Your average police interrogator has nothing on Jen's mom & aunt...
Nerd By Northwest #338 – “Interrogation”
(Click on the image to see the full-size version)
For Ash meeting Jen's mom, I wanted to have a humorous and uncomfortable interrogation. Ultimately, I found the best inspiration for this from the classic 80's movie, 'Uncle Buck':
Now Jen's mother and aunt may be a little more aggressive in their questioning, but I aimed for the same kind of setup and rythym. Actually, the Aunt Sophia character wasn't even part of the plan from the start... but when writing the dialogue I found I needed an extra person to enhance the interrogation. Probably good to have the character over the longer run too. Can't have just one character hogging all the snarky comments!
I was also having trouble trying to figure out what Ash would say in the last line, but ultimately I relied on a humor writing tip from cartoonist Scott Adams. Yes, I know he's developed some notoriety in recent years, due to him being both a Trump fan as well as making a controversial comment considered racist by some (an assessment which IMHO leaves out some critical context from the whole video... though I definitely agree he was being intentionally provocative). But like his politics or not, he does know how to write humor. Anyway, the tip in question was, (paraphrasing here) "write dialogue with a trend towards the character being selfish or self-absorbed".
Mission accomplished... now where's my damn cookies? 😁
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