There’s little that’s less funny than talking about what makes something funny. So just watch this bit first – this is the funny bit; and afterwards, I’m going to talk about it. It’s a clip of a young Simon Pegg on Big Train, one of the sketch comedy programs he did for the BBC prior to his leap to movie stardom with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz and so on.
See? Not the most original or complex premise in the world, no finely-honed social satire, not really memorable dialogue. But this sketch (all due credit goes to series creator/director Graham Linehan) makes me laugh, and I believe I can break down for you some of the fundamentals they got right in order to accomplish that.
First – timing. There’s comedy that is triggered by surprise, and comedy that comes from tension and release. This mixes both: you have the surprise of the mind-boggling lack of common sense in the Runner (which evolves throughout according to its own logic in order to provide variety); and you have the tension of the Coach staying polite and encouraging in the face of the Runner’s stupidity. That’s a time-honored source of tension in English comedy, where the desire to not make a scene or to be seen as rude is challenged time and time again.
You keep trying to make it impossible for Arthur Putey to not acknowledge what is happening in front of his eyes, but he’s just so polite. Palin was The Man at this. His “Gosh!” to the Cowboy kills me every time.
Think about a balloon that keeps inflating….and inflating….and inflating…while you are forced to watch. Chances are you might laugh along the way to waiting for it to burst – that’s the mechanism; you feel your own tension rising along with whatever you’re watching, and the laugh almost feels forbidden, it escapes in little helpless bits as you cringe.
The performers in Pegg’s bit have good timing when indicating the rising frustration; there are enough subtle changes on the joke (like suddenly going before the gun) to give the sketch permission to live longer, and it finishes before it has a chance to wear out its welcome. I feel like sketch shows which allow the sketches to determine their own ideal length tend to flow better – Saturday Night Live is at its worst when you feel like their programming schedule tells them they have to make a two-minute joke last for six minutes between commercials. Since the British don’t cut to commercials mid-show, this gives them a structural advantage in TV sketch comedy.
Second – performance. This isn’t sophisticated physical clowning, but the content of the scene is carried through body language. You need to be able to see the Coach’s reaction to the Runner’s late departure as it’s happening for maximum impact, so the choice to stay wide the entire time and let the performers convey the relationship is a winner.
We are so trained to put all our attention on faces; and most visual storytelling modes, when shooting a two-person scene, will adopt the alternating close-ups method so often that something even as simple as this almost feels radical. I think the reason is that using camera angles puts the power of the piece in the hands of the editor, while in this approach you need to trust your performers completely. If you look at the insane amount of cutting in most TV shows, films, and commercials, you realize that part of the reason might be that these actors can’t be trusted to carry anything longer than five seconds, and the production has just chosen to shoot as many options as they can (a dangerous luxury in the digital age) and trust that they can assemble the best of them later.
The thing is, editing by its nature can be very distancing – and in the case of comedy based in tension, you don’t want to create too much distance or else you risk losing your sense of identification with what you’re watching. You want to feel like a fly on the wall, not out of the building entirely. Ricky Gervais’s work couldn’t maintain its tension without subtly-amazing editing that mimics the natural flow of an ongoing conversation even as the actors, in real life, are busting a gut laughing every ten seconds:
You can feel the terrible command – MUST…NOT…LAUGH…AT…LIAM
In the case of the Pegg sketch, though, the static shot is a simple, low-tech way to emphasize the performers’ physical work and create gradually-rising tension. These performers are up to snuff, playing totally sincere throughout the long take, and letting the humor created by the writing do its work. The single cut at the very end, revealing the final, cherry-on-top gag, is priceless.
Third – the decision to shoot outdoors in a real environment rather than on a stage. Lots of sketch shows work on stages – it’s controllable, and you can bring in a live audience if that’s your bag. And many sketches work very effectively there. But I think this one is helped by being outside, with the sound of a little wind, and that extra who runs by in the foreground at the very beginning (and can be seen in the background in the last shot for subtle continuity of place). Again, because this is about the tension of not making an embarrassing scene in public, emphasizing the sense of being in public is a scarcely-visible but powerful trick. We don’t register it consciously, but in our identification with the Coach character, we subconsciously feel there are people around. That’s not indispensable, but it does enhance the scene.
There’s a tendency to believe that this stuff can’t be “taught”; that you either watch it and get it or you never will. Certainly I think that most people who get into comedy are self-taught without even realizing it; simply because they act on a voracious appetite for the stuff. But I’d like to be optimistic and think that it can helpful to have someone clarifying why something which is this seemingly-basic can work when you have a feel for the underlying mechanisms. And to encourage people that it doesn’t take a lot of expensive equipment or computer wizardry at all to record something very funny.