How to Write "Pure Id"

I've been thinking a lot lately about ways to approach characters, including considering them in terms of their Enneagram type. How does a 4 see the world, compared to a 2? What would Myers-Briggs have to say about certain characters?

Another thing I love is a big, big character—you almost write them exaggeratedly large on the page.

So I loved seeing Nerstalgic's new video pop up in my YouTube feed. How big can characters go, especially in comedy, and how can you approach a character using psychology?

Most sitcom characters have an invisible fence. You know where it is even when the show doesn't spell it out. It's a limit the character approaches but never quite crosses.

Rafi (Jason Mantzoukas) has no real line. He arrived in Season 2 of The League as Ruxin's brother-in-law and immediately turned things to 11.

As Nerdstalgic puts it, "a character this chaotic, this aggressive and this unpredictable should break any sitcom he's a part of." And yet, The League survived Rafi, and became a better show for it.

Mantzoukas' castmates described the character as a being of pure id, which Mantzoukas himself has called his "unbridled Id," per Maxim.

"Pure id" is a character type, and building one that holds up over several seasons requires craft under the chaos. Here's what writers can pull from how Rafi works.

• YouTube www.youtube.com

Anchor Chaos in a Real Relationship

Rafi isn't a stranger who shows up at the door. He's family, specifically, the brother-in-law of Ruxin (Nick Kroll), whose obligation to tolerate him is structural and inescapable.

That relationship gives every Rafi scene stakes beyond pure spectacle, although that's certainly a part of it too. There's always someone in the room who has to deal with the aftermath. When you're building a disruptive character, this is a good place to start.

Give them a load-bearing connection to someone your audience already cares about. Without it, you just have a cameo with nowhere to go.

Know What You Want, and Pitch It That Way

When Jeff Schaffer and Jackie Marcus Schaffer (the married couple who created The League) approached Mantzoukas for what was originally meant to be a couple of episodes, they gave him significant creative latitude.

Mantzoukas told Interview Magazine how his pitch went down.

"They had the storyline worked out: in order to curry favor for his wife, Nick Kroll’s character gets her brother into the league, but then everybody hates the guy, so they kick him out. To their credit, the Schaffers were like, 'What version of a horrible guy do you want to be? How do you want to do it?' I was like, 'Ooh! I know exactly what I want to do. I feel like what this show lacks is a real maniac. I want to do a lovable maniac.'"

Rafi is chaotic in a specific, committed direction. The "lovable" qualifier is doing real work there.

Writers often fixate on how extreme a wild card character can go without asking what quality makes them worth following. With Rafi, the answer is that underneath all of it, he's earnest. He genuinely means everything he does.

He found that balance in Rafi's humanity, telling Interview:

"No filter; no nothing. He’s kind of a monster, but also that lack of filter causes him to love everybody. He just gives into all emotions. So that love for absolutely super f*cked up sex and violence also means he gets emotionally very invested in the friendships with the guys in the league, who hate him."

Contrast Does the Heavy Lifting

The League already had a mean streak before Rafi showed up. The main cast is petty, selfish, and frequently awful to each other, and the Nerdstalgic video is right to note that this context matters.

Rafi registers as a different category of human because he makes the comparatively terrible people around him look relatively functional.

Your wild card's extremity is always relative to the room. Drop the same character into a gentler ensemble, and you'd need to dial something back. Put him in a nastier one, and you'd need to push further. Understanding your ensemble's baseline before you add a disruptor is part of the writing jigsaw puzzle you have to figure out.

• YouTube www.youtube.com

Consistent Internal Logic, Not Random Chaos

Rafi appears unpredictable, but he's actually highly consistent. He has specific obsessions, a legible worldview, and things he cares about (bears, Dirty Randy, his sister, the finer points of substance use).

His responses to situations are surprising but, in retrospect, always make sense for who he is.

Random chaos reads as lazy writing very quickly. An audience will forgive almost any behavior from a character if they understand the internal logic driving it. Rafi's logic is just operating on a completely different set of premises than everyone else in every scene.

Let Them Generate Their Own Orbit

Dirty Randy (played by Seth Rogen) started as a throwaway improvised aside.

"In the second season, I improvised the concept of Dirty Randy," Mantzoukas told The Daily Beast. "If I was a nightmare to the guys, there was a guy that was a nightmare to me; Rafi's Rafi."

The showrunners ran with it, cast Rogen, and eventually built a standalone episode around the two of them. That episode ("Rafi and Dirty Randy") is now among the most talked-about in the series.

When a wild card character starts generating their own story gravity, why not follow it? The best secondary characters earn their real estate by producing new characters and situations, not just disrupting the existing ones.

The throughline across all of this is that Rafi's apparent freedom and mania are constructed. Mark Duplass talks about the duality between character and performer. In real life, Mantzoukas is, by all accounts, a thoughtful and perceptive person, even serious off-camera. But when Rafi comes out, it's "terrifying," he says.

Pure id is a direction of travel, and a great inspiration if you need a big character. But remember, you don't want insanity for insanity's sake. Be thoughtful about it, even for these characters.