Punch Up

By Kat Sandler

Duncan has always been a pretty boring guy, leading a simple life while working at a bread factory.

Then he stumbles upon Brenda, a sad young woman who’s about to end her life. Convinced he’s fallen in love, Duncan strikes up a desperate deal: if he can get her to laugh, she'll give life another shot, but if she doesn’t even giggle, he'll help her go through with her plan. There’s just one catch: Duncan isn’t funny. At all.

So he borrows Pat, his second-favourite comedian, to help him come up with the perfect routine. But Pat is having a hard time mustering his sense of humour after a bad break-up, and the last thing he wants to do is teach a lonely loser the difference between knock-knock jokes and schadenfreude while chained to a typewriter.

A tragicomedy of three misfits, Punch Up navigates a hostage situation and a life-or-death comedy lesson to show just how far we’ll go for a laugh.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
• Release date: Feb 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781770917446

Kat Sandler

Kat Sandler is a playwright, director, screenwriter, and the artistic director of Theatre Brouhaha in Toronto. She has staged seventeen of her original plays in the last eight years, including Yaga and the concurrent double bill of The Party and The Candidate, where the same cast raced back and forth between two theatres to perform two simultaneous plays. Her play Mustard won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Play and BANG BANG was nominated for the same award. Kat is a graduate of the Queen’s University Drama Program and is based in Toronto.

Book preview

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For my parents, for teaching me to tell stories, and for encouraging me to laugh at silly things.

Contents

Foreword

Note on Punctuation and Overlapping Dialogue

Note on Jokes

Note on Pace

Production History

Characters

Punch Up

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Foreword

When I was ten, my father started playing a cassette tape (yes, cassette tape) of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s 2000 Year Old Man bit during our morning carpools. It was awful—two old guys I’d never heard of just . . . talking. I honestly thought it was the news. Until one day I realized it was meant to be funny. They were a duo, playing off each other, and all the comedy came from the rhythm of their dialogue, the ease of their improvisation, their knowledge of how the other guy works. Each of them had a very specific role to play—a straight man and a funny man. One guy sets up the jokes, the other one knocks ’em down. I was hooked.

At the time I couldn’t figure out why I thought it was so funny, and it took a long time for it to sink in: A 2000-year-old man is funny because it’s impossible—no one can live that long, no matter how much we want them to. And geez, is that a tough lesson to learn from a cassette tape, but it makes sense. That joke was so funny because of how sad the truth is. You can’t have eternal life without understanding death. You can’t know what it is to love without loss. You can’t have comedy without tragedy, and the intersection of the two is where some of the best, the saddest, and the most hilarious works of art live.

Punch Up, hopefully, lands somewhere near that intersection. It was originally conceived as a vehicle for Colin Munch, a comedian friend whom I’d wanted to collaborate with for a long time. I knew I wanted it to be about the comedy world, that it should be about the interplay of comedy and tragedy. But the original concept was brutal: Comedian cares for dying father. Not necessarily a laugh-riot.

So why not make it a duo? Write for two guys who knew each other’s rhythms, loved sharing a stage, and were perfect foils to one another? I paired our comedian with a close friend of ours—Tim Walker, an incredible and immensely lovable actor and physical performer. Now we had a team, but what were they fighting against? Death. What were they fighting for? Love, of course. So we introduced a great love story, a true love, personified by Caitlin Driscoll, the girl that just happened to be the love of our actor’s life (for real). And then it became a fairy tale.

I wrote the first draft of this play over a week in January 2013. We did a one-day workshop with the cast, then another pass in May 2014, and I didn’t look at the script again until we workshopped / staged it over nine insane days in June 2014, in the freezing murder basement of a Vietnamese mob bar with no windows and a concrete floor on Dundas Street West in Toronto. If ever a place needed some jokes, it was our rehearsal hall, and, thankfully, we rose to the challenge.

The creation of this kind of play—a comedy about comedy—can only happen with a group of very generous human souls. Comedy is not static—it has to change; it has to be flexible. A lot of the jokes in this play are mine, a lot came out of rehearsal, and a lot are suggestions, donations to the cause from a group of very, very funny people: dramaturg Tom McGee; collaborator