Maria Ferrari is a staff writer on "The Bill Engvall Show." She is a graduate of Northwestern University.

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Episode 208 – Dream Lover

One of the trickiest parts of writing a sitcom is pitching jokes on the stage. We shoot our show in front of a live studio audience, except for certain scenes involving special effects or the outdoors. So for this episode, we pre-shot the storyline where Lauren teaches Trent to drive on a street on the studio lot, and we shot the storyline about Susan’s dream live on stage. It’s a big job – we do at least two takes of each scene, usually more, and have to take breaks for camera moves and wardrobe changes. So shooting eight or nine scenes will often take four hours or more. That’s a long time for an audience to sit still. We change jokes throughout the week as we revise the script. But sometimes we’ll get to tape night and a joke we loved all week just won’t get the laugh we expected. So we have to change it on the fly. If the rest of the scene is working, we have to be pretty surgical with our changes so we can cut the new joke into the take of the scene we already shot. And we have to work fast, because like I said earlier, that audience is waiting on us.

For example, this week we ended up pitching madly on one of Paul’s lines in the restaurant where Penelope works, the one where he says, “I never left. I’ve been ordering appetizers for hours, waiting for Penelope’s shift to end. JOKE.” This joke took many incarnations over the course of the week. One of the ones I remember is … “I’ve been ordering appetizers for hours, waiting for Penelope’s shift to end. Remember how I said I’d eat anything fried? Well, you can take apricots off the list.” I liked that one.

Anyway, whatever version of that joke we had in there when the episode went to shoot, in the moment we realized we needed a different joke. And we were off. My page of this script is covered with manic scribbles, only some of which I can decipher. “I’ve been ordering appetizers for hours, waiting for Penelope’s shift to end. I’ve eaten so may cheese sticks that I can speak Italian. And mouse.” “I’ve eaten a dozen cheese sticks, Bill, and the lactose is not my friend.” “I’ve eaten an appetizer platter for six, Bill. Do you know how lonely that makes me feel?!” “I’ve eaten five plates of nachos, Bill. My mouth is all cut up and bleeding.” “I had a whole pupu platter, Bill. It tasted just like you’d think.” So you do that for thirty seconds, a minute, two minutes, then you look at your deranged scribbles and you think, now, which of these jokes do I think should be on American television? And then the showrunner asks everyone what they’ve got and you just read him your jokes anyway.

It all happens so fast you don’t really have time to think about it. Generally the showrunner or Bill will decide they like a joke, try it in the next take, and if the audience responds we move on. If they don’t, we’ll try another one, which means you better have spent the previous take coming up with new jokes, just in case.

Sometimes I’ll be watching an episode and I’ll realize a line we had to pitch onstage is coming up, and I won’t even know what version was picked when the episode was cut together. So the punchline to Paul’s appetizer setup? You’ll have to watch the show to find out.