BUSINESS PROPOSAL illustrates some great comedy tips. I spent March watching two Korean dramas, BUSINESS PROPOSAL and TWENTY-FIVE TWENTY-ONE.

Comedy Tips from BUSINESS PROPOSAL

BUSINESS PROPOSAL is light and fluffy, but also quite brilliant in how it subverts certain Korean drama tropes. And the humor is really good.  It is a fake dating romcom too, and I do love that trope.

Business Proposal has a great comic set scene in the very first episode. The main character is Hari, who works as a food researcher. Her best friend, Young-seo, is wealthy. Young-seo’s father keeps setting her up on blind dates to find an appropriately connected and rich marriage partner, but she wants to marry for love.

The Comedy SET SCENE in BUSINESS PROPOSAL

Enter Hari, who pretends to be Young-seo on her dates and acts so outrageous that she scares off any potential suitors.  This is a great set up for comedy, because it allows for surprise and exaggeration, which can be key for comedy, but in a manner that remains true to the purpose of the scene. Here, Hari is absolutely outrageous, and it’s hilarious.

First, there is a flashback to Hari scaring off a previous Young-seo suitor by pretending to be possessed.

In the blind date scene, Hari, pretending to be Young-seo, meets Tae-mu. The audience knows that Tae-mu, a workaholic, also doesn’t want to marry anyone; his grandfather wants him to get married so he will have grandchildren. Hari gets more and more desperate as Tae-mu completely misses her outrageousness because he keeps checking his work email.

It also illustrates another helpful tip for comedy: that there should be someone who is watching someone else do something funny. In this scene where Hari meets CEO Tae-mu on a date, Tae-mu is the straight man as he is shocked by her antics. As Steve Kaplan points out in his book, The Hidden Tools of Comedy:

“The dynamic of Straight Line/Wavy Line is the idea that comedy isn’t watching somebody do something funny, but rather us watching someone watch someone do something funny.”

The Hidden Tools of Comedy by Steve Kaplan at p. 172.

But Tae-mu also realizes that she’s not all that she seems. And so there’s a twist as he seems to go along to see how far she is going to take this.

TWENTY-FIVE TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-FIVE TWENTY-ONE broke my heart when the couple broke up. As a RomCom writer, I couldn’t take it. I think the writer of TWENTY-FIVE TWENTY-ONE might have been trying to write a first love, but ended up writing a forever love. Anyway, I wrote an alternate HEA ending that was published by Dramabeans. It was therapeutic. And I was so honored that Dramabeans published it. It definitely made my week!