Physical situations in comedies
When looking at my favourite comedies, I began to see a pattern. Some of my favourite (br|s)itcoms are Are You Being Served, Fawlty Towers and Absolutely Fabulous, and one of the funniest movies I know is Mon Oncle.
The four of them have in common that a part of the set invites physical comedy. Mon Oncle has the curved garden path and the stepping stones and the tiny outdoors dining spot, AbFab has the stairs leading down to the kitchen, the heart of the house, and Are You Being Served has wide stairs that the staff continuously have to run up or down.
The latter requires that the stairs are written into the scripts, but luckily Croft, Lloyd, Knowles and Chapman were smart enough to do so, and do so often.
The biscuit is being taken by Fawlty Towers, though. One of the common locations is the upstairs hallway, connected by a stair to another common location, the downstairs hallway. At the top of the stair, there is a daize that serves absolutely no other purpose than to enforce physical comedy for every character walking onto or off the stage.
For a long time, I just figured that these physical situations were the hallmark of truly great comedy. However, I saw two shows the past two days that suggested another explanation.
Keeping Up Appearances is said to be filled with bad actors. I wouldn’t know, but I noticed the episode where Hyacinth and Richard had rented (or bought) a cottage in the country. Normally, it is understood that when well-to-do people say they buy a cottage, they mean a huge house; but in this case, it really was a cottage: tiny. Almost all the jokes revolved around the lack of room, and many were physical in nature.
Today I saw for the first time an episode of Whoopi. I noticed that Rita either performed physical comedy or word play, which made it hard for me to judge her comedic abilities. After all, playing the physical jokes seemed to be no more than following the script.
It started to dawn on me that perhaps another reason to use physical situations is to give the script writer some control. I know an actor who doesn’t like doing comedy, and it showed when he tried his hand at it once. He had to act his whole scene, rather than to stumble through funny sets and situations.
A physical situation can be some sort of guarantee that something funny will happen. For instance, in Whoopi, Mavis Rae hates Rita, so it is funny that in their moment of reconciliation, when Mavis Rae wants to make it clear that the truce is only temporary, Rita inches closer to her again and again while Mavis Rae inches away and away.