Comedy Minus Time

You had already committed to emotional processing-through-writing a week or two prior, but the similarities between your experience and Forgetting Sarah Marshall were uncanny . Flying to Hawaii by yourself on the weekend of Saint Valentine’s Day on the heels of a rough breakup was not an homage by design, but one you grew to thoroughly appreciate. Fate, destiny, and providence are empty concepts to you, but what a hilarious coincidence this was becoming. You embraced the ridiculousness. At one point, you had even used the name of the Sarah Marshall protagonist, Peter Bretter, as your moniker on a dating website. Although this trip started out as a last-minute desperation attempt to make the most of a long weekend, that line between coincidence and perceived destiny was continually obscuring . Once aboard the plane for a few hours, you were handed a seemingly standard Declarations form. Any fruits? Been around animals or livestock? Have you traveled to the land of the coronavirus during the last two weeks? And then came the punch in the kisser – Reason for Visit. Thankfully, someone had taken the liberty to save all passengers the time and the agony of having to write out the commonest answers to this question— this may have well been a question on Family Feud. You can just hear Steve Harvey saying: “With the scores tied, we now go to sudden death. Only the top three answers on the board. We surveyed 100 people in the audience. We want to know, what is a reason you might go to Hawaii?” 1. Wedding Proposal 2. Honeymoon 3. Anniversary Somewhere after “Independent Study of Marine Biology,” and “Sporting Event,” you find the generic “Tourism” bubble and fill it in. Because you have already leaned into the whole Sarah Marshall motif, you find this amusing, and store this data to a file entitled “Self-fulfilling Prophies,” where it will fit quite nicely. You also can’t help but chortle at the thought of someone trying to nervously hide his/her answers from their unsuspecting partner while bubbling in #1. This is going to be a good trip, you reconcile . Although you hadn’t been dating a TV star, and hadn’t been burning her pictures on the stove, you were in pretty rough shape. Psychologically, you were in a pretty similar rebound state as Pete, but your execution was as fruitless as his was comedic. At least you didn’t have to endure Billy Baldwin’s one-liners from Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime reruns over the Pacific. Cue the wildly inappropriate Seinfeld-esque music. Your two most recent exes remained stateside, but both would be texting you in the next 48 hours. Had you not already been in the headspace of rehashing relationships past, this may have seriously upset the flow of your trip, but as it stood, these outreaches would only fuel your creative process. Whereas Jason Segel’s Bretter was working on A Taste for Love, you had been channeling some of your lifetime of good damage by taking pen to the page. Part therapy, part drunken dare to write extensively in the second person, you were trudging through the quagmire of romances long-expired for a publishable narrative. You hoped to strike the same heartfelt-but-comedic balance as your favorite vampire-themed puppet musical. And like the play on words which humanized Dracula in Peter’s title, you searched for a title which captured the essence of humor and heart. That film was a true embodiment of the aphorism that comedy is tragedy plus time. Relying, then, on some algebraic sleight of hand, you supposed that your story would be one of comedy minus time . Not forsaking the funny parts, but still at its core about a set of perceived tragedies, you had the crux of your title: Comedy Minus Time. The misadventures in romance, marginal comments, and non-sequiturs would come later in the writing process.