Funny
Original composition date lost - pre 2008 | journal
I was watching an interview with Barry Sonnenfeld the other day. He was, of course, discussing his directing career - most particularly how he directs comedy. He made a couple of points which I hadn' considered in great depth before, but which made a great deal of sense in regards to doing a comedic film. He says that you can't have two funny guys in a film, that it won' be funny if you do. The other two points he made were that you should never let an actor know he's in a comedy, and that he tells his characters to be “flatter and faster” in their delivery - that is, to speak faster and be straighter.
After he said that I gave it some thought and he's right - the funnier people are the ones that are not being funny, the straight men, the ones who don't seem to realise that comedic things are supposed to be happening and going on around them. At least those are the characters I enjoy most in a comedic film, the ones being serious. Look at Captain Hook in Hook, the king in Holy Grail, just for example. Perhaps it's because they seem out of place, incongruous with the situations they find themselves in, fish out of water and all that. Airplane, for example, is hilarious because they're all being so straight - they believe in their own normalcy, they don't see their own absurdity.
It's funny, no pun in ten did, that he is as good as he is at doing what he does, because he never even wanted to go into films apparently - he went to film school because there was nothing better to do. He'd never been interested in making films, and stuck with cinematography because he'd finally found something he was good at.
If you don't look at the link above, and the name doesn' sound familiar to you, he directed the following films (amongst others, including some feature-length pornos that aren't listed in IMDB - gee, imagine that): The Addams Family, Addams Family Values, Men in Black, Men in Black II, and Get Shorty.