Billy Mernit is back again with another great post, one wherein he introduces a new piece of screenwriting lingo — “Snidekick”:

What do you call the best friend of the hero, male or female, whose primary function in the movie is to wax sardonic, to make with the zippy one-liners, to wisecrack — often with amusing mean-spiritedness — at the expense of the hero, heroine, or other supporting characters?

The Snidekick is a specific subset of the more general sidekick, which includes all manner of friends and foils for a protagonist, from the perpetually awed Dr. Watson, to the stalwart Sam of Lord of the Rings and Lucy‘s ever-gullible Ethel Mertz. The Snidekick is distinguished by a particular sensibility — often snarky and snippy — that leaves no hapless hero or heroine’s questionable behavior unremarked.

This is a great example of how someone who reads a lot of scripts thinks — they can’t help but see recurring characters, recurring plot conceits, recurring themes in script after script. So you may think you just wrote the ‘snidi-est’ character of all time, but chances are a script reader will have covered a half-dozen versions of that character type in one week. Which means — writer beware!

What to do? Let’s say you’re writing a snidekick character. You would be well advised to conduct some research into snidekick predecessors in movies and determine what made each one work. Then you would brainstorm ways to make your character distinctive, a fresh voice or take on the character type. Play around with switching the character’s gender or sexual orientation, their socio-economic background, their religious beliefs or lack thereof, what excites them most, what scares them most, figure out why they’re so damned snide, what inner emotions or realities are they hiding by using their ‘snideness’ as an offensive or defensive weapon. In short, you want to dig deeper into the character and make them more than just a snidekick, a real multidimensional character.

There’s one other thing and I mentioned it in my comments on Billy’s post:

Billy, this is a great post. And “snidekick” is a wonderful riff. Makes me think of Hobson (Sir John Gielgud), the butler to Arthur (Dudley Moore) in ARTHUR. He had a wickedly snide sense of humor — “Thank you for a memorable afternoon, usually one must go to a bowling alley to meet a woman of your stature.” — yet at the same time, he functioned as a wisdom / mentor character to Arthur’s protagonist.

So I guess one question is can a “snidekick” character work in a script if their ONLY job is provide biting humor? That’s probably the case in too many spec scripts and I doubt if that type of character provides much value to the plot / story.

You can write the funniest snidekick of all time, but if that character doesn’t tie into the plot in some necessary and meaningful way, that is if they don’t have a narrative function, more than likely you’re just wasting page count.

But the main point is I can’t recommend Billy’s blog enough. I mean, come on… Snidekick? That is flat-out brilliant.