The Importance of Keeping Slang Out of Your Script

Workaholics was a TV series about four Millennials living and working together that ran on Comedy Central from 2011 to 2017. Last week, @colorpulp gave us a look into the writer's room at the show with images of the jokes the writers weren't allowed to slip into the scripts.

In case you can't read them, here they are enlarged.

You can see that these are not so much "jokes," but are catch phrases that were used a lot in the '10s. Using them as jokes would be a shortcut; a cheap shot to get a laugh just from recognition or to point out how weird Millennial slang is. Banning the latest jargon or catch phrases forced the writers to skip the easy way and come up with something truly comical.

But there's another reason to avoid relying on the latest in-group language when making a TV show. Ten years later, we don't have to cringe when we watch a ten-year-old episode of Workaholics and hear what we were saying back then. Or that Zoomers will roll their eyes and Generation Alpha will have to ask what that means and why it's funny. When you're writing for TV, you have to hold out the possibility of syndicated reruns or DVD sales. -via Nag on the Lake ​

(Image credit: Adam Newacheck/Comedy Central)