Part Two.
3. Two men in love with one girl. She gives them a common task to perform; one tries to win by crooked methods and is discovered. She marries the other.
Here our author inserts a long digression reminding us that it it not the triangle itself that is to be avoided, but only this manifestation of it. In the spirit of this exercise, therefore, we must try to stick close to the forbidden theme, but we may perhaps allow ourselves a single deviation: instead of marrying the virtuous suitor, the girl marries the crook. She admires his audacity. The virtuous one is left to realize that the girl and the crook deserve each other. Anyone who would set up a competition like that with herself as the prize would drive a virtuous man to vice sooner or later, and it is a good thing to have found her out so quickly.
If, however, we decided not to allow even that one deviation, then perhaps she marries the virtuous man because the contest has enlightened him. He understands that cheaters always prosper, and he devises a colossal cheat that cancels her plan to marry the other fellow. He wins the contest and marries the girl, and the two of them live happily ever after, having founded a large corporation that prospers by evading labor laws and defrauding consumers.
4. Plays in which a sick child, usually a cripple, is contrasted with a poor child, usually strong and healthy.
The point of such a story is usually to show that Money Can’t Buy Happiness. But wouldn’t this be a fine setup for a juvenile detective series? The “cripple,” confined to a wheelchair, has all the advantages of wealth, education, and the vast and varied reading he has done to entertain himself. The poor child acts as his able-bodied minion, who goes out to gather clues and have hair’s-breadth escapes; only when he brings back the clues he has gathered and relates his naive descriptions of his adventures can the rich boy see how the whole puzzle fits together and send the culprits off to jail for embezzling or whatever they have been up to. The rich boy would also be an expert in using people’s mistaken assumptions about him to his advantage, letting them believe he’s just a spoiled rich kid in a wheelchair right up to the moment the police show up.
5. The husband jealous of one of his wife’s relatives, generally a brother who has been in South America since early youth.
Farce is anathema to current audiences; there has not been a successful farce on screen or in print for more than a generation. Along with all the other reliable mechanisms of farce, this plot has vanished so completely from our popular entertainment that it would seem fresh to a modern audience—if we played it absolutely straight and made the big revelation five minutes of Oscar-bait melodrama.
If we decided to write a farce, thus guaranteeing that we should please no one but ourselves, we might have the brother intentionally provoking jealousy in order to make the husband appreciate the wife and give her the attention she deserves—a scheme that backfires noisily when the husband admits to the brother that he has long been looking for an excuse to leave his wife and is happy that she has found a better man.
Or we could combine this situation with Hackneyed Theme no. 7, which we’ll meet in a future episode, so we have something to look forward to.
6. The discharged workman who sets out to injure his former employer, but who, instead, performs some heroic task, thus regaining his old job.
This situation could be made more interesting if the heroism were quite unintentional. We follow the fired employee as he concocts an elaborate and seemingly perfect scheme to take revenge on his old boss and make himself rich at the same time; but instead he causes a series of unintended consequences of great benefit to the boss, who offers him his old job back at a seven per cent rise in salary. The employee must accept the offer, or his attempted crime will be revealed and he will go to prison. The boss thinks he’s given a faithful employee a happy ending; the employee is trapped in drudgery he hates and cannot escape without causing dire consequences to himself.
Four hackneyed themes are enough for one session. We’ll return with more opportunities for hacks; but meanwhile, once again, readers are invited to give us some better ideas in the comments.
Continues in Part Three.