How to make a funny film Part 1

Making someone laugh is a bit like scratching their back. The specific location of an itch may be difficult for the scratcher to hit first time, and the scratchee usually can’t describe the exact place where it itches either. With a bit of direction along the lines of ‘up a bit, down a bit, left a bit. There. No, there!’ a good scratcher can find the place and exert the right amount of pressure to hit the spot.

However, continue to scratch the place and the scratchee’s pleasure will quickly turn to discomfort and repeated requests to stop before the skin starts bleeding. Sometimes the successful scratching of a portion of someone’s back will cause another place to start itching, and so on and so on. You may find it hard enough to follow someone’s directions to a series of specific points on their back but imagine how hard it is to anticipate every single location and map out a ‘scratching plan’ before they even get there.

OK, so what the hell has this to do with comedy? Just that the ‘scratching plan’ metaphor is the best I can come up with to describe how hard it is to make a consistently funny film. It’s one thing to say something that will make a bunch of your mates laugh. You know your audience, you know what buttons to push and what parts of their backs are itchy. It’s harder to stand up in front of a bunch of strangers and make them laugh- whether you are a stand up comedian, part of a team doing a sketch, or trying to break the ice before presenting a business seminar. At least if one vein of humour isn’t working you can tell by the absence of laughs that it’s time to try something different.

Imagine how hard it is then to make a huge number of strangers laugh who aren’t even there when you’re making the joke, and do it many more times over at least 90 minutes. Not only that, but your joke may pass through several people’s hands, each changing it a little bit, before it reaches its finished form. In back scratching terms, you must design a back scratching machine with one hundred and fifty fingers, each adjustable to different strengths and which must be programmed to deliver a satisfying and non-lethal scratching regimen to the majority of people who submit to its mercy.

The problem with the British comedy film industry is that, like the British computer industry and the British mass produced car industry, years of bad management and crappy product design have changed what was once a world leader into a national joke. A very dark, tragic joke. The tragedy of it all is that in the fields of British cars and computing there have been over the years a some extremely talented people.  Alex Issigonis, who designed the Mini. Tommy Flowers, who worked for the post office until WW2 when he singlehandedly designed the world’s first programmable computer. For every talented visionary there seems to be a story of management bolloxing it up. Despite its major role in cracking the Germans’ Enigma code Tommy Flowers’ computer and its plans were destroyed after the war and he went back to working for the GPO. Thus it was the Americans who became leaders in the post war computer boom.

Have we gone off track as far as comedy films are concerned? Maybe, but the British film industry isn’t just called an industry to sound grand. As a product, a good film that can make people laugh all the way through is a precision instrument. The writer (or writing team) must design the jokes, the funny situations, the characters that make the comic interplay happen. The Director must visualise the scene (with help from the writer) and with the help of producers, production managers, camera operators, cinematographers and a whole raft of other people, right down to the caterers, translate the funny situation into a real situation so it can be filmed.

Then comes an actor and fluffs the line, or decides to try a funny accent and ruins the effect, or maybe delivers a line that wasn’t supposed to be funny and makes it funnier than the rest of the scene. Then when it’s shot the editor might cut in such a way that the comic timing is destroyed, or if you’re lucky cuts away to a reaction shot that makes the whole scene much much funnier. So finally you have a ‘bit’ which works as well as anyone can make it, and the Producers cut it from the film because they showed it to a test audience and no one laughed.

Repeat the above process about 100 times and try to get it all into a film that lasts 90 minutes. Sounds easy? Well I’m not even going to go into all the ‘screw-up’ factors like the lead actor being too drunk to deliver his line, or the Producer’s current squeeze getting a part despite their incredible lack of talent, or the film coming out right after a similar film and failing, or the writers being made to re-write the script so many times that they get burned out, or half the crew getting food poisoning, or the Director insisting on 27 takes for each scene despite the actors losing their edge after take 3.

So are we unable to make comedy films as well as we used to? Should the British film industry stick to period drama and leave comedy to the TV people? The problem with wild generalisations is that there are too many exceptions cropping up all over. Look at recent comedies ‘Janice Beard 45 WPM’ and ‘Johnny English’.  Compare to ‘The Ladykillers’ and ‘Withnail and I’ and yes, the trend is towards the crappy. But consider ‘Carry on Emmanuelle’ and ‘Morons from Outer Space’ and it becomes apparent that rubbish comedies have always been with us.

So what can be learned from a bad comedy? Is there anything that can be done to avoid making any more bad comedies? The answer to both these questions unfortunately is ‘not much’. Because every film is the culmination of millions of variables- some controllable, some horribly random- the only answers seem to be clear in retrospect. It’s harder to answer the question ‘How do we make it funny?’ before starting work than ‘What the hell went wrong?’ after the film tanks.  The only thing to do is try to swing the odds in your favour as far as possible and leave the rest to luck.

Tomorrow we shall look at some pratical examples…