exposition and connecting scenes together. It alleviates some of the staleness that can creep in because it is like painting with another color, adding something new to your pallette. Hell, even Spock had some genuinely funny moments.
Good comedy is hard but if you work at it a little, it will help your readers become more engrossed in your script. Iron Man 3 is another good example of how funny commercial action movies had gotten lately. Its never a good idea to force jokes for the sake of having jokes but try and wring out a little bit of irony from your characters personalities. If you notice, much of the humor from action movies comes from clashing points of view. For example, because Spock is so intelligent and calculating, his response to someone asking him Are you getting an attitude with me? is funny because of the irony but also because it is true to the character.
Oftentimes, these will be the moments audience members take with them when leaving the theater. Its not a bad idea to take a look at your script and see if it suffers from being too self serious.