Collaboration: Research - Acting for Animators; Comedy

Whilst reading acting for animators, I found a section on comedy that explains: what comedy is, why we find it funny, who professionals looked to. Here are some notes I made, it mentions a few times about Charlie Chaplin especially the Little Tramp so below the notes is Chaplin video. - Paris

Comedy

"... the animator should know wat creates laughter - why d things appeal to people as being funny?" (Disney, 1935)

If what you're doing is funny, you don't have to be funny doing it. (Charlie Chaplin).

There is only one way of making comedy richer - and paradoxically, funnier - and that is by making it more serious. (Walter Kerr; The Silent Clowns - 1975).

• Comedy is the celebration of life, thats’ the reason we will laugh more in a group of people than on our own. Laughter is our way of saying to one another, “I'm still alive. You still alive? Great! We are both still alive!” 
• Charlie Chaplin is the person to study if you want to understand how comedy works. 
• Comedy is directly related to drama, in fact comedy is dependent on drama, comedy is drama steroids. Drama has to do with the most potential, and comedy has to do with its limitations. Comedy is about limitations. 
• The ultimate limitation is life, everyone knows life is finite no exceptions, so when people laugh at jokes they acknowledge to each other they’re still alive. 
• Comedy is drama exaggerated, heightened and enriched. 
• The big challenge for actors and animators who want to be funny is this: in order to be funny, you must be truthful. If you try to be funny, I guarantee that you will not be funny. This is what is wrong with so many animated feature films that contain “gags”. 
• Comedy is not like hanging ornaments on the Christmas tree. It's the stuff of life, and it needs to merge organically from the situation in order to work. 
• We laugh at what we identify with. We are all - for better or for worse - caught up in this thing called life, and we have to do the best we can with it. When our best efforts to bellyflop, it is funny. 
• Animation is a better medium for comedy, you can get cars to crash harder, toss characters from great heights, even have them get shot through with a shot gun pellet - and still survive. 
• Farce - a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterisation and ludicrously improbable situations. (Slapstick). 
• Farce is about mechanics, mechanical things gone wrong, timing, and the element of surprise.