Desire & Disaster - Goals, Stakes and Problems

Comedy is funnier when something’s at stake. If we know what a character wants, we care when they don’t get it. If we know why it matters today, we lean forward. And when it all goes wrong, the laughter lands harder because there’s something to lose.

The goal can be huge (win the championship) or absurdly small (tie your shoelace before anyone notices). What matters is that it’s important to the character. A tiny mission treated with deadly seriousness hooks the audience just as much as a big one. If it matters to them, it matters to us.

Desire fuels action. Stakes give it weight. The higher the stakes, the more the character’s failures matter — to them, and to us. Even if the “real” stakes are small, to the character they’re enormous. That’s where the comedy lives: in the gap between the actual scale of the problem and how desperately it’s pursued.

Once you have a strong, clear goal, you have an endless supply of funniness just by asking: What can get in the way? What obstacles can I throw at them? What could go wrong next? Problems create comedy, especially when they’re obvious to the audience but invisible to the character hurtling towards them.

The clown often gets in their own way. They create problems, make them worse, and rarely solve them. Obstacles pop up everywhere — sometimes from the outside world, sometimes from their own idiocy. The audience enjoys both: the mishaps they couldn’t avoid, and the ones they walked right into.

When the goal is strong, the stakes are clear, and the character’s desire burns bright, every wobble, misstep, and self-sabotage becomes comedy gold.