How to punch it up

How to Punch It Up
By Patton Oswalt, actor and screenwriter
I do a lot of punch-up in Hollywood. Punchup is where they get a bunch of screenwriters and comedians together to sit around a table and add jokes to a yet-to-be-filmed script. It¹s fun. They usually have it at a nice hotel, and there¹s coffee and bagels, and later they bring in lunch. Then snacks.
The only people who get asked to do punchup are people who have already written some very decent original scripts of their own. The kind of scripts where you racked your brain coming up with an original concept, ground your teeth making sure the characters and their dialogue were alive and funny and, finally, drank a lot of Red Bull to finish the thing on the last night of the eight-week period you had to write it. These scripts then make the rounds of the studios, where studio people read them, roll them into a tube, put the tube in a rocket and then shoot it into the ocean.But the studio people remember your script. And they remember your name when they give some other writer a tugboat full of heroin and diamonds for his first draft. That¹s when they realize they need you and all your friends (whose names are on the same list as yours because of their scripts that have been shot into the ocean) to punch it up. So what¹s really going on is this: A mediocre writer is being punished with a huge paycheck and a produced movie while a bunch of funny, talented writers are being rewarded by getting to punch up his horrible script.

Lately I¹ve been doing punch-up on computer-animated films, but the trick with doing punch-up on these movies is that unlike the live-action script, which hasn¹t been filmed yet, the computer-animated film is usually 80 percent complete by the time we see it. And when I say 80 percent complete, I mean, ³We¹ve spent $120 million on this, so we really can¹t change anything.²
³Uh, well then,² you¹ll ask, through a mouthful of takeout Chinese, ³what exactly do you want us to do?²
³What we need is for you guys to come up with funny off-screen voices yelling funny things over the unfunny action.²
I didn¹t know you could make comedies that way! This is comforting news. Can I take old super-8 footage of a kid¹s birthday party, where none of the other kids showed up? And he¹s sitting at the kitchen table, and he¹s got his little birthday hat on, and a lonely little cake, and he¹s crying, and just when you¹re about to kill yourself from the pathos, someone offscreen yells:
³I just fell on my fanny in some butterscotch!²
Wow, you¹ll think, suddenly cheerful. Someone I can¹t see, or will ever see, just fell into some butterscotch and is now talking about it out loud the way no one does or has, ever!
Did I mention there¹s lunch?

Every war... is represented not as a war but
as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. George Orwell