How to make a funny film Part 2

As promised yesterday here are some practical guidelines in making a good comedy:

Just because everyone on the set thinks it’s funny, doesn’t mean an audience will like it.

Remember that feature films are made and watched under completely different circumstances. A film crew might be near the edge of hysteria after a long, stressful day, or bleary and hung over following an early call. A cinema audience might be relaxed, expectant, irritable, Swedish, any number of different states or mind and character. To put it simply, the production that thinks it is making the funniest film ever is in trouble. Nothing grates more than a film convinced of its own comic wonderfulness (are you listening, Richard Curtis?)

Extravagant productions are bad news for comedy.

The higher the budget, the more people who get involved, the more stress which is placed on the Director to make it work,  the more elaborate the set-up, the more black holes open up for the comedy to drain into. Why do people like Woody Allen, Armando Iannouchi and Hal Roach (producer of Laurel and Hardy) work with the same people so often in their projects, both in front of and behind the camera? Because a comfortable and tight unit where everyone knows each other keeps the production flowing. People are relaxed and everyone gets a clear image of what direction the work is going.

Comedy by committee doesn’t work.

There has to be one, maximum two people who are in charge of the film and who decide what stays in and what goes, which take to use and how the scene plays best edit-wise. Usually this is the Director, though often it can be the writer, producer or lead actor. The best comedies seem to be the ones where one person has assumed two or three of the above roles. If that person is any good at what they do then the chance of their vision coming to fruition is much greater thanks to their control (Christopher Guest, Woody Allen (again), Bruce Robinson, Mike Myers) – this can work the other way of course. If one person is in control and they do a crap job then the whole film suffers.

Don’t underestimate the post production

As timing is so important, a good editor who knows exactly when to cut can make a scene funny when it felt terrible during the filming. Likewise a bad editor can kill a joke stone dead. The difference between a funny scene succeeding or not can be tiny. Maybe a few frames either way. It’s not easy to describe on paper but ‘comic editing’ is an instinct that becomes honed by long hours of slogging away on an editing machine, trying to tell whether a joke works better one way or another when one has seen it for the 271st time. The same applies to music and sound effects. Badly chosen music will distract an audience from the scene without them even knowing why. Well placed and mixed sound effects can give a film a whole other dimension (see ‘Barton Fink’ for some of the best comic SFX ever made).

And finally: Remember that Goldman’s axiom (as explained in William Goldman’s ‘Adventures in the screen trade’) applies as much to comedies as to any other film: Nobody Knows Anything.  Don’t take anything I’ve written here as gospel because Nobody Knows Anything. There is no formula to making a good comedy, and what one may see as the funniest film ever made another will see as unfunny garbage. That said, if the people making British comedy films paid more attention to the four points above then just maybe there will be less garbage out there.