Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar reflects on the components of a successful movie comedy:
Timing in comedy is not like rational time. When the actor gives his reply, he hasn’t had the physical or mental time to assimilate the previous line, but he has to deliver his reply at full speed. No one is going to wonder if he’s understood what was being said to him. If the audience does wonder, it’s a bad sign. Within comedy, the style that teaches you about rhythm (as do all of Woody Allen’s films, but I think that’s because the New York director is in a hurry) is screwball, the crazy American comedy.
Think of Midnight (Mitchell Leisen), The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor), Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks), Ninotchka (Billy Wilder), The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges), To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch), Easy Living (Mitchell Leisen), Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges), or in general any comedy where the comeback is delivered by Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, or Katherine Hepburn. …
Timing. Rapid-fire dialogue. Rehearsals. Otherwise, even though the situations are funny, and the actors excellent and with resources, the film becomes long and so do the scenes. I don’t want to point the finger, but one example of this problem is Bridesmaids. The director lets the actresses improvise until they come up with the right joke. You shouldn’t improvise in front of the camera. It should happen long beforehand. To crown it all, both the editor and the director are in love with the actresses and the material shot. The result is an attractive film, but one that lasts 125 minutes; it is saved because Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy are wonderful comedians.
Update from a reader:
God, Pedro Almodóvar is so enormously full of crap. He has taken the entirety of comedic cinema and defined what is “good” according to an arbitrary speed value supported by nothing more than “here are a select group of movies that I like.” He then dismisses Bridesmaids, a fantastic movie by the way, as saved only by great comediennes. Is he so enamored with his deeply flawed thesis that he can’t see that these two great comediennes have … wait for it … comedic timing that stands in stark and wonderful contrast to his narrow preferences?
Look, I loved the West Wing, but I could never immerse myself in it to the point where I could quiet my discomfort with the obvious falseness in dialogue. To put it bluntly: no one talks like that! No one! And yet Pedro thinks that everyone in comedy movies should speak in that ludicrous rapid fire, beyond human comprehension manner. His preferences are precisely why I am ambivalent towards so much classic cinema: a forced and artificial depiction of human conversation nearly unrecognizable by those of us who actual talk to other people.
The Dish 