I’ve been thinking a bit about physical comedy lately. I adore the accidental nature of it—the element of surprise, the spontaneity. Pranks and pratfalls are the easiest way to get a rise out of me—laughter should I be a witness and fury should I be a victim. Don’t try to prank me. It will not end well.
But what is the funniest moment of the prank or pratfall? My answer would depend on the medium used to tell the story—prose, a comic strip, or live action and animation. With live action and animation, the most humorous moment is the moment of surprise, the instant where a deviation from how the victim believed things would occur takes place. The sucker punch. The pie in the eye. The dishes crashing to the floor. I believe that when creating a comic (“chopping” the action into static images) the most hilarious moment of the action changes, occurring when the reader’s anticipation of the victim’s surprise is at its height. As readers, we quickly fill in the blanks, creating an image in our mind’s eye before our actual eyes can gaze upon the panel containing the action’s climax. And so the panel of the victim “talking junk”—blissfully unaware that the shadow of his attacker has fallen upon him—becomes funnier than the attack. In some instances depicting the final action is not even necessary; a cut away from the action to a different scene altogether allows the reader to participate as a storyteller, the climax limited only by his or her imagination.
Comedy, folks!