Comedy Editing Quotes

We're gonna have to sweeten some of these jokes for the CD. You know what sweeten means, right? Sweeten is a show-biz term for "add sugar to".

Everything in comedy's got to be exactly right, which is why making a comedic film is kind of a difficult process, because, for most of the two years of shooting it and editing it and reshooting and all of that, it's not quite right. And it's only when you just at the end, you put the final polish on it, it becomes really funny again.

Then I will tape the sets and even though I'm not very successful sometimes I will try to cut out the fat and put the jokes closer together.

Sometimes a joke that doesn't work just needs a breath or a little word or the tiniest little change to be fixed.

You start to find a rhythm and usually if it makes me laugh or comment in the editing room then I knew that's what's going to happen in the audience. That first reaction is usually the right reaction.

I watch comedy on TV, and it's too cutty for me. I get a little jarred, and it succeeds. It's not like it's not working, and I look at certain things, and it has the cutting... it's not like I'd make terribly different cuts, but for some reason, it moves too fast for me.

The first thing I do in the editing room is the 'radio edit,' where you listen to the dialogue and don't even look at the visuals. The rhythm, the music of the comedy, has to work.

And I watch all the dailies and I grade the jokes or the moments, you know, on a scale from... so I know exactly what we have. And so I can then go into the editing room and be like "I want you to do this moment, this moment, this joke, that joke. I'd like to see 3 versions."

Twitter taught me how to become better at writing jokes because it forces you to chip away at all the extraneous words.

When you screen it the first couple times, you're just trying to get the movie to work, trying to get the story to flow, trying to find out where your areas are where you have enough breath to laugh a little bit. So you're doing that the first two or three screenings, and then finally, you dial the movie in and it's working, and at that point, it's 50/50 as far as what's funny and what's working. Sometimes you'll put something in and it will just die so hard that it'll almost kill the movie.

In something like 'Frank,' which is a comedy, albeit a strange and emotional one, you can absolutely put in deleted scenes, and we did because they were just funny and great, but they weren't necessary in the overall structure.

If something doesn't feel right comedically I won't budge on it. You just have to dig your heels in and fight for it. And I mean fight quite intensely.

A lot of comedy films, there's the opinion, 'Well, if it's funny, put it in.' But I think you have to be more disciplined than that.