Ancient Origins of Halloween

Halloween's origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter.

To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

By 43 A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of "bobbing" for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.

On May 13, 609 A.D., Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western church. Pope Gregory III (731–741) later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1. By the 9th century the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted the older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church would make November 2 All Souls' Day, a day to honor the dead. It is widely believed today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. All Souls Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.

Halloween Comes to America

Celebration of Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant belief systems there. Halloween was much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies. As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups as well as the American Indians meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included "play parties," public events held to celebrate the harvest, where neighbors would share stories of the dead, tell each other's fortunes, dance and sing. Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the nineteenth century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing Ireland's potato famine of 1846, helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally. Taking from Irish and English traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today's "trick-or-treat" tradition. Young women believed that on Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors.

In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks and witchcraft. At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season and festive costumes. Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything "frightening" or "grotesque" out of Halloween celebrations. Because of these efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the twentieth century.

By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular, but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague Halloween celebrations in many communities during this time. By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high numbers of young children during the fifties baby boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated. Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighborhood children with small treats. A new American tradition was born, and it has continued to grow. Today, Americans spend an estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country's second largest commercial holiday.

Today's Halloween Traditions

The American Halloween tradition of "trick-or-treating" probably dates back to the early All Souls' Day parades in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food and families would give them pastries called "soul cakes" in return for their promise to pray for the family's dead relatives. The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the church as a way to replace the ancient practice of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits. The practice, which was referred to as "going a-souling" was eventually taken up by children who would visit the houses in their neighborhood and be given ale, food, and money.  

The tradition of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and Celtic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was an uncertain and frightening time. Food supplies often ran low and, for the many people afraid of the dark, the short days of winter were full of constant worry. On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back to the earthly world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts if they left their homes. To avoid being recognized by these ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits. On Halloween, to keep ghosts away from their houses, people would place bowls of food outside their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent them from attempting to enter.

Halloween Superstitions

Halloween has always been a holiday filled with mystery, magic and superstition. It began as a Celtic end-of-summer festival during which people felt especially close to deceased relatives and friends. For these friendly spirits, they set places at the dinner table, left treats on doorsteps and along the side of the road and lit candles to help loved ones find their way back to the spirit world. Today's Halloween ghosts are often depicted as more fearsome and malevolent, and our customs and superstitions are scarier too. We avoid crossing paths with black cats, afraid that they might bring us bad luck. This idea has its roots in the Middle Ages, when many people believed that witches avoided detection by turning themselves into cats. We try not to walk under ladders for the same reason. This superstition may have come from the ancient Egyptians, who believed that triangles were sacred; it also may have something to do with the fact that walking under a leaning ladder tends to be fairly unsafe. And around Halloween, especially, we try to avoid breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks in the road or spilling salt.

But what about the Halloween traditions and beliefs that today's trick-or-treaters have forgotten all about? Many of these obsolete rituals focused on the future instead of the past and the living instead of the dead. In particular, many had to do with helping young women identify their future husbands and reassuring them that they would someday—with luck, by next Halloween—be married. In 18th-century Ireland, a matchmaking cook might bury a ring in her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping to bring true love to the diner who found it. In Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended that an eligible young woman name a hazelnut for each of her suitors and then toss the nuts into the fireplace. The nut that burned to ashes rather than popping or exploding, the story went, represented the girl's future husband. (In some versions of this legend, confusingly, the opposite was true: The nut that burned away symbolized a love that would not last.) Another tale had it that if a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out of walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night she would dream about her future husband. Young women tossed apple-peels over their shoulders, hoping that the peels would fall on the floor in the shape of their future husbands' initials; tried to learn about their futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water; and stood in front of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and looking over their shoulders for their husbands' faces. Other rituals were more competitive. At some Halloween parties, the first guest to find a burr on a chestnut-hunt would be the first to marry; at others, the first successful apple-bobber would be the first down the aisle.

Of course, whether we're asking for romantic advice or trying to avoid seven years of bad luck, each one of these Halloween superstitions relies on the good will of the very same "spirits" whose presence the early Celts felt so keenly.

The Comic Toolbox’s Lessons and Tools

Comedy is truth and pain . . . Religion, sex, and death are rich areas for humor because they touch some pretty strongly held beliefs.

The Rule of Nine . . . For every ten jokes you tell, nine will be trash . . . Depressing? Not really.  In fact, the rule of nine turns out to be highly liberating because once you embrace it, you instantly and permanently lose the toxic expectation of succeeding every time.

Lower your Sights . . . I lower my sights.  I concentrate on this chapter, this paragraph, this sentence, this phrase, this word.  Why? Because the hope of success can kill comedy just as surely as the fear of failure.

Okay, now we have two tools . . . the rule of nine and lowering our sights.

The better you imagine yourself to be, the better you become.

Change your focus.  Concentrate on the process, not the product . . . Concentrate on the task at hand . . . When you are concentrating on the task at hand, the outside world truly does not exist.

The comic premise is the gap between comic reality and real reality . . . Anytime you have a comic voice or character or world or attitude that looks at things from a skewed point of view, you have a gap between realities.  Comedy lives in this gap.

The comic premise exists in all comic structures.

Use the comic premise as a tool to create comic situations.

We start by looking for something unexpected to create the comic reality.

There are multiple gaps in a comic premise.  They all turn on conflict, and the deeper the conflict gets, the more interesting the premise becomes.

In classic dramatic structure, there are three types of conflict: man against nature, man against man, and man against self.

The first type of conflict, so-called global conflict, is the conflict between people and their world.

A normal character in a comic world stands in for the reader or viewer or listener and represents real reality.

Comedy is also created when a comic character appears in a normal world.

There are two types of local conflicts.  One pits a comic character against a normal character, and the other finds comic characters in opposition.

Not just in comedy but in all storytelling, the richest conflict is the conflict within . . . nothing beats seeing characters at war with themselves.

In on sort of inner conflict, a normal character becomes a comic character, and the comedy is rooted in the character’s change of state.

In the best comic storytelling, all three types [global, local, and inner conflict] are present in the same situation.

You may have noticed that I try to keep my comic premises short, the length of a sentence of less.  Like they say, brevity is the soul of wit.

To recap: The comic premise is the gap between real reality and comic reality.  Every form of humor, from the smallest jokes to the largest comic tales, has some sort of defining gap or comic conflict.  There are three types of comic conflict: Global conflict takes place between an individual and his/her world.  Local conflict us about people fighting people . . . Inner conflict features a character at war with himself./herself.  Inner conflict is always the richest and most rewarding.

The heart and soul of any comic character is his strong comic perspective.  I repeat these words—strong comic perspective . . . they [these three words] may be the three most important words in this book.

The comic perspective is a character’s unique way of looking at his world which differs in a clear and substantial way from the “normal” world view . . . The comic perspective functions in a character exactly as the comic premise functions in a story: it defines the gap that the laughs will spark across.

A character’s strong comic perspective is the motor that drives his comic engine.  Comedy flows from character.

Comic perspective is a new tool, a single, clearly defined way of looking at the world.

Virtually anything can be filtered through a comic perspective, and virtually any point of view can be a comic perspective.

Exaggeration is the tool that makes the comic perspective interesting.

The tool of exaggeration simply takes a comic perspective and pushes and stretches and accelerates it until it’s sufficiently so far from our [normal] perspective that it starts to be funny.

This tool, exaggeration, requires you to be bold . . .There’s no such thing as exaggerating too much.

Flaws are another tool in creating comic characters.  A comic character is funny as a function of his/her flaws.  Flaws are failings or negative qualities within a person’s attributes or aspects.

Flaws in a comic character work to open emotional distance between a comic character and viewers or readers . . . flaws work to make a comic character “the other guy” in readers’ and viewers’ minds.

The more flaws you can find for your comic characters, the more interesting and complex and funny those characters will become.

Find a flaw and you’ve found a comic character.

Here, then, is another comic premise you can exploit, the inner comic premise, the gap between how a character sees himself/herself and who he/she really is.

Flaws serve two purposes: they create conflict within characters, and they create emotional distance between character and audience.

Humanity is used to build a bridge between character and audience . . . a comic character’s humanity (identifiable sympathetic human qualities) create empathy.

Humanity, then, is the sum of a character’s positive human qualities that inspire either sympathy or empathy.

Comic perspective is the unique worldview at variance with normal reality; it is what drives the character’s comic engine.

Flaws are the elements of a comic character that separate him from “real” people.  If he has no flaws, he’s generic and not funny.

Humanity is the quality of a comic character that unites him with the audience, building sympathy and empathy.

Another tool is the clash of context.  Clash of context is the forced union of incompatibles.  Clash of context takes something from its usual place and sticks it where it doesn’t fit.

Clash of context is a surprisingly easy tool to use.  Stick a character in the opposite setting he/she is usually found in.

The wildly inappropriate response is another highly useful tool.

We want a wildly, not a mildly, inappropriate response.

The wildly inappropriate response is also pretty simple to use.  Just pick a situation and ask yourself what the logical response to that situation would be.  Then find the opposite (taking a cooler full of beer to a funeral).

The law of comic opposites seeks the diametric opposite of a comic character’s strong comic perspective and assigns that opposite to a second character.

The tool of comic opposites is one of the most common in comedy.

To find a comic opposite is to ask who could give your comic character the worst possible time.

Using tension and release is another comic tool.  You raise tension, and then you release it.

Allow tension (expectation) to build up.

Tension and release is not only a function of time, they are also a function of circumstance as well.

To make a joke funny, delay the payoff; to make a situation funny, create dire circumstances . . . maximum tension, suspended release.

Positioning the payoff: place the payoff at the end.

Tool: telling the truth for comic effect (stating the obvious).

Tool: telling a lie for comic effect  . . . Telling a lie for comic effect is like finding the wildly inappropriate response.  Simply locate the truth of a situation and then say the opposite of that.

Telling the truth and telling a lie for comic effect work well together.

Comic story: in the center-and-eccentric configuration you have a straight man/woman surrounded by comic characters . . .The comic premise of the center-eccentric story is found in the gap between the central character’s normal perspective and the uncommon comic perspectives of the surrounding eccentric characters.

Comic story: fish-out-of-water tale, a normal character in a comic world, or a comic character in a normal world.

Fish-out-of-water stories don’t require an actual physical change of place.  Often a character undergoes an internal change.

Comic story: Character comedy, the direct emotional war between strong comic opposites . . . law of comic opposites becomes the comic premise.

Character comedy is also often character romance.

Comic story: magical powers, the comic premise os the power itself.

Readers and viewers have tremendous tolerance for magic in comic stories, but give an explanation, establish your rules . . .readers and viewers will tolerate almost any stupid explanation.

Comic story: ensemble comedy, a group of people in conflict with each other and their world, a common storyline for TV sitcoms.

The trick to making an ensemble comedy work is to layer in sufficient lines of conflict within the group.

Comic story: slapstick, the easiest sort of comedy . . .you don’t have to worry about inner conflict of emotional core issues or any of the things that make writing hard.  All you have to do is to make it funny in superficial ways (slipping on a banana peel).

A slapstick character never experiences self-doubt . . .the comic premise of the gap between the slapstick character’s self-assurance and his/her manifest incompetence.

Because slapstick comedy denies self-doubt, it is physical comedy as opposed to cerebral/emotional comedy.

To create slapstick comedy, create a comic character with delusions of grandeur, and then put the character in a situation designed to torment those delusions.

Comic story: satire and parody, satire attacks the substance of a social or cultural icon or phenomenon from the outside.  Parody attacks from within.

The common denominator between satire and parody is this: both find their comic premise in the gap between the world as they present it and the world as their audience understands it to be.

The best parody and satire operate on two levels at the same time.  You might have a fish-out-of-water tale that involves a comic character in a new and challenging world that, at the same time, mocks a facet of that world.

A throughline is a simple, direct path from the start to the end of a tale.

The comic throughline:

1.     Who is the hero?

2.     What does the hero want? (inner and outer needs)

3.     The door opens (a new and challenging world—hero never the same).

4.     The hero takes control

5.     A monkey wrench is thrown in.

6.     Things fall apart.

7.     The hero hits bottom.

8.     The hero risks all.

9.     What does the hero get?

A monkey wrench is a new bad thing—a new screw-up, a new threat, a new character, a new complication.

In TV sitcoms, the monkey wrench is usually thrown in at the act break, the moment just before the commercial when the hero realizes things aren’t going according to plan.

The moment of maximum remove occurs when the her realizes just how distant he/she is from the goal.

You find the monkey wrench in your story by asking and answering the question: when does something go completely wrong?

In a comic story, the monkey wrench is usually thrown in when the hero falls in love.

The key word is loyalty.  A character always starts out with loyalty to himself and to his goal.  What happens when the monkey wrench is thrown is that the hero experiences displaced loyalty.

This new conflict between original loyalty and displaced loyalty turns the story on its head.

Create conflict between what the hero wanted originally and what the hero now wants.

The rule of three is a helpful tool that’s built on three iterations of an idea or theme.  The first iteration presents a theme.  The second iteration validates the theme.  The third iteration violates the theme/sequence.  The rule of three is thus: introduction, validation, and violation.

Another tool is the jokoid, something that looks and sounds like a joke but is not funny.  A jokoid is a placeholder in your story and can easily be revised.  It’s always easier to revise than invent.

The doorbell effect is a sudden unexpected complication.

The character has a certain expectation—the doorbell won’t ring—and then that expectation is denied/defeated—the doorbell rings.  As a tool, the doorbell effect can be a humorous way of complicating the character’s situation.

Avoid clichés, cheap worn-down lazy formulas that allow writers to take shortcuts.  Cliches risk alienating readers/viewers.

The running gag use the structure of a joke that never changes, while the substance always changes.

A close cousin to the running gag, the callback works by direct reference to an earlier joke or idea . . . callbacks are a marvelously effective way to finish, or button,  a scene or story.  End with your story’s beginning.