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action going at a slick speed. The plots of these comedies are often little more than convenient frameworks upon which the comedian can build his jokes. If the film is not to become dull, the story points need only be sketched in very briefly so that the jokes follow each other in rapid succession.
Besides making the action develop with an appropriate swing, the editor must try to make allowances for the length of the audience's laughter reaction. A long laugh rewarding one joke may make the next inaudible. Yet, on balance, it is probably better to lose a few laughs by having them follow each other too fast than to miscalculate and to leave the gaps too long. It is better to have too many jokes than too few : not only do some of them inevitably misfire, but laughter is also to some extent conditioned by what has come before. A poorish joke, coming after a series of belly laughs when the audience is near hysteria, will get a good reception ; coming after a tedious bit of plot, it may not raise a titter.
The editor's job in this slick, wisecracking kind of comedy is the rather humble one of mounting the jokes. Only very rarely is he directly concerned in putting over the joke itself, and the better the actors' sense of timing, the smaller is the editor's contribution to the comic effect. In visual comedy, the exact opposite happens. Here, the director and editor are mainly in charge. There is, after all, only a very limited number of visual jokes — all more or less variations on the theme of a man getting hurt or in some way losing his dignity — and it is precisely in the presentation that they become funny. Hurling a custard-pie into someone's face, may, if badly shot and edited, be excruciatingly unfunny. Only through a careful consideration of what gives a situation its essential humour, and through shooting and editing the scene accordingly, does a slapstick situation become really effective.
David Lean has described how the oldest of old chestnuts might be treated.
Imagine two shots :
1. Laurel and Hardy running along a street in full-figure shot. After running for 15 seconds or so, Hardy slips and falls on the pavement.
2. Close-up of banana skin lying on the pavement. After a few moments Hardy* s foot comes into picture, treads on the skin and slips.
Now where would you cut the close-up of the banana skin ? . . . The answer is nothing to do with a smooth cut . . . Looking at these two shots from a purely smooth cut point of view, it would seem that the best place to cut the close up of the banana skin would be the point at which the foot entered picture, carrying it on until halfway through the skid at which point
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