CHAPTER 1:

2000 hrs, Military Headquarters, California

Adrian, 31, 2/10/16

“And…Fire!” the training officer yells. I shoot at the target and hit it in the center. I’m a fairly better shot than the rest of my team. I don’t know why, it’s not like I’ve been training longer, in fact most of them have been training much longer than me. We’re specially trained black ops Marines and have been in the military most of our lives. 

“Nice shot, Adrian,” our training officer compliments me.

“Thank you sir,” I say.

“Okay Marines, report to the obstacle course station” our training officer orders us. By us, I mean my team, we’re Delta Squad, and there are seven of us. Me and Sam are the riflemen, Henry is the sniper, Alyx is the engineer, Marolyn and Jacob are the submachine gunners, and Carter is the commanding officer.

We head to the obstacle courses, which consist of tubes to climb through, barbed wire to crawl under, far jumps, and walls to vault over. When we’re done a voice speaks out of the loud speakers: “Delta Squad, report to Hanger A.”

CHAPTER 2: Peter Sheppard

2100 hrs, Military Headquarters, California

Adrian, 31, 2/10/16

My team and I are as confused as a turtle at the bottom of a well. “A new mission?” asks Henry.

We half run to the hangars where Colonel David Baker, the man who’s in charge of our whole organization, and two personal guards are waiting. David is wearing a suit with a red tie. His guards are wearing similar outfits but with blue ties.

“What is it sir?” Carter asks as we salute.

“There is a terrorist by the name of Peter Sheppard, and I need him dead. He’s been smuggling in weapons and may use them. He’s in a small town in New York and has a team with him that is very dangerous. Which is why I’m counting on Delta Squad to get the job done,” David answers.

“How will we get there?” Carter asks.

“You will be flying in one of our best armored choppers, it is covered with steel plating, has a heat seeking missile launcher, and automatic machine guns on the front, back, sides and bottom. It is very fast. We will be controlling it and will fly you to your destination from headquarters,” David answers with a proud smile on his face.

“And where is this magnificent helicopter, sir?” Carter asks.

“Right there,” David answers as a crane-like machine carries in the armored chopper.

I have to admit, it is an amazing vehicle. “Are you ready Marines?” David yells.

“Sir yes sir!” we all answer. Then we walk into the chopper and get seated. The chopper has two windows on either side, and they’re actually the only way to see outside.

“Good luck,” David says to us as the chopper lifts off the ground.  

Chapter 3: Flight

2100 hrs, outside of Military Headquarters, California

Adrian, 31, 2/10/16

The flying tank soars through the night sky, almost gracefully. Our team doesn’t talk very much, but today’s an exception. “Why would they suddenly send us on a mission at night, to kill a terrorist?” Sam asks.

“I don’t like it,” Alyx says.

“A mission is a mission, and this is perfectly normal,” Jacob concludes.

Just then the hum of the helicopter blades ceases. And then we’re launched into free fall. “Hold on! Everybody hold on!” is all I can get out of my mouth before the chopper slams down on rocky ground and explodes.

Chapter 4: Chopper “Malfunction”

2200 hrs, unknown location

Adrian, 31, 2/11/16

The ringing in my ears is dreadful, but at least it signifies that I’m still alive. I open my eyes to find Marolyn is unconscious on the ground next to me. I try to stand but there’s a heavy piece of metal debris on my heavily bruised left leg.

I observe the area around me. Alyx and Jacob are on the ground about five yards away to my right, and Sam is about ten yards away from them. I look to my left to find Carter crouched over a piece of the chopper, and Henry is nowhere to be found.

“Sir?” I ask.

“Yes, soldier?” Carter answers back without turning his head.

“We should have gone for the parachutes,” I say.

“I did,” he answers, and this time there’s a long silence. “There were none,” he concludes.

Many years ago, I was up for the gig of adapting Where the Wild Things Are to the big screen, and I had the chance to talk to Maurice Sendak on the phone for two and a half hours.

It was one of the most thrilling experiences of my life, because in spite of being a much older man with an infinitely greater impact on world culture, Sendak and I had an immediate rapport and instantly talked like two old friends.  I imagine many people have similar stories about him.  He saw me, the both of us I guess, as adventurers in the artistic wilderness.  He didn’t like rules, he had no patience with commerce, he was utterly unconcerned with the demands of the marketplace.  He was a pure artist, a man of vision who did what he wanted, damn the consequences, and made the marketplace bend to his will.

To a screenwriter, an encounter like that is like heroin.  The screenwriter spends his entire life in compromise, putting himself out there day after day, doing his best to make his voice heard, only to be told, a hundred times a day in a hundred different ways, that his voice is subservient to the studio executive, the marketing department, the producer, the director, the cast, the special-effects crew, the production designer, the product-placement people, and so on.

We talked about Walt Disney.  I told Sendak that I thought Bambi was Disney’s artistic peak, Sendak said he placed it at Pinocchio.  ”Bambi is where he went wrong,” he said.  ”Bambi is where the cute animals took over.  I liked Mickey Mouse, the early ones.  That guy was a rat-nosed bastard.”

We talked about Samuel Beckett.  Sendak loved his plays but had never read his prose.  I told him I greatly preferred his prose and suggested a short story collection as a point of departure.  I don’t know if he ever took me up on the recommendation, but I was gladdened that an artist with nothing left to prove to anyone was still curious and still looking for inspiration, still eager to learn.

Sendak told me he had only one demand for my (hypothetical) adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are.  ”All I ask,” he said, “Is that the movie be as revolutionary today as the book was in 1962.”  Those are terrifying and liberating words for a screenwriter to hear.  On the one hand, you’ve got a great author telling you that you are free to do anything you want, and on the other hand, you know that the word “revolutionary” is in the studio’s mind exactly nowhere.

I laughed.  I said “I totally agree with you, that’s what the movie should be.  The way that your book threw out every expectation of what a children’s book should be, that’s what the movie should do.  It should boldly, recklessly experiment with form, it should deal with dream and metaphor, it should take penetrating psychological insight and present it as messy, wild comedy.  But I gotta tell you, there’s no way a studio is going to spend $100 million on that movie.”

“That’s okay with me,” he said.  ”I don’t need the money, I don’t need the hassle, and I don’t need a movie made of Where the Wild Things Are.  And if no movie ever gets made, I’m perfectly okay with that.  These are my conditions.”

Loved that guy.

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Here’s a nice piece on Geoffrey Golden and Amanda Meadows, creators and editors of The Devastator, a new humor magazine that’s been kind enough to publish me, which makes it the single greatest publishing entity of the 21st century.

You know, it’s quite good.

And it appears the entire world wants to see this movie about a scrappy band of misfits who put their differences aside and refuse to bow down to an individual who would oppress them.

Many years ago I went with my friend R. Sikoryak to see the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie.  R. had been waiting all his life for that movie, and it did not disappoint him — it all felt right to him.  I wasn’t well-read in Spider-Man comics at the time, so I assumed he was right.

Looking back on it now, Spider-Man is a wonderful movie, but does it capture the tone of the comics?  My reading of Spider-Man was that he wasn’t so tortured, that he wore his heroism lightly, that he was always there with a quip, that nothing really bothered him that much — as long as he had his Spider-Man suit on, anyway.  The act of putting a teenager in a Spider-Man suit on film, I think, meant that the character and his world needed to become — here’s the dreaded word — “grounded.”  And the Raimi movies got that down well.  When you take a character in spandex and put him on screen, he’s bound to look ridiculous.  Because of that, everyone in the movie must take this all very seriously, or else there is no dramatic tension.

Look at where we’ve come in this genre from the Batman TV show to The Avengers.  The Batman creators saw that a man dressed like a bat punching people was ridiculous, and so everyone played it for laughs.  The Superman movie creators saw that a little weight could add resonance to this pulp material, but they had no real faith in the source material.  Deep down, they thought it was all kind of silly and gave Superman a buffoonish Lex Luthor to fight.  Look at a project like Justice League of America: The Movie and you can see how disastrous a too-light approach can be to this kind of material.  How can we care about anything onscreen if everyone is an idiot?

The Avengers, I think, gets it all right, more so even than X-Men: First Class, up ’til now my favorite Marvel movie.  The characters are well drawn, well played, taken seriously and grounded, but it all plays very lightly, the way I remember Avengers comics being.  Disaster always looms, the world is always on the brink of collapse, but everyone in the movie manages to bear the burden with a grin.  I mean, we’re talking about a world where a thawed-out super-soldier, a Norse god and a Jekyll-and-Hyde monster all live in the same space, where an aircraft-carrier can fly, where the multi-billionaire arms dealer with the flying super-suit is the most “grounded” character of the bunch.

Add to this the fact that the movie has to juggle the concerns and arcs of no fewer than ten main characters, and does so with grace, humor and panache.  There is never a moment where you’re thinking “Come on, where’s the Hulk already?” or “Ugh, Captain America, I’m gonna go get some popcorn,” but neither does the movie get so bogged down in any one character’s struggles that the narrative slows.

And we remember, we read superhero comics as children because they were fun.  The adventures were huge, the mayhem panoramic, the tests of will and strength arduous, but above all, they were fun.  The Avengers remembers that.

Archer’s arc for “Skytanic” is:

(1) He has no interest in defending a rigid airship against a bomb threat, but goes on a mission to do so, in order to have sex with Lana.

(2) Once aboard the ship, he goes about his job of “finding the bomber” half-heartedly and incompetently, while still trying to have sex with Lana.

(3) His twin motives of “find the bomber” and “sex with Lana” conflict in the person of Singh, and force him to drive Lana into the arms of Cyril, his romantic rival.

(4) Finally, once it is revealed that there never was a real bomb threat, Archer discovers a very real bomb.

The most excellent of Archer episodes take care to include at least one sequence of “actual movie spy work” — a car chase, a gunfight, a break-in.  This is no small feat — action sequences are expensive, whether in live action or animation, and the action sequences in Archer manage to be both visually impressive and funny on a character level.  It is also, I would say, not strictly necessary — comedies like Archer, where the comedy often rises from colorful characters doing mundane tasks, could easily get by on anti-comedy.  Adult Swim shows have trafficked in this kind of comedy for a decade now, where the laughs come from the audience’s expectations being dashed.  Archer, on the other hand, is lovingly generous to its audience, giving them excellent scripts, elegant animation (for its budget), and devoted attention to detail in its homages to its source material.

The “actual movie spy work” sequence of “Skytanic” is “Disarming the Bomb.”  Archer, upon finding the bomb, immediately jumps into action — and runs back to his room to change into his black turtleneck.  On the way he runs into Lana and tells her about the bomb, and Lana, in turn, captures Kraus, who, of course, is not the bomber.  Archer returns, with turtleneck, just in time to see Kraus shot by — who’s this?

Capt Lammers! (ARCHER: “Nice read, Velma.”) In a twist worthy of Chandler, we see that Capt Lammers has been playing ISIS the whole time.  He has taken advantage of Malory’s fake bomb threat to create a real bomb threat, and he has hired ISIS to deal with it because he knows that ISIS will be utterly incapable of dealing with it, because they are a bunch of incompetent, base-minded nincompoops.  (Why does Capt Lammers want to blow up the Excelsior?  Oh, you know, a stock scam — essentially lifted from Casino Royale.)  He now jumps out of the cargo hold and flies away, leaving Archer and Lana to deal with the bomb.

Archer and Lana call Ray Gillette, who puts on his “crisis vest” (lifted from Apollo 13‘s Gene Krantz) and helps them disarm the bomb.  Who is Ray?  Ray is “the gay one,” and is therefore obsessed with clothes and bitchy.  Is Ray a stereotype?  Maybe, but he is a markedly better person than either Archer or Malory.  Would we say that Archer is a stereotype of privileged white men?  He has all the characteristics — short-sightedness, complete disregard for the feelings of others, outrageous sense of entitlement.  Lana has faults but is in no way a stereotype, not even a stereotype of a “1970s black female action star,” which is what she looks like — Pam Grier mixed with Diana Rigg.  

And while Ray has his stereotypical “gay mannerisms” (lisps, sex-mad, fashion-conscious), he also has real skills (which always go unappreciated).  (And, if “clothes conscious” is gay, then Archer is the gayest member of the cast — he worries more about what he wears than anyone.)

Long story short, the “Disarming the Bomb” sequence involves a blue wire with white stripes, a white wire with blue stripes, a pair of serial numbers, a static-y radio and Archer using the phrase “‘M’ as in ‘Mancy,’” which is precisely where the series exploded for me.  Bond parodies I’ve seen for decades, but a character who could say “‘M’ as in ‘Mancy’” is a whole new level of stupid. Archer fails in every regard in “Skytanic.”  He doesn’t catch the bomber, he doesn’t have sex with Lana, he fails to disarm the bomb, and he ends up shot in the leg (by Lana, no less).  At the last moment, Cyril enters, still in Malory’s dressing gown, to help Lana, in her underwear, to push the bomb off the Excelsior.  Cyril proves his love for Lana and the Excelsior is saved, although the bomb lands on Wales.  But that’s someone else’s problem.  Someone must always pay the price of love, even if it’s not the people actually in love.

Up in the sky aboard a rigid airship, Lana has reached a crisis point with her boyfriend Cyril.  Dressed as a bellhop and bearing a basket of fruit, Cyril has stumbled upon Lana in her underwear with a naked Archer.  Lana, fed up with Cyril’s mistrust, breaks up with him, and Cyril flees, sobbing.  Archer, whose first priority is to have sex with Lana, tells her to “go after him.”  Not to patch up their relationship, of course, but because “we’re almost out of fruit.”

Mind you, this is all in the service of foiling a bomb plot.  That’s one of the key things to remember with farce — the higher the stakes are, the more serious the “mission,” the more base the cast’s motivations should be.  In Fawlty Towers it’s “the hotel inspectors are coming,” in Arrested Development it’s “we’re going to trial,” in Curb Your Enthusiasm it’s “There’s an important party and you need to be on your best behavior.”  With the Marx Bros it’s A Night at the Opera, with Bugs Bunny it’s “The Rabbit of Seville,” with the Three Stooges it’s the “important society gala,” with Caddyshack it’s the big golf tournament, with Animal House it’s the homecoming parade.

And one of the things that makes Archer that much more startling is that it’s, of all things, “a James Bond parody,” a genre unto itself, something that’s been done to death, in every possible medium, from Get Smart to Austin Powers, from radio to newspaper comics.  How Archer manages to be not just fresh, but startlingly so, is a miracle unto itself, and a testament to the vision of the show’s creators, who have turned a liability into an asset — they use the “Bond parody” style as a familiar way into their extremely bent worldview.

While Lana is dealing with Cyril, Malory is glowing and gloating in the casino.  She is getting what she wants — she’s got her luxury trip, she’s showing up her rival Trudy Beekman, and she’s working on getting Capt Lammers into bed.  She’s forgotten all about why she’s actually aboard the ship — for good reason, we will learn.  Lana and Malory have a “girl talk” about Lana and Cyril while Archer half-heartedly goes about some secret-agent stuff.  He goes to the gaming tables to suss out Singh (or “Beardy McTurbanhead” as Archer calls him) and promptly loses to him.  Having no money, Archer must give Singh the only thing he has worth winning — Lana.

(At the top of the show, Archer, in order to get into the same room as Lana, suggested to Capt Lammers that they pose as man and wife.  Now, without ever achieving his goal of sex with Lana, Archer loses Lana to Singh, because of his own ruse.  That’s good plotting.)

Meanwhile, Cyril, still a mess from Lana’s rejection, falls prey to Cheryl’s demented wiles, and has violent sex with her.  Realizing his mistake, he panics, again, and flees the room, this time wearing Malory’s dressing gown — a second outfit change for Cyril, and a step down from busboy.  Cyril’s arc, up to now, has been a steep plummet from anxiety to humiliation.

Back in the casino, Archer faces a crisis — he has to pay up to Singh, but Lana isn’t really his to give.  Thinking fast, he remembers the reason he’s supposed to be there — looking for a bomb plot.  He tells Lana that Singh is the bomber and that she needs to go to his room to seduce him while he “looks for the bomb.”  Archer never confronts an issue if he can push it downstream instead.

Malory, on the other hand, is upset with both of them for ruining her trip — the bomb threat is the furthest thing from her mind. Having sent Lana to seduce Singh, Archer comes up with another plan — to find Cyril and send him to discover Lana with Singh, which will save Lana from seducing Singh.  Archer is either trying to save Lana’s relationship with Cyril (doubtful) or he’s thinking that if Lana goes through with seducing Singh and then finds out there is no bomb, he’ll never get to have sex with her (more probable).

Archer runs into red-herring Kraus and then Cyril (in Malory’s dressing gown).  He directs Cyril to go find Lana with Singh.  Cyril does indeed walk in on Lana and Singh, and drags her back to Malory’s suite, to find Malory, Pam and Cheryl reviving Cheryl from a post-sex drowning (don’t ask).  Then comes the big twist: Malory reveals that it was she, herself, who made the initial bomb threat on the Excelsior, for the sole purpose of showing up her bete noir neighbor Trudy Beekman. This is already enough plot to carry a Joe Orton play, but we’re only at the end of Act II, at which point Archer discovers, almost by accident, that there is, in fact, a real bomb on board the Excelsior.

So, our team of self-involved, superficial super-spies are now on the Excelsior.  But there is one key player we haven’t met yet — Cyril, Lana’s current boyfriend.  Cyril, anxious and insecure on the best of days, can’t stand the idea that Lana is going to be spending the voyage in a cramped stateroom with his rival Archer, so he sneaks aboard the airship and disguises himself as a bellhop in order to spy on them.  The perfect ingredient to raise the level of farce — a character with a secret, involved in a deception, and best of all in disguise.  Add to that the enclosed space of the airship, the ballooning of free-floating sexual tension and the escalation of the bomb plot (which may or may not be real) and you have a farce narrative that would work under far less well-written circumstances.  (It’s essentially the plot of The Hindenburg.  ”Skytanic” manages to cover the same ground with 100 minutes to spare and a lot more laughs.)

Archer doesn’t care about Cyril’s discomfort.  But then, Archer doesn’t care much about anything but himself and his own wants.  He openly flaunts his desire for Lana, his superior physicality, and the likelihood of close physical contact with her.  He seems to want to win her over by sheer force of will — he knows he’s attractive, he knows he runs rings around Cyril sexually, he figures all he has to do is keep reminding Lana of that and she’ll eventually succumb to his, er, charms.   

Because that all isn’t quite enough complication for an Archer episode, there are still two more characters to work into the mix: Cheryl, Malory’s secretary, and Pam, the ISIS HR manager.  Both of them are terrible at their jobs and sexual psychopaths of different stripes.  Cheryl, we will learn, has a plan for sneaking aboard the Excelsior; Pam ends up mostly just along for the ride.  (Cheryl, by far the most clinically insane of the team, is often crazy like a fox, and today is no exception — she pretends to be stupid to lure Pam into a round of drinks, to ensure them both being aboard the Excelsior when it takes off.)

Now that everyone is aboard, we catch up with what I’ll call our “active principals” (as opposed to our “reactive principals”).  The script touches base with all four motivations — Capt Lammers wants to keep the Excelsior safe, Malory wants Capt Lammers in her luxury suite, Lana wants to actually protect the Excelsior while keeping her relationship with Cyril on an even keel (the Excelsior eventually becomes a clear metaphor for her relationship with Cyril), and Archer’s mind is headed in three different directions — he still doesn’t understand that the ship won’t explode on its own, he has no idea where to start looking for a potential bomber, and his primary goal is to get Lana alone. “Skytanic” is really Lana’s episode, now that I think of it.  Archer, as Archer will, gets all the good lines, but it’s Lana’s emotional arc that carries us through the narrative.

Capt Lammers, still believing there is a real bomb threat to worry about, directs our super-spies suspicions to officer Kraus.  Kraus is a classic red herring: he’s introduced as the first possible suspect and he exudes guilt — he’s German, he’s got a hideous scar and an eyepatch.  He’s missing only a mechanical hand and a white Persian cat.  Archer, pressed into unwilling service of actual detective work, goes about his job by punching a man lighting a cigar and suspecting a man in a turban (to whom he gives the name “Beardy McTurbanhead”).

Meanwhile, Cyril, deeply anxious about losing Lana to Archer, falls prey to Cheryl’s plan.  Cheryl’s plan, it turns out, is to get Archer’s attention by having brutal sex with Cyril.  How this plan is supposed to work exactly is unclear, but few things from Cheryl’s head scan in the cold light of day.  Cyril, understandably panicked by Cheryl’s rabid advances, flees to go find Lana and finds, more or less, this:   

Which, again, classic farce.  A cuckolded lover, feverish with jealousy and sexual longing, has his worst fears confirmed, if only in his own head.  This forces the issue between Lana and Cyril, and Lana tells Cyril they are now “on a break.”  Is Lana seriously charmed by Archer, or is she merely creeped out by Cyril’s obsessive stalking?

We are living in a second golden age of television.  Some of the best writing in any field is being done right now there, from the finely-calibrated social analysis of Mad Men to the demented dark fantasies of The Venture Bros.  Somewhere in between those two shows lies Archer, perhaps the most consistently well-mounted farce ever presented.  Comedy is hard, and farce is the hardest form of comedy, and the scripts for Archer manage to deliver quality, satisfying, twenty-minute farces on a weekly basis.  Those twenty minutes fly by cool breeze but actually are hard won crystalline comedy.  Today, let’s look at my favorite episode from Season 1, “Skytanic.”

To properly analyze this episode, first we have to meet this guy:

This is Capt Lammers.  What does Capt Lammers want?  He is the captain of a rigid airship, the Excelsior.  There has been a bomb threat against his rigid airship, and Capt Lammers wants ISIS (which seems to be a kind of freelance spy agency) to ensure the safe flight of the Excelsior’s maiden voyage. A bomb threat is serious under any circumstances, but in the case of the Excelsior it’s quite serious indeed — the marketing people of the Excelsior have put quite a bit of stock in selling the airship as safe.  

This is all explained to us in a promotional film at the top of the show: the Excelsior is safe, says the film, because it’s filled with helium instead of hydrogen. The promotional film, which is played mostly straight, serves an important purpose — to get across a rather complicated premise.  For some reason, in present-day America, someone has decided to begin airship flights across the Atlantic.  Archer often trades in these kinds of bizarre anachronisms.  In spite of being set in the present day, the characters seem to live in a perpetual mid-1960s, mixed with a technological mid-1980s.  The strange anachronisms of the show serve to create a kind of timelessness; it could be happening pretty much at any time between Dr. No and The Bourne Ultimatum.

The promotional film also allows us to experience the exposition of the premise in a graceful way.  Once the film is over, the script needs exactly two lines of brief, funny dialogue to launch the episode’s narrative. (As a side note, one of the most admirable things about Archer is that, even though it is mile-a-minute funny, it actually contains very few “jokes” — the humor comes almost entirely from character, in this case, a group of characters so deeply enmeshed in their petty worldviews that it’s all but impossible for them to carry on a simple conversation.)

This is Malory, who runs ISIS.  What does Malory want?  If you guessed “to serve the interests of her client,” you’re wrong.  One of the key elements to the success of Archer is that few people, if anyone, in the cast is concerned with doing their jobs, no matter how vital or important those jobs are.  In Malory’s case, we find that Malory has taken the job of securing the Excelsior in order to get a luxury airship ride across the Atlantic, in order to show up her neighbor Trudy Beekman.  Does Malory have any interest in keeping the Excelsior aloft?  Not at all.  She’s taking the job to (1) bump Trudy Beekman off the flight, (2) get some luxury pampering, and (3) maybe have sex with Capt Lammers (who doesn’t seem very interested in the prospect).

Here are Archer and Lana.  What do Archer and Lana want?  Well, Lana, being the only semi-professional in the company, wants to protect the Excelsior from a potential bomb threat.  Archer, on the other hand, wants only to have sex with Lana.  Archer, who has the attention span of a comma, is convinced that the Excelsior will explode in an orange fireball with a spark of static, in spite of being told the opposite several times during the episode, but, in order to have sex with Lana, he will brave the danger.  Lana, for her part, has recently left Archer for Cyril, ISIS’s comptroller (who has his own problems), so the job of securing the Excelsior suddenly becomes fraught for her — to go on this job with Archer will endanger her already-fragile relationship with Cyril.

So, perfect setup for farce — an “important job,” a job that requires focus and skill, in the hands of three characters who have the basest of motivations on their minds — greed, envy and lust to name only of the three deadliest.

To give you an idea of how quickly Archer speeds through plot, this entire opening — the promotional film and the setup of four different character arcs — takes a total of two and a half minutes.  That would be, in screenplay terms, two and a half pages, and that’s not even including the jokes that fly past.

The one guy is like “Whu-oh” and his wife is like “Grrr” and this one woman is like “HELL-o!” and her guy is like “Sigh” and this other guy is like “Yikes!” and this lady is like “Don’t You Dare” and another guy is like “Heyyyyyy” and another guy is like “Who, me?” and his girlfriend is like “Come here, you sexy thing!”

I can’t remember where I got this from, but this pretty much says it.

Every time I find myself typing the word “suddenly,” I want to kill myself.  On the other hand, I use exclamation points all over the place in my screenplays.  Screenplays seem to demand it for some reason.