Need advice on adult puppet web-series

[Onath]

Thanks everyone,

I talked it over with my crew and I think we are going to go with a dormroom setup. The two puppets will be an odd pairing of roomates that will lead to confrontation and many jokes. The dorm room opens possibilities of one of characters.

I think I want to make the show feel as though it is a video blog from a web cam. I think this will help college age connect with it. The situation I am having is in why would they do a blog about making tutorials. The best thing I can come up with to solve that is to have the one puppet be a lot more of a punk and have him revolting against corporate america and is trying to lead a DIY revolt. Then have his nerdy roomate just interupt his vidblog presentations.

For example---> Tuck is presenting to the camera intro to the show. Snippit yells something like "hey tuck"

Tuck" go away I'm doing my vidblog"

Snippit" But you soda tastes funny? Why does it taste funny. Hic..."

Tuck "because its not soda its beer"

Snippit enters "Oh.... I don't feel so good" falls over

Tuck"**** it.... I'll be right back watch this clip in the mean time."

So the episodes could then cut to a tutorial or a user submition and then when it returns it could be another comic routine with the two.

I am thinking I will change Snippits voice to something more like the pimply teen on the simpsons. Tuck will sound more like the puppet with the mohawk in this clip. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOOj2bQ7TA8&feature=channel_page

Well let me know if you guys have anymore ideas or your opinions on this.

Thanks Jon

 

[DumbAscii]

My humor tends to be laced with references to things people of my age/generation would get. (I'm 36, but I also have the sense of humor of a 12 year old boy at times, so there's a random doody joke here and there)

I totally agree about avoiding profanity and blatant sexual humor. It can be done just right, but most people seem to just do it to be shocking and lose the humor side of it.

And congrats on the possible gig!

 

[LamangoNumber2]

... *Snicker.* Puppet sex.

Erm. Just don't over do it. When I did a small five minute show for my School's old News Program, we tip toed around the idea of being more adult oriented, until finally, I tripped over one of the monitor cables and me and my character[Lamango] took a tumble. I got back up, made the puppet brush himself off, and just walk off screne, my then girlfriend's character [Miki], turned to Camera, and finally said 'Oh f**k it.' and ran off screne too.

The trick was, that we where live, and only had one night to remember scripts. Usually we forgot...

 

[staceyrebecca]

I've been mulling this over. Look at The Office...Arrested Development....those are all shows that are aimed at grown-ups, and if done with puppets you'd still have shows aimed at grownups. Sure they have sexual themes, but the last I checked they had few profanities (Well except for that one episode but they were all bleeped out). So it can be done.

I'd honestly start with strong characters. It means you're going to have to work harder as a puppeteer to express all of those emotions that adults have. Frustration, anger, fear, joy....the first three being emotions that kids deal with very differently...so when Elmo is angry he says "Elmo is maad. Elmo wanted to play with the ball. Elmo wants Snuffy to share!" and when an adult is angry they say "dude, what the what? You took my stupid ball you stupid piece of stupid!"

When I write scenes I like to start with the characters rather than one funny situation to say "how do we try to work in this funny situation?" When writing, do something that can last. If you have a scene that *can* go on for 30 minutes (obviously doesn't have to) its because the characters that you've created are strong enough to exist together in a real life situation. And it will be because you want it to last that long. A string of funny bit after funny bit probably won't create a show that's compelling enough to keep an audience. You can totally miss 8 months of Saturday Night Live & you won't care...but missing one episode of The Office will make you angry that your DVR was set wrong by your stupid head stupid roommate.

Also try to avoid arguing. Nobody wants to see entire episodes of these two people at each other's throats. By the end we'll say "kill each other already!" Give us emotional reasons as to why they've not moved out. Friends have funny situations between them as well...it's what makes us laugh with our friends.


You know your characters already...and you know the situation they're in...if you act/write it out honestly (meaning bring truth into their emotions) then the humor will follow naturally.

I'm wordy.

 

[practicecactus]

My $0.02 on adult puppetry.
I really dug what Greg the Bunny did when it was taken over to whatever network it was it was on over there.
It was clearly aimed at adults, but it wasn't gratuitious. It always just implied sex and drugs, but they didn't even swear. I mean, in the opening credits there was a hooker puppet.
That works best for tv puppetry, when it's adult story lines without being southpark-like.

People will tell ya there has to be a reason to do it with puppets, something that wouldn't work with normal human actors, but I say nuts to those rules, man. I like the absurdity or surrealism of puppets with adult, humanistic problems, interlaced with the occassional puppet type specific character problem or whatever. Like take the plot to Muppets Take Manhatten. That could have been done with human actors, but each of their individual 'character' is what makes it fun.
I feel I'm prpbly just repeating what staceyrebecca said, but make it character driven, and put them in real adult situations.
Oh, and never underestimate the universal appeal of a good fart joke.

 

[The Narrator]

Greg the Bunny was excellent adult humor puppetry. Comedy is difficult though, and I stand by the words of Joel Hodgens when he was creating Mystery Science Theater 3000, "We don't think about who will get the joke, we script knowing that the right people will get the joke." In the end, I think the best comedy occurs when the writers are enjoying themselves and aren't trying to water-down to suit a mass-market. Unfortunately, so often national chains don't want to take the risk on smaller demographics.

I say, go with what you like, let your audience find you and build from there. ...Then again, what do I know? I liked Clerks: The Animated Series, after all.

 

[chrisfason]

i really like the "video blog" idea. i had actually considered doing that as a youtube series myself once i'm a little more prepared. money's just been tight, bleh. that way, at the very least if i'm doing the series solo, it wouldn't be too odd that there's no other characters. just sort of improv monologue-ing. whatever you do, keep us updated!

 

[mike short]

To plug a bit, you can watch some adult-oriented puppets from my improv show.

All three vids are in order on my tumblr: http://shortmikeshort.tumblr.com/

Now, I'm the tall guy with the Italian-looking puppet who does the beanbag chair gag in the third scene. Now, we do drop the f-bomb a couple of times (I dont, you'll notice, but that's just me. I rarely if ever cuss on stage). But you could easily remove that word or any other expletive and still have a very adult show.

 

[RockerRob]

I don't like the idea that cussing makes it adult. I am an adult and I don't want to hear cussing at all. I feel that it is usually an unnecessary short cut to an end result that could have been resolved better with more thought. Adult oriented programs should not be categorized as cussing, sex, dirty ideas, but what really defines something as adult is that it is a situation that a child, teenager, or even a young adult would not understand because they have not matured mentally, emotionally, or had the life experience to understand the situations presented. Why should we cheapen our puppet programs with dirty jokes when they could be so much more?

 

[mike short]

I hope I didn't imply that there should be cussing.

In my video, the green monster places unreasonable demands on his employee, forcing her to dress up as a Munchkin just because she's a midget. It's an exaggerated exploration of horrible, callous bosses. Yeah, there's cursing in that scene, but if we wrote a script from that set we could easily remove those words. The heart of the scene would remain the same.

In another scene, my character lays in stoned wonder that various CDs match up with various TV shows while his girlfriend gets angrier with him for just lazing about. Listen closely, there's absolutely no cussing in that scene. But it's still a very adult story.

Get it?