Editing comedy is tough

Man I am THE QUEEN of uninventive blog titles. But at least I'm the queen of something. The peanut gallery can cease their whispers now :P

Today's topic is editing comedy. For whatever reason, I tend to get involved with/cut comedies. I don't think I've ever cut a serious, dramatic piece. This is not to say I don't think I could do it, but it's the way the dice have rolled for me.

One of the assez difficile things about cutting comedy is the timing. You've got to figure out where people are going to laugh, build the pacing of the piece for maximum allowed laughage, and figure out *how long* people are going to laugh. I'm fairly good at pacing a piece out with jokes, if they're in the script, but it's the "how long will people laugh" question that always nibbles my bum. The answer is always longer than I think, which sucks because the next lines of dialogue are chewed up by audience laughing. What's also boggling is people laugh at the weirdest shit! You can think you've got your jokes all paced out, allowing for the laughage, and then people laugh at something completely ridiculous, like a 2 second pause on someone's face. Go figure I say.

I've got a pretty good sense of humor, but I've yet to come away from watching an audience watch a piece I cut without wondering how I missed a funny beat that got yuks. I reckon this is one of the few pacing practices than can be learned over time (I'm a big believer in pacing CANNOT be taught to some people) so there's hope yet. I still have to recut my last 48 Hour piece to get the yuks in quicker, and I'm cultivating more ideas.

ETA: http://www.showreel.org/memberarea/article.php?62

Now, on a side rant, there's this girl here who does not understand file management. She does not get the difference between media files and the project file. I'm not sure how many times I've explained this to her, but it still hasn't sunk in. I'm afraid to ask if she knows how to keep her file hierarchy in tact *shudder*. COME ON PEOPLE, LOOK AT THE FILE SIZE. Media? Huge. Project File? Small. DO THE MATH. OR I WILL BEAT YOU WITH A KEYBOARD UNTIL YOU GET IT.