Comedy Screenplay Template | Free Google Docs Format

Why this template?

Comedy is rhythm.

A joke on the page is not the same as a joke on screen, but the mechanics are identical. Setup. Expectation. Subversion. The laugh comes from the gap between what the audience expects and what they get. In a screenplay, that gap lives in the action lines, in the pauses between dialogue, in the cut to the next scene. Comedy is the hardest genre to write because the structure has to be invisible. If the audience sees the setup, the punchline is dead.

The best comedy screenplays are character-driven. The humor comes from who these people are, not from jokes bolted onto a plot. A well-drawn character in a bad situation is funnier than any one-liner. Shane Black understood this. So did Billy Wilder. The character's logic creates the comedy: they do something that makes perfect sense to them and no sense to anyone else. That's where the laughs live.

This template gives you the formatting. Scene headings, action blocks, dialogue, parentheticals: all industry standard. You bring the timing. The margins are already correct.

What's inside

Everything You Need

Industry-standard format

Courier 12pt, correct margins

Pre-built scene structure

Adapt or delete as needed

Character and dialogue formatting

Ready to go

Works with Screenplay Editor

One-click auto-formatting

The film behind the template

The Nice Guys (2016)

This template is built around the opening of The Nice Guys (2016), Shane Black's neo-noir buddy comedy set in 1970s Los Angeles. It's one of the most underrated comedies of the decade, and its opening sequence is a clinic in how to establish tone, character, and world in under five minutes.

The opening is pure Shane Black. A kid sneaks out of bed at night. He finds a magazine. Then a car crashes through the hillside and into his house. A woman stumbles out, barely alive, and the kid covers her with a blanket. The scene is absurd, violent, tender, and darkly funny all at once. It sets the rules of the entire film: nothing is sacred, anything can happen, and the comedy will come from the collision of the grotesque with the mundane. It's a scene that shouldn't work on paper, but Black's writing makes every beat land with the precision of a punchline.

Shane Black is the writer who sold Lethal Weapon at 23 and essentially invented the modern buddy action-comedy. His scripts are famous for their voice: sardonic narration, self-aware dialogue, and a willingness to let his characters be genuinely terrible at their jobs. In The Nice Guys, Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe play a private eye and an enforcer who can barely function individually, let alone together. The comedy comes from competence gaps, misread situations, and characters who are always one step behind the plot they're supposed to be driving.

Great comedy writing looks effortless. It never is. This is the structure that makes it look easy.

Timing is everything.