Bateman: How We Write Our Hot College Comedie

Remember that one movie where the obese guy farted and the jock with the backward baseball… Remember that one movie where the obese guy farted and the jock with the backward baseball cap fell into the pool? The one where some really gross, really memorable thing happened? The one where the people said all those lines that your annoying friends have been quoting for the past six months? Well, we wrote that hot college comedy, and we’re going to tell you how you can write one just like it.

College students are renowned throughout the world for their great senses of humor, so writing comedies that tickle their funny bones is a big business. According to Forbes Magazine, the college comedy industry is larger in terms of gross revenue than the industry that sells women the bodies they really deserve because they know they’re worth it. In other words, we’re talking about a recession-proof career with no glass ceiling.

We broke into the business with a big idea, which is what you need if you’re going to write a hit. You might think that you can just start typing the words that the characters say, produce 120 pages of that and call it a day. If only it were that easy! No friend, you have to have some kind of idea or plot or whatever to help organize those words. Fortunately, the ideas that you need for one of these comedies can be inane and unoriginal. Just have some nerdy losers become campus heroes or lose their virginity or win a dance competition. As long as the nerdy losers aren’t too nerdy and look kind of cute in the latest styles, the idea will go over like gangbusters.

After you have your idea, come up with a few situations. Situations are points in the writing where stuff happens. Ideally, the situations will involve someone tumbling into a mound of poop or getting teabagged. If you want to spice it up, make sure that the poop is lion poop or have a lion do the teabagging. For some reason, disgusting scenarios like these make college students, particularly obnoxious guys who are in fraternities, howl with laughter. Also, be sure to note in the script that not all of this is to be shown, because otherwise your hot college comedy would get an “R” rating and 13-year-olds with disposable incomes would have to wait until the DVD release to watch said lion teabagging.

Before you send your comedy script to a production company, you need to ensure that you’ve included a lot of mixed messages. One way to do this is by shoehorning some kind of lame romance into a story that has a bunch of raunchy situations. Nevertheless, even if the main nerdy loser does care about the girl of his dreams, he mustn’t forget that losing one’s virginity is an important measure of masculine self-worth. You should give a lot of screen time to the main loser’s misogynistic loud mouth of a best friend, who will have the choicest lines and thus distract viewers from any vague moral lesson you’re trying to convey. The love interest might have a few redeeming qualities, but the other female characters need to be written as vapid airheads who will pander to the largely male audience’s negative gender stereotypes.

Finally, think about casting and quotability. You want to front this movie with hot young actors, preferably ones who got their starts on late-night sketch shows or state-of-the-art sitcoms. They all need to have interesting hair and affected line deliveries. The interesting hair is important because it allows you to insert product tie-ins with hipster clothing companies and happening-ster indie bands. The affected line deliveries are important because these actors are going to utter a bunch of one-liners that college students will repeat ad nauseam.

There it is: A plan so simple that a communications major could follow it. What are you waiting for, true believers? You’re one gut-busting college comedy away from a tricked-out crib, a pimped-out ride and a baller savings account!

Oliver Bateman and his friends invented the Moustache Club of America, a website that specializes in hot college humor. You can read their hilarious stories about keg parties and randy students at moustacheclub.wordpress.com or e-mail Oliver at olb8@pitt.edu.