How to make a funny film

11:22:2007
(and why the British film industry is so crap at it)

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.

Some practical guidelines in making a good comedy:
1. 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?)

2. 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 eachother keeps the production flowing. People are relaxed and everyone gets a clear image of what direction the work is going.

3. 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.

4. 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.


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